The Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Mr Femi Adesina, on Monday, refuted claims that the appointments made by President Muhammadu Buhari have always been skewed to favour the North.
He said many people had a wrong perception about the appointments made by the Buhari-led administration. In his words, “Perception at times is not the totality of reality. For instance, the belief is that most IG of police comes from a certain part of the country in the past 20 years. But somebody did put the right information out just last week which I saw online.
“In the past 20 years, we have had eleven inspector generals of police, and 6 came from the South, and 5 from the North. But you will hear people say all IGPs are coming from the North.”
Speaking further, he said, “I saw another analysis over the weekend on service chiefs — Chief of Defence Staff, Chief of Naval Staff, Chief of Air Staff, in the past 20 years. Do you know that majority of them have all been from the South? These things are available online, and you will hear people say that all service chiefs are from the North. It is a perception that is not quite correct in this country, and a lot of people who have believed it, need to unbelieve this.”
“It is not particularly our duty to begin to try and correct this, ours is to put out the correct information”.
Two years ago, we did a chronicle of all appointments made by the Buhari administration in 2015, it happened that Ogun state had the highest number of appointments, followed by some Southern states, even Kastina state where the President comes from, is one of the lowest state in terms of numbers of appointment, and we hear people’s perception say there is a skewed appointment, and the North is favoured.. We have released the facts and figures…”