A love letter to Mallam Nasir el-Rufa’i (I)
We know that in Nigeria, governments unfortunately do not believe they are here to serve the people, but it is our duty to work together
Governor Nasir El-Rufai
I had made up my mind to write to you openly before I saw the viral video by Dr Shadi Sabeh in which he appealed to you passionately to temper your actions with a “human face” with regard to the proposed sacking of 20,000 staff of the Kaduna State Government.
I do not quite agree with Dr Sabeh that people should be kept in service just to pay them as a social service. Nigeria cannot afford that for now. Our economy is not a 10th as developed as the US economy was in the 1930s when it went through the Great Depression. However, Dr Sabeh is right to the extent that Keynesianism is back world over and a government must necessarily think about the impact of its policies on the people it serves.
We know that in Nigeria, governments unfortunately do not believe they are here to serve the people, but it is our duty to work together to change that unfortunate misunderstanding and disconnection.
There are other issues coming up in Kaduna State presently. Indeed, the state under your governance has again been mentioned as one of the best governed and we hear of your achievements in infrastructural development. The dangers of travelling to Kaduna has hampered many of us from coming to see those achievements, but most people know that El-Rufai is a man of achievement and a stickler for standards.
The Federal Capital Territory (FCT) cannot forget you in a hurry. Many people rue your absence as minister. A lot more remember you in dread. Unfortunately, many of the villages you cleared and many of the shanties you demolished are back – this time with a vengeance. Why? The governments over time have made no plans for these poor folks, and human beings – like water – must find their levels. If you are flying into Abuja at any point in time, look down from the window of your aeroplane and you will see just how badly shanties have metastasized since you’ve been gone. Any minister who will try and correct this anomaly will have millions of refugees on his hands. In your time, it was 500,000 refugees we had. As at 2006, Nigeria had the second highest number of displaced people in the world – after Iraq – due to your actions. I recall writing to you then through my Daily Trust column, and appealing for the same thing that Dr Sabeh is now calling for; human face. I quoted timeless Chinese wisdom by reminding you “If your vision is one year, cultivate flowers. If it is 10, cultivate trees. But if it is eternity, cultivate humans.”
The idea then was that you should go easy on you hard rhetoric that anyone earning less than N50,000 should return to their village, because Abuja is not for the poor. You said this on national TV and it was most unfortunate and unfeeling. It was perhaps the most bourgeoisie thing ever said by someone in office. If anybody was to lay claim to Abuja as their inheritance, it should have been those Gwaris displaced from their ancestral land, many times without compensation. At what point did Abuja become a playground/inheritance for the nouveau riche? While we watched on TV in 2006, whole families displaced in the thick of the rainy season, with their mattresses on their heads and their little toddlers in their hands, we heard of stories of people who committed suicide because both their homes and their businesses were demolished same day. I learnt from one lady, who acted as secretary to some of your meetings back then, how much you took delight in displacing those poor folks and that in one instance, the appeals from Drs Oby Ezekwesili and Okonjo-Iweala could not dissuade you and you were jokingly called a sadist even as you departed the meeting to go and have another demolition.
It sounded much like those folks in the south of the USA who used to take delight in ‘hanging themselves another negro’.
Kaduna not only has a bloated civil service (as is), but also a problem with indiscriminate building of all sorts of structures where they shouldn’t be – like everywhere else in Nigeria. Abuja claims to have a ‘master plan’ which no one is supposed to see, thus making it a political plan not a geographical one. Kaduna is NOT Abuja, and the people there may not have the mettle to withstand Hurricane Nasir, as we did here in Abuja up till 2007 under your iron grip.
You know you can easily get crazy once turned on. You confess to this yourself. You don’t care whose ox is gored and this can be a good attribute to turn around a country such as ours, but it could also be deadly to a great many poor folks, especially in a Kaduna which is basically an agrarian and civil service state. Is there any compensation for example, for those whose houses and shops you will demolish? Is anyone listening to their stories of how they came about the land or spaces or have they been told to go to hell and back? Is it true that we should strive to achieve a glistening city in order to achieve accolades from far and near, not minding the human costs? Should governance be calibrated solely to appeal to the whims and fancies of the monied class?
Look at Banana Island and Turnbull Street in Ikoyi. The other day, the well-fed owners of properties there pushed a video wherein they filmed how their pristine space has been encroached by poor ‘invaders’. They almost labeled the poor people as vermin. The problem is not the ‘invaders’ but a lack of integrated, inclusive planning. As educated as we claim to be, we choose not to learn the nuanced lessons from the places we visit abroad. How can anyone think that the model of Banana Island will work forever when there is no provision for how the servants, drivers, gardeners and other ‘dregs of the earth’ who serve these Lords of the Manor will get around; how they will eat their lunch, how they will survive and sleep close to where they are supposed to resume at 4am every day?