SUNDAY MUSINGS
Truth be told! This is winter in summer for Nasir el-Rufai, a former Director General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises, former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, former Governor of Kaduna State, former ranking member of the PDP and former stalwart of the APC.
He has gone through a lot of controversies since he became an “Accidental Public Servant” far back in 1999. He is a stormy petrel, a gadfly, a consistent storm in a teacup and an unrepentant irredentist! He is an adroit manipulator of both the old and the new media, and only a few in the media industry would not see him as an interviewer’s delight.
He is arguably loquacious, largely due to an exaggerated public perception that he is blessed with more than an average intelligence quotient. Since he came into the national limelight in 1999, his tongue often enjoys more acceleration than his brain. When he was appointed a Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, he told the nation that the Senators that screened him demanded a bribe! When invited to prove his allegation by the Senate, he capitulated! He profusely apologised to keep his job.
El- Rufai has this ignoble track record of engaging his tongue before his brain. He is a regular outpatient for chronic verbal diarrhoea. As a Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, he demolished a lot of structures and revoked many certificates of occupancy. When confronted by the Senate committee led by Senator Smart Adeyemi on allegations that Rufai’s blood relations benefited from the aftermath of that exercise, he responded with impunity that his relations were Nigerians equally entitled to such rights and privileges.
As a Minister, he placed a female Youth Corps member on a monthly allowance denominated in dollars! When queried by the Senate, he retorted that she was a product of an Ivy League Varsity, which many of the probing Senators could not be considered for admission to. That’s Mallam Nasir el-Rufai for you. He sees every engagement in public office as an incalculable favour and sacrifice which he should always be appreciated for rather than interrogated about!
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The chequered political service record of Nigeria is not short on the likes of Rufai. In the Second Republic, there was Umaru Dikko, a powerful Minister of Transport in Shagari’s Presidency. In 1983, in an indecent display of hubris, he told the Senate committee that screened him for a second-term ministerial appointment that there was no national hunger, as no Nigerian was eating from dustbins and dumpsites!
In the same Second Republic, Augustus Meredith Akinloye, the national chairman of the then-ruling Party, NPN, publicly boasted that only two Parties existed in Nigeria: the ruling NPN and the Military! According to him, opposition Parties were Electoral participants and not contenders.
When the military struck in 1983, David Mark, a Lieutenant Colonel, emerged as Communication Minister, and told the nation that the telephone was not for the poor! Today, the same Mark must be using the same facility to communicate with his domestic staff, courtesy of Obasanjo’s unbundling and privatisation of the sub-sector in the life of this millennium.
When PDP ruled and reigned from 1999 to 2015, Vincent Ogbolafor, then national scribe of PDP, arrogantly told the nation that PDP would remain in Aso Rock for 60 years. It never came to pass. And that Party today is a confirmed political patient on life support in a national emergency facility! Time and season. Men and providence.
Mallam Nasir el-Rufai has taken so much for granted since Allah used Abubakar Atiku to bring him into public life. Impunity has become his second name, and what nature denied him in height and size, he consistently strives to make up for with infantile and uncouth utterances.
Let’s fact-check his file more. He once posited on his X handle that the loss of a Fulani man’s life in any conflict is like a bank loan that must be repaid and not written off as bad debt! He governed Kaduna from 2015 to 2023 with an iron fist. He decimated, diminished and decapitated Southern Kaduna, a predominantly Christian belt of the state.
Providence has made Rufai believe that he is a man for all seasons. But recent developments may disappoint him and some political actors of his ilk. How can a public figure disclose in an interview on an international news channel that he has a network of hackers who stalk conversations of the National Security Adviser! Where in the world could that be tolerated and swept under the carpet? This goes beyond politics and the quest for political power! In a country derisively described as a “country of particular concern” due to insecurity, only a timid government will accept El-Rufai’s afterthought defence that he only made a “casual statement”.
He only forgot to add, like Shakespeare, that his satanic statement was “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”!
