Buhari Sets To Make Minor Cabinet Shake-up, Lai Mohammed, Fayemi, Others Likely Affected

An exclusive report according to Authority Newspaper suggests that President Mohammadu Buhari may engage in a minor cabinet reshuffle just 8 months in his administration.

The cabinet swap according to our source may be due to some incompetence and the image of the Federal Government.

The likely affected ministries are Infomation, which it minister, Alhaji lai Mohammed may be swapped with his solid mineral's counterpart, Dr. Kayode Fayemi; While the Foreign affair minister, Mr Geof­frey Onyeama may be swapped with Hajiya Amina Mo­hammed of Ministry of Environment.

Read Bellow Full report According to Authority Newspaper:

Eight months in power and three months after the appointment of min­isters, the Buhari admin­istration is tinkering with an idea of a minor cabinet reshuffle, af­fecting two very prominent min­istries, going by the information available to The AUTHORITY, via a very dependable source very close to the seat of power.

It was learnt that the cabinet reshuffle would involve the switch of places between the bosses of the affected ministries. In that pro­cess, according to our informa­tion, the foreign affairs minister will swap positions with his col­league in the environment minis­try, while the information minis­ter, as our correspondent was told, would switch places with the min­ister of solid minerals.

According to our source, the president might not have been very pleased with the perfor­mance of the Enugu-State born foreign affairs minister, Mr Geof­frey Onyeama, a reputed operator in the Diaspora, who was brought into the system, almost from no­where, to man the very important ministry, at the time, it was hoped, the new administration needed a good hand with internation­al contacts, to repair the damage reputedly done to Nigerian image, by the last administration.

However, according to our source, Mr Onyeama is said to have turned out, in the sight of his boss, to be a square peg in a round hole. “He is definitely a very intelligent and very hard working person”, in the words of our source, “but he might only have been working in the back­ground, and is rather laid back and might not have shown much dyna­mism in advertising the adminis­tration’s new foreign policy thrust”.

The source further told The AU­THORITY that Mr Onyeama, who had distinguished himself in Dias­pora Affairs, might have been over-rated, as it is being said that he might do well as a senior bureaucrat, rath­er than as a political appointee. Our reporter was further informed that his name might have been suggest­ed by one of the influential aides of the president, who was said to have taken some postgraduate courses in a London university with him.

Two strong indications of the al­leged presidential disaffection with Mr Onyeama include the appoint­ment, earlier in the week, of Mrs Abike Dabiri-Erewa, as the sen­ior special adviser to the president on foreign affairs. It is being inter­preted in power circles as an indi­cation that the president requires more help in diplomatic matters, especially with the Diaspora popu­lation, whose support the govern­ment has been courting, for the eco­nomic amelioration of the country. Hon Dabiri-Erewa was the chair­person of the House of Representa­tives committee on Diaspora affairs and is expected to bring her experi­ence and wide contacts to bear on her new job.

Another indication that the For­eign Minister might have received a yellow card was the fact that a day after Mrs Dabiri-Erewa’s appoint­ment, another minister with a for­eign affairs experience was picked to pronounce on a major foreign affairs issue instead of the foreign minister. It would be recalled that after the Federal Executive meeting last Wednesday, Hajiya Amina Mo­hammed, the Minister of Environ­ment, who has had some diplomat­ic experience at the United Nations, was called upon to justify the inces­sant foreign trips of the president to the Nigerian public which had been raising loud protests over them.

“Ordinarily, the foreign minister should have formally or informal­ly done that much earlier without a formal orchestration”, our source claimed.

The AUTHORITY was in­formed by the same source that Mr Onyeama is likely going to be shooed to the ministry of environ­ment, while the more vibrant Mrs Mohammed would be installed as the new foreign affairs minister, in his place.

In the same vein, The AU­THORITY was informed that even though the president might have been adamant in his support for Al­haji Lai Mohammed as the Informa­tion and Culture Minister, his rigid­ity might have started to thaw in the face of incessant complaints of trust­ed aides and top-hats of the party, over what is being increasingly seen as the inadequacy of the informa­tion minister at his post.

Our source indicated that com­plaints, from top leaders of the par­ty and government, had started as trickles but have grown into tor­rents, against the information man­agement methods of Mr. Lai Mo­hammed, which have also become a regular object of attacks, especial­ly in the social media. According to our source, “nobody is happy about the widespread classification of the spokesman of a government that puts a lot of premium on integrity, in a regular bad light, as he is being daily and widely being dubbed as a liar, and that is not good both to the image of the government locally or internationally”.

The AUTHORITY was, there­fore, told that Mr Lai Mohammed might be moved over to the min­istry of solid minerals over which Dr Kayode Fayemi currently su­perintends, while Fayemi would be moved to become the information minister. It was observed that the former Ekiti State governor is gen­erally seen as a very suave, likeable and diplomatic person whose ami­able nature is expected to resonate with the public as well as the media.

Accordingly, when Fayemi was being screened at the Senate, pri­or to his ministerial confirmation, it was the expectation of many that he would be appointed as the for­eign affairs minister, saying that it is now the impression of many with­in the power circles that he will do as well in the information ministry.

When The AUTHORITY sought to know from the inside source if there would be no action at the finance ministry, the source said that he has no information on that, but confirmed that the presi­dent is also tinkering with the idea of constituting an Economic Team.