Economic Confidential, December, 2009

FEATURES

El-Rufai’s Tantrums This Time Around

By M. Sani Zorro

In communicating, it is trite that the reliability of the messenger might as well be more important than the message itself. It is in this context that former minister, Nasir El-Rufai’s fairly extensive interview (THISDAY, Saturday October 17, 2009) should not pass by without one form of interrogation, or the other.

To begin with, the ex ‘Mr. Minister’ has earned my personal commendation for starting to de-classify the information he had so amassed, while in office. For me, the revelations contained therein sit pretty well with the spirit of our struggle for access to official records; otherwise our version of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Bill, earlier denied Nigerians by an administration in which he undoubtedly played second to the Nigerian god.

My worry however is with his habit of throwing tantrums in the day time, only to embark on nocturnal house-to-house visits, begging for forgiveness and undertaking to be of good behavior.

To refresh our memory, he started off on this note when, upon his nomination as minister in 2003, he accused Senators Ibrahim Mantu and Jonathan Zwingina, of attempts to extort money from him, thus kick-starting a public service career that was to be characterised by one blunder after another.

But, once the consequence of this goof dawned on him and his sponsors (the lack of evidence to substantiate the allegation, and because the ministerial position that would launch him to the inner recess of power and riches was now in jeopardy), he did not only recant at the end, but raised a powerful squad of serving government officials, comprising his friends and associates, who went begging for forgiveness on his behalf. Senators who served in the course of that era, and are alive today, can readily testify to how the man swallowed his own vomit without shame.

Again, when the blunder-prone Mr. Minister deliberately referred to Nigerian senators as ‘fools’, we all remember how the drama resolved itself – another round of begging, capped by his televised apology from the Wadata Plaza office of then PDP chair, Mr. Audu Ogbeh, who negotiated the ‘amnesty’ for him, with his full consent.

Soon enough though, Nigerians began to have a very different opinion of Nasir el-Rufa’i as an intemperate official, who spoke before he thought, one whose promises were not worth a penny, and as a master of double-speak. An example of that thoughtlessness was soon to manifest in his sweeping generalisation of Nigerian senators as ‘fools’.

The roll-call included Nigeria’s present High Commissioner to the UK, Senator (Dr.) Dalhatu Sarki Tafida - an elder statesman from Zaria, el-Rufa’i’s native home, as well as Senator (Prof) Iya Abubakar, Mr. Minister’s ex Vice-Chancellor at ABU, and in-law of Nuhu Ribadu. He displayed absolute lack of respect for Ribadu’s marriage to the professor’s daughter even though in their current predicament, Ribadu is to el-Rufa’i, what Dr Ayman al-Zawahiry is to Osama Bin Laden.  

Notwithstanding these serial gaffes, the nation was to come to terms with the reality of hosting a slave driver imposed on the Nigerian people by a head of state, who himself did better under a clime of chaos and lawlessness.

Given his well-known ambitions, his unedifying record of double-dutch, but with a speculated war chest in landed property and cash, I will be surprised if by now, as it were in the past, Mr el-Rufa’i has not unleashed his professional footmen on presidency officials, to canvass for a soft-landing on his behalf, his playing to the gallery notwithstanding.

Yet, the trend and litany of this abnormal behavior, evident only in those that psychologists classify as emotionally unstable, is not the subject of this riposte. Mine is rather an exercise in credit rating and risk management in leadership that I wish to bring to the table.

I met ex-minister el-Rufa’i only twice in my life, and all at the Bureau of Public Enterprises, where he fiddled with our national patrimony in the name of privatisation. Contrary to possessing the ‘midas touch’ with which he was often show-cased, the Chinese would have tied him to the stakes while the rest would have been history, if what he perpetrated in Nigeria were to be in Beijing.

A minimum of two examples, one of criminal complicity and the other of demonstrable incompetence would suffice here. Under his authority, NITEL was not only gang-raped and brought to its knees, he still had no qualms in issuing a clean bill of health to the dubious Portuguese firm that mismanaged our national asset, and duped us of billions of Naira.

The other had to do with the privatisation of federal government shares in African Petroleum (AP), an exercise that collapsed God knows how many times, with all his chest-beating as Africa’s most successful privatisation Czar. For Mr. Minister, it was all motion without movement.

I hate to be personal, but I thank God for protecting an easily-trusting chap like me from being in the loop of Nasir’s friends. While I cannot remember precisely what prompted my first meeting with him, I remember very well that the second was at the prompting of Suleyman Yahyah – obviously a friend of el Rufa’i, on the one hand and mine on the other, for a talk that was entirely all about himself.

I wouldn’t want to venture into a case that may obviously be subjudice, suffice it to refresh our collective memory about how as FCT minister, he forcibly snatched a piece of land earlier leased to Sulyman’s company by the Federal Executive Council (FEC), along Madeira road, Maitama, Abuja, and allocated same to his well-known business partner and hit man of many years.

It is public knowledge that when a team of the new EFCC operatives under Farida Waziri’s leadership raided the business offices of his cohorts, a room filled with certificates of occupancy (C of Os) and other material documents belonging to the FCDA was uncovered, while his partners were summarily rounded up.

In his hey days as Mr. Minister, he kept a squad of EFCC operatives seconded to his office by his side-kick, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, which, ostensibly was to crack down on forgery and racketeering, with one ‘Engineer Success’ as the mastermind. 

But in yet another evidence of double-speak, a whistle blower who probably wanted to test the integrity of the operatives themselves, became their first victim, as they rummaged him into detention, for exposing land allocation deals in which the minister’s immediate family, friends, business associates and office cronies were main beneficiaries.

As a chronicler of issues and events, one is not a muckraker, but trained to hold public officers to account for their action(s) and inaction as provided for in the relevant sections of the 1999 Constitution, as well as other universal statutes dealing with freedom and accountability.

In fact, time and space would not allow us to exhaust the predatory conduct, or details of the gross abuse of power that hallmarked his reign as a former minister under the old order. “Show me your friends and I will tell you who you are”, says an adage. And so, el-Rufa’i would one day account for officially collaborating with, and patronising the services of characters such as Jimi Lawal, the first known Nigerian accused of bringing down a bank, but whom he smuggled back from exile to preside over the controversial sale of federal government houses in Abuja and whose proceeds are still not properly accounted for.

According to recent reports, one of his ex-bosses has just been fingered and questioned by security agencies in connection with the Halliburton bribery scandal. While a minister and his master’s hunting dog, there was hardly any of his colleagues on whose toes he did not step on, without justification. At one point, the then foreign affairs minister, Ambassador Olu Adeniji, probably the oldest man in the cabinet apart from President Obasanjo, lost his temper and told him off. 

He was such a nuisance and unfair player that those who know him and are willing to assess him objectively believe that he might have been short-changed while growing up back home, in terms of training. But he might not agree with this assessment as he always chooses to tread on his usually self-righteous, tragic and lonely path. All men are expected to mature with time, but with him, they are supposed to be worse off in wisdom and moral behavior.  

I am not the spokesman of the present government, but as a Nigerian with a fairly deep insight into what typifies this administration, I have no doubt in my mind that his decision to engage in a war against President Umaru Yar’Adua is merely motivated by greed and envy, as opposed to any of the issues he has raised so far.

Whereas, while drunk with power, Nasir always threatened to “crush” every strike threat by the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC). He was also at the head of a kangaroo committee that either cooked up a report to prevent Atiku Abubakar from contesting elections or something devilish. It is interesting that our new born democrat is now the advocate of human rights and the rule of law.

Fact is, el-Rufa’i’s botched personal agenda of becoming Nigeria’s energy minister (to combine both oil and power sectors), under President Yar’Adua as foretold by Nuhu Ribadu, even before the president was sworn in, in May 2007, is obviously and fundamentally at the root of his adversarial disposition towards this regime.

With this multitude of baggage, I can only admonish the former Mr. Minister, to lessen his burden by reconciling with his Maker. As for the rest of us who have seen through his layers of untruths since venturing into public space, we are now wiser and would rather say in answer to his propaganda, “Idan Mai Magana Wawa Ne, Majiyinta Ba Wawa ne ba,” roughly meaning: if the messenger is foolish, (Oh, that word again), the receivers of the message are not necessarily fools!

Sani Zorro, former president of the Nigerian Union of Journalists, wrote in from Cardiff in the United Kingdom.

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