Some of the sixteen former state governors who left office May 29 departed as discreetly as possible without much fuss. One or two were absent from the handover ceremonies in their state capitals preferring, instead, to celebrate the historic day at Eagle Square Abuja during the swearing-in of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Another made such a colorful spectacle of his exit befitting a man who once ruled his state imperiously for eight long years. Erstwhile governor of Kaduna state Nasir Ahmad el Rufai also made a splash of his departure but not in the same ostentatious manner as his counterpart in the littoral state. Invoking Prophet Mohammed and the Caliphs, el Rufai let it be known how religion played an important role not only in his election and his successor’s but governance in general thus sparking a raging controversy THEWILL now considers. Michael Jimoh reports…
Inveterate gamblers know to keep their ace to their chest until the last seconds or minutes of the game. It is only then they pull their surprise to the astonishment of those at the gaming table. If they deal their cards well, they win. They also lose sometimes if they don’t.
Depending on whichever angle you’re looking at it from, former governor of Kaduna state Nasir Ahmad el Rufai is straddling this thin divide between winning and losing right now after his unsolicited but well-timed remarks to Islamic religious teachers, scholars (Imams and Ulamas.) Meant to be both a special session and valedictory address to the Ulamas, el Rufai thanked them for not only ensuring the victory of the All Progressives Congress’s Muslim/ Muslim ticket in the last governorship election but sustaining it in the state all through his two-terms from 2015 – 2023. In other words, maintaining Muslim dominance of politics in the state.
If they continue to lend their support as they have done in the past, el Rufai boasted, then the Muslim/ Muslim ticket is sure to last for 20 years. What he left unsaid but blindingly obvious to all was that the continuous Muslim/ Muslim ticket will shut out other religions from attaining top political positions in a state where ethnic and religious tensions have become the norm.
Polarised along ethnic and religious divides, the state in question has a predominantly Muslim population in the north and Christians in the south. Of the six elected civilian governors since 1999, for instance, only one of them Patrick Ibrahim Yakowa was a Christian. (A veep to Governor Mohammed Namadi Sambo of the Peoples Democratic Party, Yakowa naturally stepped in as governor after Sambo was made Vice President to Goodluck Jonathan following President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s demise in May 2010. Yakowa’s tenure as governor was short-lived: he died in a helicopter crash in December 2012.)
Yakowa’s successor, Mukhtar Ramalan Yero, a Muslim, ruled until 2015 when el Rufai took over as APC governor. A Muslim, el Rufai was reelected in 2019 along with his deputy, Hadiza Sabuwa Balarabe, also a Muslim. Soon after Senator Uba Sani was elected governor with Balarabe as his deputy last March, the outgoing governor let on how the Muslim/ Muslim ticket has benefitted the state.
To underscore that, el Rufai began by asking his audience the sole reason for his choice of a Muslim running mate in the 2019 governorship election in Kaduna state. “Why did I pick Dr. Hadiza Saduwa Balarabe to be my deputy in 2019? First, I did a thorough calculation that most of those that are not Muslims don’t vote for our party (the All Progressives Congress). Most of them. So, why should I give them the deputy (governor) position? I did my calculation and I knew we could win the election without giving them (position of deputy governor). That’s first. That’s a purely political issue. It’s politics. You want to win an election, you’re looking for people that will vote for you. We have observed that since we started practising democracy, we know places we used to win elections and those places we don’t. We’ve done that calculation politically. That’s the political point of it.”
Of course, it didn’t go down well with non-Muslim population in the state, especially against the backdrop of the incessant killings and premeditated acts of violence against many of them in the Christian south. With el Rufai’s justification for excluding them out of top government positions, it was no surprise many of the Christian communities grumbled that the governor did little or nothing to prevent the wanton destruction of lives and property and even displacement of people in those communities by bandits plus terrorists and the frequent herders/ farmers confrontations.
How it all began
The outgoing governor’s now infamous and some say incendiary speech came only days after Senator Uba Sani was declared winner as candidate of APC in the governorship election last March. Though el Rufai spoke mostly in Hausa, the by now viral video of his exhortation to the Imams and Ulamas in Kaduna to continue their support for Muslim/ Muslim candidates in the state lasted for almost 12 minutes. Venue was somewhere in a hall in Government House Kaduna, a giant electric fan blowing the decorative curtains like the billowing sails on a schooner out at sea just as the outgoing governor’s voice riffed through the hall eliciting an applause here, a laughter there from the audience.
Standing among the seated special guests and facing the audience, el Rufai spoke extempore but it was obvious he’d been studying his scripts for quite some time like an actor mastering his lines over and over down to his gestures. At intervals, el Rufai raised his left index finger straight up to emphasise a point. “What we wanted to prove to people,” he went on, “and thank God in the last four years, we’ve vindicated ourselves and proved that a government that has a Muslim as governor, a Muslim as deputy governor, a Muslim as SSG (secretary of state government), a Muslim as chief of staff, a Muslim as finance commissioner, we’ll not cheat Christians in Kaduna State. And everywhere we go we tell them ‘Yes, that’s it; the top government hierarchy in Kaduna State are Muslims but can any Christian in Kaduna prove that we’ve oppressed them? Is there any district that we didn’t renovate schools? Is there any district we didn’t construct a hospital? Is there anywhere that we didn’t construct roads? Is there anywhere that we didn’t help farmers whether they voted for us or not? We’ve given everyone their entitlements.”
Except for the occasional guffaws and applause, there was cat-quiet silence at the venue signifying that el Rufai carried along his listeners. But the video itself soon generated heated responses, mainly from the non-Muslim community in Kaduna state. Chairman of Kaduna state Christian Association of Nigeria, Rev John Joseph Hayab, for one responded quickly on a national television station Arise TV.
The video in question, Hayab said, is real because of el Rufai’s antecedents. “This video in the first place is real because that’s El-Rufai for you. Some of us have known El-Rufai for saying these kinds of things, for plotting these kinds of issues, and for masterminding these whole things. And many people thought we were just fighting or stopping him for something else. God has helped us for him to come up publicly and make Nigerians know who exactly El-Rufai is. If you have known El-Rufai for the past 20 years and you watched this video, you will know this is the El-Rufai you know because he hasn’t changed, El-Rufai remains a chameleon, El-Rufai just remains a pretense. El-Rufai remains the same, thinking he would outsmart people by playing games.”
Playing games with others or lying to them was the same keen observation on el Rufai by none other than former President Olusegun Obasanjo himself. Interviewed soon after publication of his book Under My Watch in 2017, OBJ had some unsavory things to say about a man he appointed Minister of the FCT from 2003 – 2007. Headlined “Obasanjo: El-Rufai has penchant for lying, disloyalty,” the former president described his subordinate as someone he knows from close quarters.
“Nasir’s penchant for reputation savaging is almost pathological,” OBJ recalled in the interview. “Why does he do it? He is brilliant and smart. I grant him that also. Very early in my interaction with him, I appreciated his talent and brilliance. At the same time, I recognized his weaknesses; the worst being his inability to be loyal to anybody or any issue consistently for long, but only to Nasir el-Rufai. He barefacedly lied which he did to me against his colleagues and so-called friends. I have heard of how he ruthlessly savaged the reputation of his uncle, a man who was like, in the African setting, his foster father. I shuddered when I heard the story of what he did to his half-brother in the Air force who is senior to him in age.”
In all, OBJ concluded that character wise, “Nasir has not much going for him. My vivid recollection of him is his penchant for lying, for unfair embellishment of stories and his inability to sustain loyalty for long.”
It is remarkable that six years after the former Nigerian ruler made those observations about a minister who served under his administration, el Rufai has not changed much.
Reacting to the success of the Muslim/ Muslim ticket in Kaduna state credited to el Rufai, his fellow Fulani and national director of publicity of Northern Elders Forum, Hakeem Baba Ahmed described it as “a fraud.”
Baba Ahmed pointedly asked: “What did he (El-Rufai) do for the Muslims? He demolished their houses. Ninety five percent of the houses and building he demolished belong to Muslims. So, of what value has Muslim-Muslim? It’s a fraud,” insisting that “politicians have poisoned faith. They took it made it a political capital. And they are fooling everybody. The earlier we open our eyes, the better. They are destroying the political process by bringing faith into it. They are deceiving people into thinking that they represent a class, which is not true.”
A politician and onetime presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party Adewole Adebayo has also taken umbrage at el Rufai’s recent video making a case for Muslim/ Muslim ticket in politics in Kaduna state. “I condemn the provocative and divisive bigotry inherent in the statements of Governor @elrufai on Islamic dominance of politics in Kaduna and Nigeria,” Adebayo twitted. “A political agenda founded on ethnicity and religion is anathema to a diverse and plural Nigeria…a political agenda based on tribe and religion is hateful to a diverse and plural Nigeria.”
Even party members in el Rufai’s ruling APC have also called him out. Samuel Kwamkur is an APC top dog and former National Director of CAN. In his response to the viral video, el Rufai’s “classification of ‘them’ versus ‘us’ meant that the former governor cannot be exonerated from the wanton killings, demolition of houses and places of worship of Christians in Kaduna.” Kwamkur cautioned el Rufai not to “set Nigeria on fire with his utterances.”
In an opinion piece last Friday by Etim Etim in The Cable an online publication, the journalist indicated that the man el Rufai had deceived most people right from the get-go. “None of us, especially from Southern Nigeria, had ever suspected that Nasir el-Rufai, the former governor of Kaduna state, harboured such thoughts. For decades, this man has carefully burnished his image as a cosmopolitan, liberal, and open-minded professional who attended a Catholic school in Kaduna in his early days, spent time in Abeokuta during NYSC, and cultivated friends and contacts from every part of the country. He served as a no-nonsense minister of FCT during the second term of the Obasanjo administration and was highly regarded as one of the four technocrats and reformists of that administration (the others were Dr. Oby Ezekwesili; Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Esther Nenadi Usman). But in a recent video which has since been viewed by millions of Nigerians, el-Rufai is heard spewing derogatory against Christians…A lot of people are asking: “Is this the real el-Rufai we had always known; or is this video AI-generated?” People who know him well, like the chairman of the Kaduna chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Joseph Hayab, say the video is the real el-Rufai and that the former governor is a pretender who had been hiding his true colours for political expediency.”
Etim may just have a point regarding el Rufai’s pretense “for political expediency.” At a meeting with leaders of Southern Kaduna Peace Summit sometime in 2020 to resolve the incessant ethno-religious clashes in that region, the governor ended the parley by not only thanking the leaders for finding some solution to the problems but also quoted a Bible verse. “Even the Holy Bible I think in Matthew 5:5 says that: Blessed are the peace makers, for they shall be called the children of God,” el Rufai said on that day. “By the grace of God, all of you will be called the children of God when we face Him on the day of judgment.”
Late last May, the same el Rufai had a different story to tell the Islamic mullahs in Kaduna state thanking them for sustaining Muslim/ Muslim ticket in the March governorship election and, hopefully, thereafter. Like most humans, OBJ may have gotten some things out of context. But on his assessment of his former protégé, the ex-soldier hit a bull’s eye: Character wise, OBJ surmised, “Nasir has not much going for him. My vivid recollection of him is his penchant for lying, for unfair embellishment of stories and his inability to sustain loyalty for long.”
Michael Jimoh is a Nigerian journalist with many years experience in print media. He is currently a Special Correspondent with THEWILL.
