Evil genius: El-Rufai is clever, but toxic, reckless, dangerous! By Olu Fasan
The world has long produced evil geniuses, exceptionally brilliant people who are utterly diabolical. Topping the global list is Adolf Hitler, the German politician who triggered the Second World War and exterminated six million Jews through his devilish scheme, the Holocaust. Following on his heels is Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, a master of manipulation, who had a doctorate in philosophy. Well, Nigeria is not without its own evil geniuses. This country has had highly intelligent people whose behaviours were/are utterly harmful and destructive.
There was Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, the Oxford-educated historian and Sandhurst-trained soldier who led the Igbos into an ego-driven civil war that cost them nearly three million lives. There is Ibrahim Babangida, a first-class military strategist and tactician, who led Nigerians by the nose and strung them along in a futile presidential election that he whimsically cancelled, setting Nigeria on a path-dependent political perversion that still endures.
There’s Bola Tinubu, Nigeria’s quintessential political grandmaster, whose politics and quest for power are so deviously buccaneering and self-seeking that the national interest hardly matters. Well, Nasir el-Rufai, the subject of this intervention, is undoubtedly an evil genius: a brilliant administrator and technocrat, whose behaviour is, however, defined by religious zealotry, ethnic bigotry and political malevolence.
But before we come to El-Rufai’s deviltry, let’s talk about his brilliance because that’s precisely what makes him so difficult to ignore. El-Rufai first came to public attention about 25 years ago as the energetic and impactful Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, Abuja. In December 2003, I joined some media veterans, led by the iconic Alhaji Alade Odunewu, at a reception El-Rufai hosted in his official residence in Abuja. The occasion was the annual Nigerian Media Merit Awards, NMMA, of which, as the FCT Minister, he was Chief Host. Petite and visibly dwarfed by the media giants, El-Rufai nevertheless dazzled his guests, who were mesmerised by his eloquence and brilliant articulation of his plans to “restore” the “Abuja masterplan”. El-Rufai, who holds a master’s in public administration from Harvard University, is the kind of dedicated public officer, who would burn the midnight oil, bury his head in files and put in hard graft and intellectual rigour to craft good policies.
In 2017, when the APC reluctantly decided to address the agitation for political restructuring, it inaugurated a committee and asked El-Rufai, then Kaduna State governor, to chair it. The El-Rufai Committee traversed the length and breadth of Nigeria, gathering evidence through public consultations, and later produced a four-volume report. It was a task only for a brilliant mind.
Lest we forget, El-Rufai is the Svengali behind Tinubu’s emergence as president. Just as Tinubu made Muhammadu Buhari president, El-Rufai made Tinubu president. When in June 2022, Tinubu made the famous emotional speech in Abeokuta, saying “I made Buhari president” and “Emi lokan” (It’s my turn!), it was a desperate cry for help. Tinubu knew that Buhari and Abdullahi Adamu, then APC national chairman, were scheming to deny him the party’s ticket. It was El-Rufai who came to Tinubu’s help, who mobilised APC’s Northern governors to foil Buhari and Adamu’s plans. And it was El-Rufai, the evil genius, who masterminded the Muslim-Muslim ticket without which, as he put it, Tinubu “would lose the election”.
In December 2022, when Tinubu went to Chatham House in London during the campaign, he refused to answer questions. Instead, he called on “Nasiru el-Rufai” and others to speak for him, saying he wanted to demonstrate “team-ship”. Indeed, as president, Tinubu nominated El-Rufai as minister. Strangely, the Senate rejected El-Rufai’s nomination, branding him a “security risk”. Leaving aside El-Rufai’s suitability or otherwise, it was the heights of ingratitude for Tinubu to publicly humiliate him. The strangeness of the Senate’s rejection, given its leadership’s subservience to Tinubu, validates the view that someone who had Tinubu’s ear in the presidency was behind El-Rufai’s rejection. The finger points to Nuhu Ribadu, Tinubu’s National Security Adviser, NSA!
Recently, some commentators took sides on the matter, defending Ribadu and savaging El-Rufai. They are wrong. Without El-Rufai, I repeat, Tinubu won’t be president and Ribadu won’t be NSA. Ribadu made virtually no contribution to Tinubu’s emergence as president; indeed, Tinubu lost Ribadu’s ward. Yet Ribadu reaped where he did not sow, exploiting his long-standing relationship with Tinubu to sit in judgement over El-Rufai, allegedly instigating the Senate’s rejection of his ministerial nomination, and thus his public humiliation.
In a recent intervention, Akin Osuntokun, a former presidential aide, traced the animus between Ribadu and El-Rufai to an opinion poll Tinubu “commissioned” to test the popularity of some young Northerners, notably Ribadu, El-Rufai and Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, as a “presidential material” in 2011. According to Osuntokun, “Ribadu scored 45%, Rufai scored 7%, Sanusi scored 3%”. Consequently, Tinubu “reached out to Ribadu and enthroned him as the presidential candidate of the Action Congress of Nigeria, ANC, in 2011”.
But the pollsters fobbed off Tinubu because in the 2011 presidential election, Ribadu secured only 2,079,151 (5.44%), of which just 509, 597 came from the entire 19 Northern states and Abuja! How could someone who scored “45%” in an opinion poll in the North as a “presidential material” perform so abysmally in the same North in the presidential election? If Ribadu was such a popular young politician in North, why has he failed to win his party’s governorship primary, let alone become governor in his state?
Truth is, despite Ribadu’s vaunting political ambition, dating back to his days as the politically-driven chairman of the EFCC, he’s a political lightweight. And there’s a grain of truth in the speculation that he wants to ride on Tinubu’s coattails to become president in 2031, after Tinubu’s putative second term, by neutralising his Northern rivals and ingratiating himself with Tinubu as he allegedly did as EFCC chairman, which earned him a presidential ticket in 2011.
Now, I have written too much about corruption in Nigeria to gloss over the allegations of corruption against El-Rufai. But who is fooling who? If El-Rufai were in Tinubu’s cabinet or in his good book, how far would the allegations go? Where is Yahaya Bello today? Can the EFCC publish the files it holds on Tinubu’s ministers? Ribadu began the politicisation of the EFCC and that politicisation continues today. That’s the stark reality!
Yet all the above said, I shed no tears for El-Rufai. George Orwell said those who think of themselves as “enlightened seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.” Truth is, like all evil geniuses, El-Rufai seldom acts responsibly. After making Tinubu president, El-Rufai, who ran a Muslim-Muslim governorship for eight years and imposed a Muslim running mate on his Muslim successor, bragged: “What we are able to achieve in Kaduna, has now been achieved in Nigeria.” As governor, El-Rufai treated the Christian population in Southern Kaduna with utter disdain and presided over their marginalisation, victimisation and, sometimes, worse. There’s something Hitlerite about him!
Then, there’s El-Rufai’s legendary loose tongue. He deploys negative parrhesia, unleashing his views freely without forethought. When he told foreign election observers, in 2019, they would “go back home in body bags”, he was reckless; when he recently said the NSA’s phone was bugged and he heard his conversation, he was utterly beyond the pale; and when he alleged the NSA imported dangerous chemicals into the country, he was, without proving the allegation, inflammatory.
El-Rufai has so much to contribute to Nigeria’s progress. But unless the genius in him banishes the evil, he risks being consumed by the latter. He must put his great talent to good use without the toxicity, recklessness and bigotry!
*Dr Fasan is the author of ‘In The National Interest: The Road to Nigeria’s Political, Economic and Social Transformation’, available at RovingHeights bookstores.
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