El-Rufai and His Disruptive Memo
Ibidapo Balogun
Asked to substantiate his allegation that some Senators demanded gratification from him to approve his appointment as minister in former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s cabinet, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai had said God was his witness. Not a few wondered at the time if God would come down from heaven to testify in his case. It was around year 2000. El-Rufai had appeared before the Senate Ethics Committee, which summoned him over the allegation. Some Peoples Democratic Party leaders, particularly then Vice President Atiku Abubakar, had to intervene in the matter to pacify the Senate before el-Rufai was cleared for the ministerial job. He was subsequently appointed Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Minister by President Obasanjo. He did not leave that office without leaving behind some footprints. El-Rufai did some remarkable things in that office quite alright, but as is his tradition, he ended up a baggage for the Obasanjo government, destroying and demolishing the houses of mostly his critics and political foes under the guise of restoring Abuja master plan.
The ways of el-Rufai, now Kaduna State governor, have always been puzzling. Attempting a de-construction of the governor in his memoir, ‘My Watch (Vol.2),’ President Obasanjo said el-Rufai was loyal to nobody but himself. “Very early in my interaction with him, I appreciated his talent and brilliance. At the same time, I recognised his weakness,” the former president wrote in the book. “The worst is his inability to be loyal to anybody or any issue consistently for long, but only to Nasir el-Rufai,” he added.
Nothing can be more accurate than that Obasanjo’s categorization of el-Rufai. This classification of the Kaduna governor has been further exemplified by the way he treated President Buhari recently. Though he called the president his leader and mentor, yet he fired a damaging memo to Buhari, where he took his administration to the cleaners. He said Buhari had failed to meet the expectations of Nigerians and that the nation was drifting away under his watch. Since he had access to the president, would it not have been better for el-Rufai to have sought audience with him and communicated his views directly to Buhari? But that was vintage el-Rufai. That memo was to become a ready tool in the hands of critics and opponents of the Buhari administration to launch a blistering attack on the regime. That move by the Kaduna governor also seemed to have exacerbated the division and dysfunction in the presidency. I shall return to this shortly.
In the 29-page memo, el-Rufai scoffed at the president, saying he surrounded himself with inexperienced and clueless officials. After the memo went public, the Kaduna governor claimed his secret correspondence to the president was leaked ‘from the Villa,’ apparently suggesting that the same people he had labelled inexperienced had leaked the memo. With that squabble, the battle line seems to have been drawn between those ‘inexperienced’ officials and el-Rufai and the Kaduna governor appeared to have been crushed by the same ‘inexperienced’ men in the seeming power tussle at the Villa.
El-Rufai’s memo reeks of hate. He claimed the memo was not ill-motivated but he gave himself away when he cast aspersion on the group he called the Lagos group led by Asiwaju Bola Tinubu. He claimed the contribution of the group to Buhari’s victory in the 2015 election was exaggerated. This is how he put it on Page 23 of the memo: “The Lagos group more or less led by Asiwaju Bola Tinubu is the most organized and proactive. This group made a key contribution in our electoral success, but like all groupings it naturally exaggerates its role in order to increase its influence in the coming administration”. To put down such in a memo to the president clearly reinforces the depiction of el-Rufal as a disloyal, divisive, ungrateful and unappreciative person who recognises only himself and his interests in the scheme of things.
El-Rufai was being mischievous when he sought to create the impression that Tinubu’s only contribution to APC’s victory at the centre in 2015 was in influencing the party’s victory in the South-west. Yes, this was crucial, indeed vital, to the outcome of the election. This is because in Buhari’s three previous failed attempts at the presidency, he never enjoyed the support of a South-west mistrustful of his perceived ethno-regional parochialism and Islamic extremism. But the truth is Tinubu’s contribution to the displacement of a sitting president at the centre goes far beyond what el-Rufai describes as the South-west support. Tinubu and the Southwest galvanised the entire nation to back the candidacy of Buhari, leading the way for others to follow.
The former Lagos governor has one of the strongest relationships with key elite groups across the North. It is on record that he criss-crossed the North and worked hard to win over many influential elites in that region who were suspicious and distrustful of Buhari to support him in 2015. In his three previous abortive attempts at the presidency, Buhari had considerable grassroots support in the North but at best only very lukewarm acceptance among the region’s influential elite. Jagaban Borgu was a crucial factor in helping to build the very vital support for Buhari among critical power centres in the North that also played a major role in the outcome of the election. This is not to mention Tinubu’s ceaseless and clearly incomparable intellectual, tactical, strategic, organizational, logistical and material contributions to Buhari’s victory. And of course his leading strategic and organizational role in moulding the APC into the awesome political coalition that it became.
Ironically, the same el-Rufai was in the fence-mending delegation led by Buhari to Tinubu’s Bourdillon, Ikoyi home to plead for another alliance with his ACN after the CPC bungled the earlier one in the build-up to the 2011 election. Buhari’s arrogant CPC had unilaterally picked Pastor Tunde Bakare as presidential running mate without consultations with the then ACN with which it had an alliance. Of course, ACN opted out. The result: Buhari lost to President Jonathan with all the states in the South-west except Osun voting for Jonathan. At that fence-mending meeting at Bourdillon, which also had Bakare in attendance, el-Rufai was on record to have said that the delegation knew that without Tinubu, Buhari was going nowhere with his presidential ambition. The former FCT minister specifically told Tinubu that “you have been proved right too many times for us to refuse to listen to you”.
Therefore, to insinuate that Tinubu- led ‘Lagos Group’ was exaggerating its contributions to Buhari’s victory in the 2015 election and on that basis seeking to clinch plum and financially-viable positions in the Buhari administration also shows that el-Rufai is one of those principally responsible for poisoning relationships within the APC and sowing the seed of the mistrust, disharmony, fractionalization and ill-will that has plagued the party till date. This perhaps must have been responsible for the way Buhari constituted his cabinet alienating key groups responsible for his victory in the election particularly Tinubu and his close supporters. It is obvious that even beyond not rewarding Tinubu’s nominees in his cabinet, Buhari also ensured that the Tinubu group had no meaningful influence or input whatsoever in the policy direction of the administration. Buhari’s stance towards the Tinubu group, after that el-Rufai’s memo, became markedly different from his attitude both after the presidential primaries in Lagos and after his victory in the election proper. In the immediate aftermath of the primaries, during the campaigns and after the election, Buhari, on several occasions, publicly acknowledged Tinubu’s invaluable contribution to his victory. That he could be so easily swayed to adopt a thinly-disguised hostile attitude to Tinubu appears to be a reflection of the quality of Buhari’s leadership and character trait.