Since the 1999 transition to democracy, luck has continued to smile at Nasiru El-Rufa’i. Luck has beckoned him from height to greater heights in his “accidental” encounter with public service through the different key positions he held.
Apart from luck, El-Rufa’i must have been technically very good at whatever he finds himself doing. Within the shortest period of his public career, he rose through Obasanjo’s recognition of the successes he achieved in the first assignment given to him as the Director General Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) to become the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory under the democratic dispensation captained by President Olusegun Obasanjo, and currently the elected governor of Kaduna State on the platform of APC.
El-Rufa’i has never had the experience of rising through the ranks of civil service or any bureaucratic structure to adequately have a good understanding of points of strength and weakness of the white-collar system we are operating in Nigeria. If not for the dominant ideological argument against big government introduced by neoliberal ideologues following the collapse of Soviet socialism, I still think it is not impossible to reform the public sector in Nigeria for efficiency despite its current state of rot and endemic corruption. However, lack of that crucial experience in public sector service on the part of El-Rufa’i, despite his blatant obsession with neoliberal reform agenda, is clearly militating against his full realization of his own enormous potentials now that he has joined public service as a politician.
Illustratively, the checkered tenure of El-Rufa’i as the Director General of BPE and subsequently Minister of the Federal Capital Territory was not without controversies. The myriad of controversies that trailed his public service outing has been eloquently captured in his memoir The Accidental Public Servant. Anybody that wants to familiarize himself with the psychological framing of his persona should read that interesting book. El-Rufa’i’s point of view in all the issues he has chosen to broach in the book is more in self-defense of his action than anything else. As the narrative unfolds, the key issues that received much of the writer’s attention includes our privatization saga, crises of title deeds and the herculean task to restore the original concept of Abuja Master Plan – all these explosive issues have led El-Rufa’i to step on the toes of high and mighty individuals in the corridors of power and influence.
I don’t think that approach to handling anything Nigeria is the best considering the complexity of our multi-cultural context. One has to negotiate his ways carefully in a highly subjective context in which reality is viewed from the prism of ethno-religious perspectives. Such is the context we must all come to terms with, and it requires wisdom to tackle it. In my submission I am not quarreling with El-Rufa’i’s desire to see things done in the way he wants them done, but the manner in which he approaches getting those things done. El-Rufa’i should know that the impression people have of his stewardship is that he is running the show alone. He therefore needs to reappraise his style of leadership and relationship with people.
My other worry is of course in El-Rufa’i’s inability to take stock of the implications of what comes out of his mouth. As a Nigerian leader, he cannot afford to become flippant, glib, brash and insensitive to the feelings of people, especially concerning what comes out of his mouth. If everybody should choose to behave that way, I assure you, there is going to be conflicts and recriminations all over the place. Wisdom requires El-Rufa’i to chew his words carefully before he lets them out, because once a leader verbalizes something, the words will continue to trail him ad infinitum. If you are careless with your words, you will definitely be forced to live with the consequences, positive or negative.
El-Rufa’i should remember very well that Nigeria is no longer operating under a military regime in which the will of a military dictator, rightly or wrongly, must by all means be imposed on the people. Under a liberal democracy, the values of which El-Rufa’i is happy to promote, it is incumbent upon him to respect the rights of citizens by listening more to them than to insisting on having things go his own way. This he must apply on every issue before him at all the times. A leader must subject his or her person to the idea of carrying everybody along. He should operate on the basis of building consensus on issues that affect the well-being of the people directly rather than impressing his stance upon them. Sometimes, a leader may be right but the spirit of give and take warrants letting go on the leader’s conviction, whatever it is.
All my surmises above are meant to bring me down to the matter at hand. Thus, as an observer of political developments in the country, I would like to state that El-Rufa’i does not seem to care much about the twists and turns of political game in Nigeria. Successful outing in our turbulent political arena everywhere necessitates one to attempt to secure his or her constituency with all the sagacity and tact it requires for such a task. It is only germane to do that because in the slippery canvass of Nigerian politics nothing is certain; and everything changes by the moment. Again, it is no longer evident if El-Rufa’i is going to have a smooth sail politically with his uneasy relationship with other political heavyweights like Shehu Sani, Isa Ashiru Kudan, Sulaiman Hunkuyi, Hakeem Baba-Ahmed and other potential gubernatorial aspirants in the state. Other political figures at local levels are feeling isolated from the type of complaints making rounds among them.
Recently, there were some acrimonious exchanges between El-Rufa’i’s handlers and Kaduna Restoration Group, members of which were close political associates of El-Rufa’i before he was sworn into office. El-Rufa’i has also been mercilessly tinkering with unpopular policies such as downsizing the traditional title-holders in the state, and his attempts to bring about an obnoxious tax regime in times of great economic difficulties and unfavorable business climate in which so many enterprises have folded up. Do we really need some soothsayers to remind us that the income of average workers in Nigeria is shrinking due to inflation and the devaluation of our currency? There is also the soaring unemployment in both public and private sectors. Problems and suffering everywhere in the land. Now that El-Rufa’i seems to be very unsure of his earlier resolve not to repeat any of his public service experience like a dull student, how is he going to handle a treacherous political turf at such a critical point he would need the support of either the people or the politicians?
Indeed, El-Rufa’i has been having running battles with his opponents all over the place. There was for instance the matter of the whole section of the electorate in the southern Kaduna over what appears to be their collective grievance on his handling of reprisal killings of herdsmen in the area. To confirm El-Rufa’i’s many troubles, The Economist of July 20th 2017 has made a damning submission on his political disposition. The magazine is of the view that “The reform-minded governor of Kaduna state, Nasir El-Rufai, was once seen as Mr. Buhari’s heir. But his intolerance of dissent, including the banning of a Shia organization after at least 347 of its members were massacred by the army in December 2015, has seen him fall from favour. Christians, meanwhile, accuse Mr. El-Rufai of siding with Muslim herders over lethal clashes with farmers in southern Kaduna.”
Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, an APC political heavyweight, has, as if The Economist bashing was not enough, followed things up with battery of charges of his own in a Facebook post on the 22nd of July 2017 that was curiously couched in Hausa language. In the write-up, he raised the accusations leveled against the governor of running the government without proper consultations with other stakeholders, his uncompromising attitudes, his insensitive policies, and his alienation of APC stalwarts in the state. This must of course be a worrying development. Expressions of disgruntlement with the way the governor is handling Kaduna state and his relationship with other APC stakeholders could not have been made up or entirely baseless.
As if he has not had his hands full, El-Rufa’i is quoting another controversy when he made that statement about Sardauna, Awolowo and Azikiwe. Undoubtedly, as he says, it is not politically correct to say that our founding fathers “did not work hard enough to build a nation”, for “maintaining the regions and divisions because it benefited them politically” as they inherited them from the colonial administrators in the brief clip that is circulating in the social media. Those founding fathers have not charted the right course in forging a united nation through their maintenance of regional structures and development trajectories. How unwise is the decision to approach our national question this way?
Methinks even if the founding fathers have made mistakes in their approach to nation building, their successors should have endeavored to correct the past errors. Instead of doing just that we are complicating matters the more through our total lack of vision and direction. We should blame ourselves more on our failures than those founding fathers. We are still enjoying their legacies. I hope El-Rufa’i is not seeking to rewrite history by attempting to demythologize our founding fathers by delegitimizing their achievements through a counter-narrative to legitimize neoliberal agenda.
Mr Liman is professor of Comparative Literature and Popular Culture at Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, Nigeria
