By John Amoda
WHEN this column was first introduced to the public it was presented as a platform on which issues adjudged worthy of public attention and commentaries could be addressed. War is of major importance, for by it the fate and fortunes of societies are determined.

By war a society can be dispersed as its members become refugees, displaced persons prisoners of war, enslaved or simply wiped off the face of the earth. So issues of war as instanced in matters of conflicts, their management, their prevention and resolution have been featured in this column.

Economies, their organisation and their interphase with governments and societies are of structural importance to families and nationalities. When judged of current relevance and importance this columnist has articulated a viewpoint on matters of the economy in furtherance of strategic appreciation of its importance to the reader.

Ecclesiastical and spiritual issues as articulated by clergies, especially the Christian denominational variants have been addressed on the platform of the Tuesday Column. A reader of recent essays may think that the Tuesday Column is exclusively devoted to theological and denominational matters. Such reader will discover that the Tuesday Column is a values-appreciation-platform and that that is the unique thread that runs through the fabric of the weekly discourses on matters of pressing public importance.

Thus in this week, I am addressing the proposal that Mr. President disregard party nominations for ministerial appointment and recruit technocrats as ministers. The President himself in his remark during the lecture of Professor Ademolekun on an agenda for the transformation of Nigeria would prefer to appoint ministers in terms of policy expertise.

This will ensure that round pegs are put in round holes. Those who make this proposal primarily are worried that patronage appointments will automatically result in ineffectiveness of policy implementation. Whether this is necessarily the case is arguable, for party loyalty and policy competence are not necessarily opposed. If this were so then electoral party rule would be make no public policy sense.

Nigerian political system is a multi-party electoral system. The President ran on the PDP platform and was presented to the multi-party electorate as a PDP candidate for President. He has been elected as President on the PDP platform. Why then should he be advised to run the executive branch with policy experts who are not only non-members of the PDP but who presumably did not contribute to the electoral success of the party.

We should expect in a multi-party electoral democracy that the party able to constitute the government on the strength of its majority will run the government on party majority basis. And there is nothing in the nature of democratic electoral majoritarianism that opposes party loyalty to policy competence. The capitalist and socialist parties of the First and Second Worlds have shown that ruling parties can staff their offices with personnel who are both party loyalist and policy competent. You can indeed be both an ideologue and policy professional.

The worry I believe for Jonathan is one of running a government that unites the PDP factions and reconciles party opponents in the interest of sustainable constitutional governance. This challenge is complicated by the venom of the zoning war for the post of the president while the PDP runs government and recruits its principal officials on a zoning basis.

Uniting the party behind the President and harmonizing the competing and rival interest of the Nigerian rulership is the principal task facing the President. This challenge is both security and diplomatic one; it is a political task not a governance one; as it was for the first Nigerian Prime Minister so it is for this President; security matters more than governance matters, for without security there is no stability of government; without a stable government, a government secured for governing, concerns with good governance instanced in this concern for technocratic governance, remain largely idealistic and therefore ineffectively moralistic. Balancing his appointments to achieve both regime security and stability is the critical strategic governance issue and we all must wish him well in his statecraft response to this pressing task.