Femi Adesina, special adviser to the president on media and publicity, who revealed this on Sunday in an interview with Channels Television, also said that the president is conscious of fair representation with respect to women and youths in the ministerial list.
“He is not going to be designated as Minister but will supervise the Ministry. When former President Olusegun Obasanjo while in office supervised that ministry for six years, was he called a petroleum minister? No, he was not,” Adesina said.
“The president is going to supervise and maybe, he would have minister of state to work along with him. I dare say, he has all it takes to supervise that ministry having been oil minister for three and half years in the past.
“President Buhari would respect the constitution. And the constitution says ministers must be appointed from each state and that means there must be minimum of 36 ministers. He would respect that.
“The president had said when the governors were appointing commissioners in their states, he never interfered, so he didn’t expect them to interfere in the choice of his ministers.
“That was the original position and then later, he came back to say when he had his list ready that he was going to run it by the governors, that is the position. I guess there must have been some consultations but it does not mean that the position of any government will be sacrosanct on the nominee.”
Adesina added that the age of the ministerial nominees does not matter to the president, saying: “These people who have been nominated are qualified and are Nigerians. Talking of age, there is a saying that ‘age does not matter. It does not mind, if you don’t mind it.’ I don’t think that age is an issue.
“And talking of age, you should rather talk about mental and chronological age. If you have a chronological age of 30, which makes you a youth, and mental age is not at par, what do we gain? Nothing.
“And you may have a chronological age of 68, which is the age of the oldest of the nominees; if that nominee now has a mental age of 15 or 20, what do we gain? We must rather talk of the mental age rather than the chronological age. It is not the chronological age that matters as long as that person has what he is bringing to the table.”
“God himself is ageless, so you can’t be talking of whether someone is old or not.”
Speaking on the women representation, Adesina suggested that the 15 names expected can be mainly for women.
“Talking about women, yes, three women on this list, 15 yet to come. If all the 15 are now women, what would you have to say? Just be sure that the president is mindful of fair representation in the country and he will do what is needful.
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