Between El-Rufai and Ribadu

At the Kaduna Investment Summit in October 2022, Bola Tinubu stood at the podium and refused to leave. “We won’t let you run away from the country,” he told Nasir El-Rufai, who was seated in the audience. Tinubu wanted El-Rufai to be part of his government. “That is the only way I will leave this […]

At the Kaduna Investment Summit in October 2022, Bola Tinubu stood at the podium and refused to leave. “We won’t let you run away from the country,” he told Nasir El-Rufai, who was seated in the audience. Tinubu wanted El-Rufai to be part of his government. “That is the only way I will leave this podium,” he said. El-Rufai walked up to the stage. “I promise,” he said into the microphone. The audience cheered, and with their arms around each other’s shoulders, the two men walked off the stage—the soon-to-be president and one of his chosen ministers.

No one imagined then that three years down the line, the man who had made that promise would be calling the president he had helped elect ‘a disaster’ and would abandon the party he had helped build. No one expected he would become one of the party’s staunchest critics, returning to the country to a welcome party of security officials trying to detain him.

Since that bungled “arrest” or “abduction” incident at the airport, depending on whose side you are on, El-Rufai has made several damning admissions and allegations.

Did his erstwhile friend, and now chief political adversary, Nuhu Ribadu, the National Security Adviser, order Mr. El-Rufai’s arrest? El-Rufai believes so because he somehow had access to a bugged conversation where the NSA ordered his arrest. How he came about this information remains a puzzle and has led to him being slammed in court to answer phone-tapping charges.

El-Rufai has also accused the NSA of importing thallium sulfate, a poisonous substance, from Poland, purportedly to use in exterminating the political pests that might chomp at the presidential ambition he may be cultivating. Apparently, as El-Rufai has alleged before, Ribadu is positioning himself to succeed President Tinubu when he finishes his term and returns power to the North. Ribadu’s game plan allegedly is to use his office as NSA to clear the stage of northern politicians he sees as possible competitors.

Anyone who has followed El-Rufai’s public career knows that he is a lightning rod for controversies. One could even argue that sometimes, he is the lightning seeking the rod to strike. He is never shy of public takedowns of not only political adversaries but also the people he is meant to serve.

Between 2003 and 2007, El-Rufai’s bulldozers displaced 800,000 people from Abuja’s informal settlements—entire communities erased in service of the city’s modernist design. El-Rufai allegedly said at the time that Abuja was not designed for the poor. In his book, The Accidental Public Servant, he stated he had no regrets over his mass demolitions. Did he sanitise the city and save it from cannibalising itself? Yes. Could it have been done more humanely? Absolutely.

He is no stranger to public spats with political rivals either. In October 2010, he declared Muhammadu Buhari “perpetually unelectable,” a man whose “insensitivity to Nigeria’s diversity and parochial focus” made him unfit for the presidency. He mocked Buhari’s “stone-age economic strategy” and warned that his record as military head of state was “a warning many Nigerians have wisely heeded.” Five years later, El-Rufai was on his knees—literally—begging that same Buhari to run for president.

In defence of this Buhari government in 2019, this same El-Rufai threatened that foreign election observers would return home in “body bags.” At that time, in a BBC Hausa interview, he condescendingly told Atiku Abubakar not to spend his money on elections because he would need it afterward for his upkeep. These two had served in the same Obasanjo government when Atiku had been Vice President and had said in an interview, “Again this is the same El-Rufai whom I was instrumental in bringing into government and making Director General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises, BPE.”

While that rift seems to have been buried for the moment, both Atiku and El-Rufai abandoned the APC, where they had worked to get Buhari elected in 2015, and ended up in the fledgling ADC, with which they hope to dethrone the APC. Atiku had even been one of the first persons to visit El-Rufai after his airport fracas.

Such fallouts and reconciliations have been customary in politics, especially for El-Rufai. After all, he and Ribadu had been close associates. They had looked like two peas in a pod in Obasanjo’s government, branded “the poster boys of reform,” and the relationship culminated in Ribadu naming his son after El-Rufai.

Ribadu himself is not without his controversies. His EFCC, just like El-Rufai’s Ministry of the FCT at the time, had been accused of being a political witch-hunting apparatus that Obasanjo used to deplatform political opponents. Until Tinubu poached him.

In 2007, he charged several state governors who had just left office with corruption. None of them had been close allies of Obasanjo or President Yar’adua, and one of them, like Peter Odili, had been a strong candidate to replace Obasanjo at the time. Many Nigerians noticed the selective persecution of Ribadu’s EFCC, but not many spoke of these men’s innocence. It just became a general assumption that everyone was corrupt, but only those aligned with the president were innocent.

Ribadu may not have the flair for controversial sound bites that El-Rufai is in the habit of dropping every so often, but he is not without them. His attempts to explain away the criminality of the Fulani bandits and militias unleashing hell in the country sounded more emotive than carefully reasoned, especially for someone who would eventually become the NSA.

The two men are fundamentally different. If El-Rufai is a firestarter, Ribadu operates as a dam cracker, flooding the terrain that El-Rufai would rather torch. So, while this may be a personal feud between two men, possibly over their ambitions, it is Nigerians who are paying for it. The last two governments El-Rufai fought to install have left a bitter aftertaste in the mouths of many Nigerians.

But here is the irony. On June 19, 2023, President Tinubu appointed Ribadu as the National Security Adviser. Thirty-eight days later, on July 27, he nominated Nasir El-Rufai as minister. By August, El-Rufai’s confirmation was blocked over “security clearance” issues—a clearance that had to pass through Ribadu’s desk. The two former friends who once supported each other through personal tragedy were now locked in a power game. El-Rufai would spend the next year blaming Ribadu for his exclusion, convinced that the man whose child bore his name had betrayed him.

Say what you will about El-Rufai’s politics, however, there is no doubt he has proved himself an effective administrator at the BPE, the Ministry of the FCT, and as governor of Kaduna State. His human record, though, is something else. Perhaps as Minister of Power under Tinubu, as the president had inferred, he might have garrulously brought some sanity to the power sector.

So, while this may be a personal feud between two erstwhile associates, it is playing out at the expense of Nigerians. If Ribadu’s EFCC had been effective, even if selectively, his ONSA has not in any way aspired to those standards. While Nigeria is being dragged through the mud by the US for its failure to handle its security issues, if we are to believe El-Rufai, it would seem the NSA is more preoccupied with hunting down potential future political opponents rather than active terrorists and bandit kingpins massacring innocent Nigerians and raping our women.

Allegations of importing thallium sulfate made against the NSA are quite serious. The implied aim, of course, is to use it for targeted political killings. A cursory glance at our recent political history shows that this is something that has become part of the political culture. After all, this is the same country where the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Federation, Bola Ige, was brutally assassinated in 2001 and his killers have gone scot-free. This is also the same country where a powerful political figure, Harry Marshall, was assassinated ahead of the 2023 general elections. Even small-time critics like Abubakar Dadiyata has disappeared for six years, leaving behind two young children who were waiting for their father to return home and help them solve a puzzle game he had bought for them the day before his abduction.

So while these feuds play out, and insecurity continues to feast, the human costs are real in the lives of Nigerians—political or apolitical. In the end, the two men might just make up over a late-night meeting, as we have seen before, leaving their supporters scratching their heads. But we have more urgent matters to address.