President Muhammadu Buhari, who came to office in May, seems bent on making public office less and less attractive to the average Nigerian "big man".
Beyond the unusually austere salary package for new members of his cabinet - in response to the country's worst economic crisis in years - he has given an instruction that should drastically reduce the size of every serving minister's entourage.

Few Nigerian big men walk alone: Such a typical highly esteemed and self-important person in Africa's most populous country goes around accompanied by a multitude of men.

They follow him to weddings and funerals and birthdays and book launches; they stand when he stands, sit when he sits, and depart when he departs. 
In return, he takes care of their needs.

You can often tell when a big man is approaching by the number of followers pushing their way through in front of him or those shepherding from behind.
You can usually tell when one is in the vicinity, maybe inside a restaurant or a hotel, by the number of men hovering outside, at the front door or the gate or in the lobby, waiting.

As soon as their principal reappears, they jump into action, surround him to his car, then shove their way into their own vehicles, which zoom off behind and in front of his.

Sometimes, the big man is travelling out of Nigeria, perhaps to a country where such exuberant displays of clustering may be greeted with raised eyebrows.
In that case, the retinue will stop at the airport lobby, watching solemnly as he jets off.

But when he returns, they will have regrouped, possibly on the tarmac, ready to resume their duties from exactly where they stopped.

None of this is particularly new. In many cultural groups across Nigeria, traditional rulers have been known to move around with a retinue that includes praise singers, who do nothing but blow their master's trumpet.
When I invited my friend, Rick, to an event some time ago, he reminded me that, by asking him, I was automatically inviting dozens of other people.
"Are you prepared for that?" he asked.

A year previously, he had transitioned from the young man my friends and I had known since our teens, to the new traditional ruler of his community following his father's death.
​
Old friend or not, his new status meant it would be unbecoming to appear at my event without his throng of followers.

​Nigerian traditional leaders enjoy huge respect

But traditional rulers are not the only ones in Nigeria who now feel entitled to escorts.

Many business men do not walk alone. Neither do many politicians and pastors.
I once met a popular 419 scammer who would not sit down in public until one of the retinue of dwarfs who accompanied him had first sat on the seat to make sure it was thoroughly rubbed clean. 
Like many age-old cultures in Nigeria, having large entourages has crept into our democracy. 

'Abstemious character'

Government officials, male and female, are known to surround themselves with aides and special assistants, and personal assistants to aides, and personal assistants to special assistants, and special assistants to personal assistants, each of them suckling from the national treasury.
Some government officials employ scores of their relatives, creating for them roles that never existed before.

Even if these employees have nothing to do or no office in which to sit, they will at least come in useful for accompanying their boss to public functions, announcing his great importance by swelling his entourage. 
President Buhari aims to curb all this, on the national level, at least.

While inaugurating his new ministers, the president directed that they take on aides only from among the civil servants already in the government's employ. 
This stance is hardly surprising, considering the retired general's famously abstemious character.

Economic factors facing the new regime, such as a decline in oil price and budgetary pressures, have made it essential to plug the unnecessary expenditure consumed by hangers on.
​
So this new order will definitely lead to fewer ministerial aides who do not work - and merely hover.
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Source: BBC Africa 

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Historical background about Rwanda:

About 85% of Rwandans are Hutus but the Tutsi minority has long dominated the country. In 1959, the Hutus overthrew the Tutsi monarchy and tens of thousands of Tutsis fled to neighboring countries, including Uganda. A group of Tutsi exiles formed a rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which invaded Rwanda in 1990 and fighting continued until a 1993 peace deal was agreed.

On the night of 6 April 1994 a plane carrying then President Juvenal Habyarimana, and his counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi - both Hutus - was shot down, killing everyone on board. Hutu extremists blamed the RPF and immediately started a well-organized campaign of slaughter. The RPF said the plane had been shot down by Hutus but to this day, the truth remains a mystery.

1. The genocide was based on tribal conflict.

As website Ubutera emphatically asserts, “There are NO TRIBES in Rwanda.” Tutsi and Hutu are socio-economic terms - Hutu originally describing the working class and the Tutsi being the wealthier elites.

Historical context:

Unlike other African countries, whose borders are the aftermath of European colonialism, Rwanda was a nation prior to colonization. Although a distinction was made between Hutu and Tutsi, these were neither tribes nor ethnic groups. Rather, as David Moshman points out, the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi was a fluid one, based on a combination of ancestry and socioeconomic status, including the ownership of cattle.

Rwanda was a single society in which Hutu and Tutsi lived among each other, spoke the same language, shared religious beliefs and intermarried. The Tutsi, comprising 15 percent of the population, were politically and economically dominant. Nevertheless, some Hutu attained some degree of power and economic success, and many Tutsi were as poor and marginalized as the majority of Hutu.

From the 1890s to the early 1960s, Germany and then Belgium reinforced Tutsi power as a means of controlling the country (i.e. colonial rule of ‘divide and conquer’). Thus, identity cards that distinguished Hutu from Tutsi became mandatory, requiring everyone to be categorized and making these categories official.

2. Tutsi were the sole targets of the genocide.

It’s been well documented that some of the earliest victims of the genocide, were not only Tutsi, but also Hutu Moderates (political opposition to Hutu Power).

Although there were moderates among both Hutu and Tutsi, extremists on each side undermined the claims of moderates on the other.

Going back to the early 1990s, the rise of a political movement calling itself Hutu Power defined Rwanda as a Hutu nation. As a result, Hutu extremists were targeting members of the minority Tutsi community, as well as their own political opponents, irrespective of origin. Accordingly, any moderate Hutu who advocated a vision of Rwanda for all Rwandans were seen as a threat to the movement and, thus, targeted and massacred by Hutu extremists.

3. The International community did not know until it was too late

Twenty years ago on January 11, 1994 General Roméo Dallaire sent his now infamous "Genocide Fax" to United Nations headquarters in New York. At the time Dallaire was Force Commander of the UN peacekeeping mission for Rwanda, UNAMIR (United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda).

Three months before the genocide, Dallaire discovered that Hutu extremists were distributing stockpiled arms to militias. Weighing the evidence, Dallaire came to the conclusion that coordinated raids on these arms caches could prevent a potential mass slaughter. His fax informed UN headquarters that while such an operation was not without serious risk, and could be a deadly trap, it was necessary to act. The ‘genocide fax’ contained specific information provided by an informant. But approval to put down the threat never came.

Ending the fax was the only line written in his native French, which read: Peux ce que veux. Allon-y. (Where there is a will there is a way. Let's go.)

Outside of Dallaire’s fax, there were 7 other international human rights reports issued between 1990-1994.

4.   Spontaneous rage over the shooting down of Rwandan President Habyarimana’s plane started the genocide. Hutu attacked Tutsi in retaliation.

There was opposition from Hutu Extremists against the President for agreeing to the Arusha Accords, which would have been signed had he not been murdered, says Ubutera. Among both Hutu and Tutsi, the killing of the president sent a fearful signal that the massacres would begin. In the 100 days that followed, extremists among the majority Hutus attempted to carry out a long-planned mission to exterminate the traditionally wealthier minority Tutsis.

Historical context:

Three months before a horrifying genocide that would claim over half a million lives in just 100 days, Dallaire discovered that ethnic Hutu extremists were distributing stockpiled arms to Interahamwe militias. A high-level informant had also revealed to him that, as Dallaire wrote in his fax, "he has been ordered to register all Tutsi in Kigali" in preparation "for their extermination."

In January 1994 Kigali was a dangerous city. Anti-Tutsi hate speech was being broadcast on the radio. A civil war had led to a formal peace agreement, which UNAMIR was supposed to police, but it was already falling apart. Then President Juvénal Habyarimana was unable to confront Hutu extremists within his own government.

5.  800,000 people died within 100 days

The killing took place at such a fast pace that getting an accurate number of those killed was not the priority, notes the website Ubutabera, and yet many still claim 800,000 is ‘The’ number. Three weeks into the genocide, the Red Cross in Kigali estimated 250,000 had been killed. A week later, they said at least 500,000 had been killed. When BBC asked for numbers the following week, an overwrought Philippe Gaillard, head of the Red Cross’s delegation in Rwanda answered, “After half a million, sir, we stopped counting.”

Sources: Ubutera, Huffington Post, The World Post

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“Hutu and Tutsi lived together, not just as neighbors but also intimately, often through cohabitation, sometimes through intermarriage. The history of cohabitation and of intermarriage spans centuries. And yet, that history cannot be glimpsed from contemporary social identities. If you go to Rwanda or Burundi, the purity of social definition is striking: everyone you meet identities as either Hutu or Tutsi; there are no hybrids, none is ‘Hutsi.’ When cohabitation takes the form of marriage, the wife takes on the identity of the husband. The social identity is passed on through patrilineal descent. If the father is a Tutsi, then the child will be socially identified as a Tutsi; and if the father is a Hutu, the child will be identified as a Hutu. As the child takes on a unidimensional identity, that of the father, the identity of the mother—whether Hutu or Tutsi—is systematically erased. So it happens that the child of generations of intermarriage and cohabitation between Hutu and Tutsi comes into this world as unequivocally Hutu or Tutsi. 

One begins to understand the puzzled reaction of those new to the region, such as a visiting Sudanese intellectual: 

'I had come to know, more or less, the stereotypical description of the short Negroid Hutu and the tall, fine-features Hamitic Tutsis. As I looked at my audiences, I saw a few who were clearly Tutsis and a few who were clearly Hutus. But most were somewhere in between, and I could not identify them. I later asked the Burundese, including senior government officials and ministers, whether they could tell a Tutsi from a Hutu. The response of the Foreign Minister, which represented the general tone, was a confident ‘Yes,’ but ‘with a margin of error of 35 percent’—a remarkable margin given the confidence of the affirmative answer.'

‘There’s been so much inter-marriage over the years that you often cannot tell who’s who,’ said a presidential aide from Burundi to a Western reporter, and then added as an afterthought, ‘but everybody knows anyway.’

I have been unable to find comprehensive data on the extent of inter-marriage. Yet, all accounts I have heard of or read speak of considerable intermarriage: anywhere from a significant minority to a majority of contemporary Rwandans are likely to be children of Hutu and Tutsi intermarriages over the centuries. This means that we cannot equate the identities Hutu and Tutsi with those identified as Hutu and Tutsi when this process set in motion. Rather than being biological offspring of Tutsi of centuries ago, today’s Tutsi need to be understood as children of mixed marriages who have been constructed as Tutsi through the lens of a patriarchal ideology and the institutional medium of a patriarchal family.”

by Mahmood Mamdani “When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda” p 53-54