The script does not change, only the cast does

Crowds gathered, chanting, cheering and pledging allegiance to the man being the defendant facing a pile-on of a plethora of government agencies and a plethora of charges. Former Kaduna Governor Nasiru El-Rufai’s first appearance in a Kaduna court looked eerily familiar. Where could we have seen this before? Oh, yes. There was a similar trial […]

Crowds gathered, chanting, cheering and pledging allegiance to the man being the defendant facing a pile-on of a plethora of government agencies and a plethora of charges. Former Kaduna Governor Nasiru El-Rufai’s first appearance in a Kaduna court looked eerily familiar. Where could we have seen this before? Oh, yes. There was a similar trial not too long ago. Just that the cast—and I use that word deliberately—was different. At the centre of that courtroom drama was a certain man called Godwin Emefiele, the former Central Bank Governor, who will be most remembered by Nigerians for his disastrous Naira redesign policy that unleashed hell on the Nigerians, among other things. The Emefiele script was designed in 2023. The El-Rufai saga seems like a rehash of the same show, just with a different central character.

Nasiru El-Rufai, also a former Minister and one of the most acerbic opposition voices, had been invited by the EFCC for alleged financial misconduct while serving as governor of Kaduna State. Having been in detention for weeks, he now had his day in court for alleged financial misappropriation while DSS is suing him for admitting  on national television,  a case of wiretapping by someone on matters relating to the National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu.

In 2023, Godwin Emefiele was one of the most powerful men in the country. He was rich beyond measure, having acquired properties worth billions, including one estate with 753 duplexes. Months before, he had thrown money at a failed presidential bid, with brand new buses bearing his face and advertising him for president in 2023 seen ready to start campaigning for him. Under Buhari, Emefiele was infallible. His fiscal policies that led to naira devaluation only raised outcries from Nigerians but did not bother his boss in the villa, and the suffering his ill-conceived naira redesign gimmick caused did not even make a dent on the psyche of his boss. Many believed it was targeted at Bola Tinubu’s presidential campaign, which had brushed aside Emefiele’s nebulous political aspirations. Once Tinubu became president, it was clear there was hell to pay for Emefiele. One Friday, he was relieved of his position as governor of the CBN; by Sunday, the DSS had him. Within days, the EFCC joined. Charges multiplied, and jurisdictions proliferated. Lagos one day, Abuja the next. Court orders for his bail were ignored, and Emefiele was held at Kuje prison.

Most Nigerians didn’t like Emefiele, and one can assume that most wanted him to suffer as much as he made them suffer, especially through his redesign policy. The government called it prosecution; activists called it persecution, and Nigerians watching charges against him being amended and dropped—being redesigned as court proceedings went on—weren’t sure what to call it.

Like Emefiele, El-Rufai came with his baggage. His reign in Kaduna was many things but a masterclass in civil liberties. His politics was caustic (that was his style, and he won); journalists were arrested and detained purportedly on his orders, and fingers are still being pointed at him for the unsolved disappearance of critic Abubakar Idris Dadiyata. The security apparatus in the state was deployed with gusto, notably leading to the Shia massacre in the state. While the neighbours of the Shia argue that the group was becoming overbearing, a state-sanctioned mass murder should not be condoned as an acceptable form of mass attitude adjustment.

El-Rufai has every right to argue for due process and the rule of law, but it is important to point out that his government treated both as optional accessories, useful when convenient and dispensable when not. There is a word for it, one I have used too often in this column—irony.

Arguments that the governor may deserve a taste of his own medicine cannot transform the medicine into justice. A wrong method applied to a possibly guilty man is still a wrong method. If the EFCC only investigates governors whose political expiration date has passed, it is not fighting corruption; it is managing political inventory. If the DSS charges people for television interviews when it has spent years ignoring more obvious criminality, it is not protecting the state but protecting the current occupant of the seat of power.

We have seen a replication of this approach in our handling of insecurity. Last week, the Nigerian Army and many Nigerians celebrated news that the Nigerian Army decimated about 80 terrorists in Borno State. It was a milestone, no doubt. But what most people ignore or overlook is that the army was repelling a Boko Haram offensive on their camp. It wasn’t a military offensive on a Boko Haram enclave that resulted in this victory. This, of course, is coming after the terrorists had managed to overrun some military bases, killing soldiers and carting away weapons and supplies.

Our security strategy has been following the same scripts our political tiffs have followed. Holding down defensive positions and awaiting waves of terrorist attacks seems counterproductive and will only produce the same result—a prolonged conflict with no end date. Even though there have been exceptions when the military has pushed coordinated offensives, far too often, our default security strategy has been to hold defensive positions, thereby failing to act when we have intelligence reports. We have allowed and continue to allow terrorists to gain footholds in different parts of the country. And instead of devising clear strategies with definitive timelines to end these insecurities, we continue to pursue the same patterns that have been yielding the same result. This results include 4,672 security incidents and 6,800 fatalities in the first half of 2025 alone,  a 19 per cent increase in deaths from the same period in 2024. Despite knowing where these gangs operate, not a single bandit leader has been arrested and prosecuted and even the notorious suspected Nyanya bomber, Kabiru Sokoto, is still on trial a decade later.

In the Emefiele and El-Rufai cases, the legal machinery did not stir during the years these men were active. Emefiele ran the CBN for nearly a decade. If the fraud alleged against him occurred, it did not occur last week. El-Rufai governed Kaduna for eight years. The financial misconduct now attracting prosecutorial attention presumably did not materialise in the final minutes of his last day in office.

What changed is that both men, in their different ways, became inconvenient to the same presidency. Emefiele’s naira policy became, in President Tinubu’s own pre-election words, a personal affront — he said as much on campaign stages. El-Rufai backed Tinubu, helped deliver the North, expected a cabinet seat, did not get one, and eventually walked out of the APC entirely.

In both instances, the distance between political rupture and prosecutorial attention was, shall we say, not very great. Correlation, the scientists tell us, is not causation. But when the correlation is this consistent, this timed, and this structurally identical, the scientists also tell us to pay attention. While this seems like a quarrel between friends, the deeper damage will glide right over their heads. In the end, El-Rufai will be alright, much in the same way that Emefiele is fine. While his trial is still ongoing, the Nigerian state has realised that it does not need a verdict. The judicial procedure is the sentence. But it is hard to imagine that whatever Nigeria takes from Emefiele through asset forfeiture would be enough to make him pay for the crimes he is being accused of committing.

El-Rufai and Emefiele are both wealthy, connected, and equipped with well-paid lawyers. They will survive their encounters with a justice system they both, in their primes, had no difficulty bending.

The deeper damage is to the institutions themselves. Every time the EFCC is deployed as political artillery, it becomes harder to take the EFCC seriously when it targets someone who is not a political enemy. Every time the DSS arrests a man for exercising his freedom of expression, its counterterrorism claims sound a little more like cover.

Nigeria has genuine corruption and insecurity. It is not subtle, it is not hidden, and it does not require particularly sophisticated investigation. What it requires is an anti-corruption and security architecture that operates on evidence rather than on the temperature of political relationships.

El-Rufai, in a recent interview, called himself a victim of persecution. He is not wrong about the method, even if he is poorly placed to complain about it. Emefiele said much the same thing from Kuje, while a court order for his release sat unanswered on a government desk.

There is a lesson here for every current occupant of power, every loyalist warming themselves at the fire of presidential favour. The fire is warm today. The question is when that fire grows cold; when that day comes, would you like the system to work as it should? Because if this is the system you are building, you are also the system’s future raw material. The script does not change. Only the cast does.