It usually takes a lot to rattle the political establishment in Nigeria, but Nasir El-Rufai’s got a knack for doing just that. El-Rufai, former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) and former Director General of the Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE), knows how to stir controversy and draw attention to himself. Since returning from his self-exile, El-Rufai has settled into the role of Nigeria’s chief inquisitor; a position that has given him new life as an informal leader and public intellectual, so to speak.
Never has that status been more evident than in his political memoirs which he released in a book last Friday. The story of The Accidental Public Servant is told in 17 chapters over 627 pages, including 38 pages of source notes; 90 pages of appendices and 490 pages of the author’s own narrative. There are another 60 pages of prefatory, introductory material, including a captivating insider account of the drama of President Obasanjo’s Third Term project as a prologue.
The Accidental Public Servant is Nigeria’s political story told from inside-out of the corridors of power. After a successful career in the private sector, El-Rufai rose to the top ranks of Nigeria’s political hierarchy, serving first as the privatization czar at the BPE and then as FCT Minister under former President Olusegun Obasanjo. In his tell-all memoir, El-Rufai reflects on his life in public service to Nigeria, the enormous challenges faced by the country, and what can be done while calling on a new generation of leaders, notably from the Diaspora to take the country back from the brink of collapse.
As a prolific opinion leader and public policy advocate, El-Rufai has become one of the country’s most outspoken voices on issues of governance, leadership and social justice. Given the strategic positions he has held in government, when people like El-Rufai speak, the nation is forced to stop and listen. The shocking revelations El-Rufai disclosed about how Obasanjo hand-picked the Umaru Musa Yar’Adua-Goodluck Jonathan ticket and the actions of prominent statesmen in the third term debacle make his book a must read for anyone seeking to understand the dynamics of power politics in Nigeria nation.
This point resonates better, especially considering the monumental, indeed, inestimable damage the politics of the third term inflicted on the country. The excruciating state of national security, loss of lives and property, international image crisis, psychology of fear and attendant socio-economic dislocations, among others, represent the countless losses experienced by Nigerians as a hang-over of the failed third term project that resulted in Yar’Adua and ultimately Jonathan coming to power.
Why El-Rufai chose to publish his book at this time or what he intends to achieve by his spiteful comments against some national leaders, including his so-called former friends and enemies (dead or alive), remains fuzzy. However, what cannot be ignored are the deleterious and uncorroborated assertions of El-Rufai about his role in national politics and his interactions with national leaders. Most people after reading the book must wonder whether they just read one man’s fictional and exaggerated accounts of national events.
But you don’t have to wander and wonder too far. Here is why. Right from El-Rufai’s comments in the introduction, you could see that the man wanted desperately to project himself in various ways: as a national hero and an infallible warrior; as the conqueror of the political establishment; and as the pillar of wisdom on which previous heads of state leaned for advice and national direction. “… At my age and in my political circumstance, writing a book that attempts to open the black box of politics and governance in Nigeria is a very risky endeavor. Deciding on what experiences to reveal and what to leave out, exposing oneself to risk of being accused of having an agenda, even when there is none…” If anyone wanted evidence that The Accidental Public Servant was driven by a number of self-serving motives, the evidence exists in the man’s own words.
“…I am writing this book to put on record my version of events in my voice and in my own hand…In the intervening two years between the time Umaru Yar’Adua emerged as the president of Nigeria and the onset of writing this book, I have suffered a lot of harassment. My house in Abuja has been invaded once by security agencies (read agents) with my family imprisoned for hours. Warrants have been obtained thrice to search my house for suspected “subversive materials” I have been serially investigated by various committees of the National Assembly and by virtually every regulatory and law enforcement agency in Nigeria. I have been accused of phantom crimes and declared a wanted man by the Yar’Adua administration with empty but media-grabbing threats of arrests by the Interpol, extradition and so on. Yet the same government ordered all Nigerian diplomatic missions not to renew my passport when I completed my studies and announced plans to return home.”
It is unimaginable that one man could talk so intensely about his relationship with national leaders, his in-depth knowledge of Nigerian politics, and his overriding love for his country and yet hardly admit that, in his previous capacities as FCT Minister and BPE Director General, he made some fundamental errors of judgment. El-Rufai didn’t talk about his flaws because, as a super-human “accidental public servant” and a folk hero in Nigerian politics, he had no blemishes; just a victim of “public accidents”.
Ironically, virtually everyone that El-Rufai talked about suffered from human flaws or was weighed down with a baggage of human weaknesses. From Obasanjo, Atiku Abubakar, Muhammadu Buhari, Yar’Adua, Jonathan and others like then Transport Minister, Ojo Madueke; none of them escaped El-Rufai’s acid test of human character. In El-Rufai’s judgment, Obasanjo was an unforgiving politician; Yar’Adua was spineless; Nuhu Ribadu was vindictive and politically naïve; even Buhari, who received a sprinkle of praises from El-Rufai, came across as too rigid and inflexible.
While El-Rufai was hard and often vicious in his assessment of these national leaders, he never acknowledged that he had his own imperfections. This makes El-Rufai the patron saint of righteousness in Nigeria. He radiates the image of a man who is specially equipped with an over-abundance of wisdom. But the image that El-Rufai cuts in the book is that of a deeply frustrated and embittered red-eyed vindictive and cantankerous man who is determined to exact vengeance against his real and perceived enemies. He often spoke as if people owed their lives to him, or, as if the nation owes him some kind of public debt. His judgment of Yar’Adua’s leadership qualities is too narrow-minded and extraordinarily selfish. His comments against Jonathan depict El-Rufai not as a true Nigerian patriot or a loyal public servant but as a callous man whose activities are driven by a tribal agenda.
On the controversial issue of the third term agenda, El-Rufai’s assessment of Obasanjo, his former boss, exposed his capriciousness: first, as a man who should never be trusted (evidence in the sabotage he orchestrated behind the scenes against the third term project) and; second, as a man without principles; whose loyalty bends with the wind. Of course, Obasanjo has many flaws but why did it take El-Rufai too long to discover Obasanjo’s blemishes? And why did he choose to talk about them now?
There is reason to question El-Rufai’s sense of judgment of human character. At 53, we cannot attribute his inconsistencies to creeping senility. Rather, it is the by-product of selective amnesia arising from the “Messiah Complex” and Actor By-stander Effect (ABE). There are indeed worrying cracks in El-Rufai’s understanding of human nature because, on two occasions, El-Rufai misread the sign of the times. First, on the confrontation with Ojo Madueke over the privatization of Nigerdock, El-Rufai judged Obasanjo to be on his side and went shooting his mouth on the pages of newspapers boasting that only Obasanjo could halt Nigerdock’s privatization. Granted, that OBJ derided Ojo Madueke for publishing disclaimers and questioning the BPE’s authority to privatize Nigerdock.
However, when push came to shove during the bitter war of attrition between El-Rufai and the Senate Public Accounts Committee, Obasanjo went ahead and did the unthinkable by a sitting president. He wrote an apology letter to the Senate. Baba later told El-Rufai that: “…my short friend, I have a duty to train you… to make sure you learn to work with everyone, not just people you like.” To drive home his point, Baba went out of his way at one point in time to summon El-Rufai back to Nigeria after he learnt that El-Rufai was in London with the Economic Team to discuss debt relief with the British government.
Just how deep El-Rufai’s frustrations run can also be seen in his utterly mercantilist attitude to politics and his cavalier indifference to corruption. Indeed, despite the vaunted public denials, El-Rufai was well aware that Baba wanted to hang on to power through a rapacious devaluation of internal democracy within the PDP, whose leaders were being bribed into submission. Instead of standing up to Obasanjo as principles would have dictated, he decided to pay the game.
Hear El-Rufai: “Andy Uba asked me to send an aide to collect a message from the President for FCT’s legislators. My security details went to Andy’s house along Ibrahim Taiwo Road to collect two aluminum brief cases containing N50 million each for delivery to the two members of the House of Representatives representing the FCT – Hon Philip Aduda and Sidi Ali. Senator Isa Maina representing the FCT was one of the few well-known Third term supporters and reportedly collected his own ‘message’ directly. I later gathered (from who?) that the messages were sent through me ‘to test my loyalty’. I advised my security details to directly contact the two representatives and deliver the messages…”
After the National Assembly thwarted the third term agenda, El-Rufai tries to justify the sermon of some PDP leaders about the principle of fairness, justice and rule of law at the NEC meeting of May 18th 2006, summoned by OBJ to lick his wounds. Sadly, rather than showcase a semblance of admiration and praise for those who stuck their guns and upheld the Nigerian constitution on presidential term limits, El-Rufai displayed only contempt and absolute disregard for decency and indeed rule of law.
When El-Rufai says Obasanjo blackmailed him and Ribadu to Yar’Adua as “loose cannons” that are difficult to control, he exposed the depth of his bitterness against Obasanjo and also his own character flaws as he said he never bothered about it because he learnt from sources that Yar’Adua did not take Obasanjo seriously. Surely, Obasanjo has his faults, most of which he wears visibly on his cuff-links, but it is curious that El-Rufai should place his faith in a man whom he implied was Machiavelli incarnate; a schemer and manipulator whose authoritarian bent and presidential meddlesomeness was evinced to heat up the polity and disrupt the PDP and consequently slide the country into troubled waters.
“Obasanjo relied on multiple, often conflicting sources of information and then using the law of averages to aggregate the truth. For instance, he encouraged the formation of a group of five of us to advise him on “northern thinking” on the Third Term under the chairmanship of Lawal Batagarawa with Adamu Maina Waziri, Mustapha Bello, Aliyu Modibo and I. We met weekly at Lawal’s house at Mabushi Ministers’ Quarters. Another “national group” of ten persons also met every Wednesday in the villa with him to discuss “ongoing political reforms” issues. Obasanjo enjoyed running these conspiracy cells from which he knew what everyone what was doing and everyone else knew only a part of the whole story. He had similar cells headed by Tony Anenih, Senator Mantu, Governors Segun Agagu and Abdullahi Adamu and many other party apparatchiks and federal government officials.”
El-Rufai’s capacity to judge human character is erratic. By imputation, Obasanjo was the best national leader only when he served El-Rufai’s interests. Once Obasanjo ceased to serve El-Rufai’s interests, OBJ became, in El-Rufai’s views, “disgusting” and a counterfeit born-again Christian who consistently puts “his personal interest before that of the nation”. El-Rufai complained that Atiku “actively undermined me and accused me of inappropriate behavior simply to get contracts for his friends.” Would any man ever satisfy El-Rufai? Not by the way he wrote angrily against anyone he didn’t like.
If El-Rufai were as forthright as he presented himself in The Accidental Public Servant, he should have taken Nigerians behind the scene into the machinations that culminated into the widespread rigging of the 2007 elections that brought Yar’Adua to power. Besides, given the ample space El-Rufai dedicated to Abuja, he should have taken personal responsibility for the manner of land allocations in the nation’s capital which was enmeshed in corrupt practices under his watch. Under the guise of restoring the Abuja Master Plan, many individuals had their allocations transferred illegally to other persons without their knowledge or consent. Others had their original allocations arbitrarily withdrawn, and less attractive locations offered in lieu, to mollify them. Certificates of Ownership (C of O) were issued to more than one person for the same property. The racketeering and corruption in the Abuja land administration process under El-Rufai fully qualifies for a formal inquiry to hold him accountable.
As the chief privatization Czar in the BPE, El-Rufai failed to tell Nigerians about the unsuccessful attempts by the Federal Government to privatize or liquidate the Nigerian Telecommunications (NITEL). This indeed is worrisome. El-Rufai’s methods of interpretation and his penchant for street talk and callous gossip is remarkably amazing; which leaves the reader with several unanswered questions. Listen to him: “What I learnt while in exile and this was subsequently confirmed from sources within the Yar’Adua inner circle was that had I returned in October 2008 when the EFCC declared me wanted, there was a plan hatched in the NSA’s office to inject me with cultures of HIV and Hepatitis viruses while in detention. That would accelerate and ensure my death through natural causes well before the elections of 2011 which Yar’Adua’s marabouts had assured him that I was going to contest against him.”
This begs the question: why does El-Rufai insist on boring holes in the boat in which he himself is also a passenger? And why can’t he just state the facts straightforwardly without their being exaggerated, aggrandized, altered, fiddled with, dressed up, falsified, and, in short, El-Rufai-ized? Does El-Rufai think he was so much of a threat to Yar’Adua that the president could have been so daft as to contemplate eliminating him by injecting him with HIV and Hepatitis? Anyone with the remotest knowledge of medicine will dismiss such outrageous claims by El-Rufai as laughable.
On taking office, ministers swear to an oath that forbids the conversion of official duties to personal advantage. Yet, many routinely award juicy contracts to themselves through proxies, and relatives and friends. That the Obasanjo and Yar’Adua administrations did not charge El-Rufai for such an abuse of office is a reflection of the kid-gloves with which corruption is treated in Nigeria. It was not because El-Rufai is “Mr. Clean” as he portrays in his book. El-Rufai is a very rich man. Personal character and staying within the bounds of fair and just remuneration sensitive to prevailing socio-economic conditions is a mark of integrity, which is in serious deficit in our governments.
El-Rufai likes flaunting his Harvard credentials. Even the title of the book has a Harvard connection – the interview he had for the 50th anniversary of the Harvard Kennedy School Mason program. After bad-mouthing OBJ, he writes: “…I left public service as a well-known Minister and loyalist of President Olusegun Obasanjo and since 2007; I have gone through a roller coaster period of surviving attacks on my person and family, sustained smear campaigns, death threats, persecution at home and abroad through withdrawal of my Nigerian citizenship, malicious prosecution and involuntary exile…”
This hypocrisy by one of “Yesterday’s men” (sic Reuben Abati) stinks to the high Heavens. El-Rufai should consult his class notes at the Harvard Kennedy School; specifically the courses on Leadership by Ronald Heifetz. He should stop being a crying baby and understand as Heifetz taught him that leadership is a very perilous enterprise. Since El-Rufai wants to be politically relevant in every Nigerian equation, he MUST learn how to stay alive to be in the game. El-Rufai doesn’t need an authority position in Nigeria to lead; he can lead from the back; that is the hallmark of true leadership. Only the gullible would read El-Rufai’s book and conclude that the man was or is the patron saint of righteousness in Nigeria.
Book Review by valerian Agbaw-Ebai
valerian_agbaw-ebai@ksg06.harvard.edu
