Tatalo Alamu
For Malam Nasir El-Rufai, the diminutive but feisty former boss of the Federal Capital Authority, it is time for roosting chicks. El-Rufai’s oversized ego and self-importance are inversely proportional to his under-sized frame. But even as an undergraduate, he was not beyond a clever resort to self-help and capacity building. Acquiring a couple of platform shoes to boost things, Rufai also acquired the nickname “Giant” in the process.
Poor Giant. It has been a gigantic unravelling. By the time the smoke cleared from his tempestuous grilling by the Senate Committee on plot allocations in the Federal Capital Territory, El-Rufai’s reputation as a squeaky clean patriot and his self-advertised integrity had been so severely battered that he is unlikely to recover from the damning opprobrium. What remained in public view was the clever resort to self-help, the maximum capacity building and the hypocritical and vain grandstanding.
Both El-Rufai and his hostile interlocutors emerged from the rubble of shame and bureaucratic sadism holding the grenade of Mutually Assured Destruction. Neither side was willing to press home. The pint-sized bulldozer was evidently aware that his interrogators lacked the moral authority and ethical superiority to finish him off, and he baited them endlessly and with savage relish too.
But the damage had already been done. Slumming and slugging it out in the squalor of the moral basement, his foes never said they were saints or crusaders. Such rarified and lofty turfs belong to El-Rufai and his equally diminished and demystified patron. Let everybody answer their father’s name.
Readers of this column should have noticed that it hardly concentrates on the individual however exceptional except when such individuals illuminate the social and political process. For us, individuals are products of specific social and historical formations. Such formations are more important than the aberrant personalities they often throw up. So it is with El-Rufai.
This piece seeks to enlighten us about how a project and process supposedly driven by high-minded and reform-minded apostles of modernisation can also be powered by a feudal and authoritarian mind-set so severe and limiting that it returns to scupper the benefits.
Secondly, we seek to show that no matter how an individual is deluded by his delusions, or manipulated by his own manipulations, such an individual cannot prevent certain give-away lapses that tend to reveal his true character.
By the time Nasir El-Rufai literally crashed on the Federal scene, he had already acquired a reputation for not taking hostages. He talked tough and acted tougher. There was a messianic, if slightly manic, glint to his otherwise cold ruthless stare. The times were rough. The stakes were high. The adrenalin matched the zeal, sometimes leading to wild, unprovoked outbursts and petulant tirades against real and imaginary enemies. But give it to the boy. Give it to the runt-sized tyrant that he had star quality.
At the end of General Obasanjo’s first term in office, there emerged a coterie of reform-minded technocrats who were said to have the ears of the big man. Arguably, Nasir El-Rufai was the blue-eyed golden boy of the lot. He was said to be the lynchpin of the group and its mobilising catalyst.
It was widely believed that El-Rufai was part of the inner caucus of a new group of technocratic young Turks from the north who had vowed to seize the region by the scruff of the neck and drag out of its feudal time warp into modernity screaming and kicking. They were the new missionaries of the Bretton Wood complex, and they would exemplify the saying that a little learning is very dangerous.
But at the beginning, it seemed that El-Rufai could do no wrong. Privatization was the buzzword of the new Economics of compulsory anorexia. The massively corrupt and overfed state with its appallingly inefficient public sector were the twin-culprit. Together, they had stifled and strangulated daring individual initiative and private creative enterprise.
After several attempts to launch public telephony in which the money simply disappeared into the pockets of crooks, the entire country was at last whirring and whizzing with the sound of the mobile phone, thanks to the brisk dismantling of the monopoly of the crook-infested NITEL.
If Proudhon had said that all private property is theft, El-Rufai now said that all public property is a worse form of thievery. As the boss of the BPE, the golden boy presided over the most massive transfer of public property and patrimony ever witnessed in Africa.
No matter the murmurs and whispers of protests, particularly from a sector of the country notorious for its aristocratic languor and princely sedation, the results were there for everybody to see in the telecommunication revolution, the gigantic strides in banking, the explosion in private initiative and the emergence of a new class of super rich Nigerians.
At this point, an influential and powerful Vice President Atiku Abubakar who mounted a sustained political offensive against the lethargic indolence of the old guard protected El-Rufai’s political flanks. Such were the stakes that it was not unusual for the big boss himself to weigh into the ring with customary abrasive contempt. Famously, Obasanjo dismissed Professor Sam Aluko, the respected economic nationalist of the old Keynesian school, as a victim of senility.
Meanwhile in the other sector of the intra-elite war, the golden boy was making hay with his hunting bag bulging with the scalpels of unwary victims. The fear of El-Rufai became the beginning of wisdom. If many found his combination of arrogance and caustic incivility a little off putting, there were also those who secretly applauded his zest and plucky irreverence. The pocket pugilist spoke the minds of many Nigerians when he dismissed the then senate as a consortium of certified crooks.
Still the doubts and dismay persisted. It is said that humility is the homage exceptional endowments must pay to nature and society. For every gifted chap who comes through the grim factory of human endeavour, there are thousands equally talented who went under.
There were many who find El-Rufai’s sense of entitlement as brazen as it is bizarre and baffling, a telling hangover from a feudal worldview in which the privileged few have a right to trample over others not so privileged. This feudal and authoritarian mind-set, so memorably incompatible with the egalitarian tenets of modernity, is the source of El-Rufai’s eventual comeuppance and brisk unravelling.
El-Rufai truly came into his own as the minister of the Federal Capital Territory. But it was also here that the glaring defects of character would cause much misgiving and lead to his eventual downfall. His remaining admirers insist that you cannot have omelette without breaking eggs and that their man has sanitised and brought municipal plausibility to Abuja.
While this is arguable, the social and political costs have been staggering. It would have been better to hasten more slowly until certain safety valves were put in place for the victims of mass displacement and dispersal.
Of course, the need for social amelioration is anathema to the worldview of the feudal-military complex and social justice does not exist in the Neo-con dictionary. But the fact remains that certain social injuries and ancestral feuds threaten social cohesion and harmony for generations to come, requiring despotic brutality and the abolition of the electorate to manage.
As revealed by the committee, the pattern of land redistribution in Abuja shows El-Rufai at his lying and dissembling worst, a nauseating and offensive public spectacle and a specimen of the worst form of official perfidy. It is the most outlandish instance of land racketeering in the history of the country.
What El-Rufai has presided over is not the sanitization of Abuja but the forcible expropriation and redistribution of private and public property to a new class of landed gentry which is incompatible with the logic of modernisation he has so blithely trumpeted. His personal interests and private animosities loomed large in what ought to be public duty.
After the damning exposure, it was obvious that the bubble has burst and that the masquerade has been disrobed. Despite his hollow hypocritical posturing, it was clear that El-Rufai, like his former boss, has suffered prohibitive collateral damage.
In a classic case of dramatic irony, he vowed never to go near public office again. He was merely echoing the thought of millions of compatriots. To echo David Halberstam, Obasanjo’s best have not been the brightest and his brightest have not been the best.
- First published in May, 2008.
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