By Suyi Ayodele

“Two wrongs do not make a right. Sensible inclusion always trumps arrogant exclusion.” The quote belongs to Nasir el-Rufai, former governor of Kaduna State. He made the statement in his reaction to Farooq Kperogi’s column on the back page of the Saturday Tribune of December 28, 2024.

Kperogi, who teaches Journalism in the United States, had accused President Bola Ahmed Tinubu of playing the Yoruba ethnic card in his appointments of personnel to manage the nation’s cash cow, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC). That is the opportunity el-Rufai seized to lecture Nigerians. Wonders shall never end!

The Yoruba say that a bedwetter is estopped by his nightly bad acts from complaining about the high price of dye. A man is always judged by the content of what he says. A character is equally known and judged by what he does and what people say about him. Before we take el-Rufai seriously, I present to you what his former boss, President Olusegun Obasanjo, wrote about him in a book ten years ago:

“Nasir’s penchant for character savaging is almost pathological…I recognised his weaknesses; the worst being his inability to be loyal to anybody or any issue consistently for long, but only to Nasir el-Rufai. He barefacedly lied which he did to me against his colleagues and so-called friends…”

The former president added: “My vivid recollection of him is his penchant for lying, for unfair embellishment of stories and his inability to sustain loyalty for long…. He was described as a malicious liar. He was more than that; he is a pathological purveyor of untruths and half-truths with little or no regard for integrity. In all of this, he unwittingly does more harm than good to himself.” Please see Obasanjo’s “My Watch”, Volume 2, page 110.

The book was published ten years ago (2014), I wonder why El Rufai has not sued President Obasanjo or report him to Hisbah in Kano and the police in Kaduna for defamation.

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When an inelegant person describes another as ugly, the elders of my place place them side by side and pigeonholed one as Ete (leprosy) and the other Eyi (hives), otherwise known as Urticaria in Medicine. Victims of both ailments are treated as pariahs! None is better than the other.

The year 2024 ends today. All surviving Nigerians have reasons to thank the Creator for making it possible for them to survive the pains of the last 19 months. I was almost halfway into what should have been the last column of the year before I changed my mind. I had titled the abandoned piece: “Certificate of survivor.” But I had to change the course of the discourse when the former governor of Kaduna State, el-Rufai, came up with his comments on Tinubu and his lack of inclusion in governance.

I am not going to defend Tinubu, but I will like Kperogi and all others who would insist that this president is pro-Yoruba to know that Tinubu is simply pro-himself. He has his own way and that is to surround himself with his boys – those that Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar described as “sleek-headed men.”

It is a great disservice to the nationalistic disposition of an average Yoruba man, that President Tinubu does not see beyond all the ‘boys’ who have been around him since his days as the governor of Lagos State between 1999 and 2007 To the President, Nigeria is just a larger version of Lagos! Too bad!

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But that is where it ends for President Tinubu. It is a collective insult to all Nigerians that the man who should lecture us about how “sensible inclusion always trumps arrogant exclusion” is Nasir el-Rufai of all people! It is quite interesting to note, with his latest position, that el-Rufai is as diminutive in memory as he is in all human characteristics!

Who is el-Rufai to talk about “sensible inclusion” in the first instance? What were his dispositions to the issue of “inclusion” in the eight years that he ruled and ruined Kaduna State? Against all advice and wisdom, did the same el-Rufai not in 2019, while running for his second term as governor, not jettison the idea of inclusiveness when he chose Dr. Hadiza Balarabe, a Muslim, from Sanga local government area in the Southern part of the state, as his running mate from a district that has a huge population of Christians?

When confronted and advised to be ‘sensibly inclusive’, did el-Rufai not tell whoever cared to listen that the “Government House is not a place of worship, we come here to work for the people?” If that statement does not fall into his today’s taxonomy of “arrogant exclusion”, what does el-Rufai want us to call it?

Besides, for the eight years that Muhammadu Buhari practised his “…embarrassingly undisguised Arewacentricity”, where was el-Rufai? So, it was good for Buhari, a fellow Fulani like him, to pack only Fulani in his key appointments, but wrong for Tinubu to do the same? Where lies el-Rufai’s conscience? Or he thinks Nigerians have short memories? Bad enough that this line is sounding like a typical tu quoque argument; an ad hominem fallacy, but this is what we saw when Buhari started the shenanigan and the el-Rufais of this world all kept quiet because the tide favoured him and his parochial interest.

I do not doubt that attitudes like what Buhari displayed and what President Tinubu is reenacting have far-reaching implications for the unity of the nation. The best Tinubu will get is another term in office. The simple implication is that after his tour of duty, another region will take over and then up the ante of promoting a clique above national interest. The ultimate victims will be the hapless and helpless Nigerians who are always at the receiving end!

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I can imagine, God willing, if a president of an Igbo extraction should emerge and all we have in the government circles are Obinna, Ikechukwu, Ikeduru, Emeka and Obiakor as heads of all key sectors of the nation! The labour of our heroes’ past, especially those who fought to “keep Nigeria one”, is lost, completely, in a Presidency where only men and women from the president’s ethnic background are holding the key positions in government! Such an arrangement is not healthy enough and no one should support such because his kinsman is the president!

That notwithstanding, Nigerians still don’t need an el-Rufai to tell them about “sensible inclusion”, a mantra that he never practised when he had the opportunity. Those who know the former governor of Kaduna State don’t have kind words to describe his years in government. He ran Kaduna State as an enclave of his religious and ethnic clique to the consternation of the other groups in the state.

For instance, in his immediate reaction to el-Rufai’s sanctimonious position, Shehu Sani, who represented Kaduna Central Senatorial District in the 8th Senate, said that the former governor was not in the best position to criticise Tinubu on matters of ethnic bigotry.

Sani wrote online: “There are people who were silent when Buhari was fielding (filling) political offices with his kinsmen and have now found their voice to speak out when the equation doesn’t favor them.” Sani goes further to assert that El Rufai “marginalised Southern Kaduna for eight years. Kaduna was an apartheid state for eight years.”

Was that why Tinubu nominated him to be minister and the senate said no? Would el-Rufai be talking about “sensible inclusion” if he had scaled through the Senate hurdle? Like Obasanjo said of him, el-Rufai is “brilliant and smart”, and Nigerians must always make “allowance for the psychology of his petit size and his elephantine brain” (Pg 110). I agree and warn that anybody who underrates el-Rufai does so at his own peril.

His engagements with Nigeria since he came into our lives have been phenomenal. el-Rufal led the caste of northern governors who stopped Buhari from foisting another northern president on Nigeria in 2023. He stopped Buhari and his cabal and made Tinubu (and his cabal) possible. You ignore him to your sorrow. Who knows if his latest sanctimonious outing about “two wrongs don’t make a right” is the first in a series of actions he may take to correct the ‘mistake’ of 2022/23?

I honestly wished President Tinubu had given one the boldness and pride to defend him against all the el-Rufais of this era. But it is not too late. He has 2025, which starts tomorrow, to reinvent himself and make all who call him Asiwaju (leader) proud. May his Saul go to Damascus in the new year.

Happy New Year, Nigerians.