I must start this piece by stating that I have neither read nor am I about to read Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai’s new book, The Accidental Public Servant. At some point down the line, I will read it. Some of my professional friends and political comrades whose critical judgment I trust have read the book. While they are not exactly full of praise for the book, they all say that it is worth reading. But please don’t take this as either a recommendation for El-Rufai’s new book or worse still an endorsement for it. My friends’ and comrades’ opinion of the book is not the reason why I will read it. Rather, the sole reason why I will eventually read the book is because ever since he wrote a devastating critique of the late president Yar’ Adua and his administration from a centre-right perspective while Yar’ Adua was alive, I have followed his essays and blogs closely. I have read nearly all his essays since then and I periodically visit his personal website. The only thing I resolutely shun when I visit this website is the column that invites visitors to have a glimpse of El-Rufai’s latest personal activities. This indicates to me that the man has, or wishes to have, a fan club; I leave that to that to the young, the credulous and the fellow travelers of his ideological forays into the wilderness of contemporary Nigerian elite politics.
In my opinion, El-Rufai is quite easily the brightest and most articulate spokesperson for the centre-right ideological and political position in Nigerian politics today. Later in this piece, I shall indicate what exactly this centre-right position implies, but for now let me add that for me, El-Rufai has the added interest of being the first politician and intellectual from the North to both articulate and embody this centre-right worldview with coherence, consistency and panache. In other words, while we have had brilliant radical leftist intellectuals and dedicated and unwavering politicians and spokespersons of the right aplenty from the North we have never, in my view, had a centre-right representative of the caliber of El-Rufai from the North. [Incidentally, we have not had one from the South either!]
Needless to say and as I hope to demonstrate in this piece anyway, I am not using these ideological terms reductively. When I shall have finished what I have to say in this piece, I hope that it would have become clear that I do not think that his centre-right views exhaust all that could be said about El-Rufai. On the strength of the things that he says in his writings and the passion with which he says them, he is quite possibly a genuine patriot and a humanist. It just so happens that a man like the subject of this essay who is as open and even aggressive about his ideological beliefs ought to be taken up on those beliefs.
On this last point, I now move directly to the substance of this piece, El-Rufai’s passionate espousal, in a recent article titled “Stunted Potentials Hobble Our Nation”, of the claim that the years 2004-2007 during Obasanjo’s second term in the presidency marked a period of great hope and promise not only for Nigeria but for Africa and the Black race. I think that this claim is both factually erroneous and morally bogus and indefensible, but before I state my reasons for this view, it is useful to state El-Rufai’s arguments in support of this claim on their own terms.
The bottom line in that article, “Stunted Potentials Hobble Our Nation” is the view that politics in any context is only as good as it is congruent with national aspirations. Between 2004 and 2007, states El-Rufai, there was a perfect congruence between politics and national aspirations in our country. On this claim, El-Rufai goes on to assert vigorously that those who “inherited” power after 2007 – Yar’ Adua and Jonathan – lacked such congruence on a monumental scale. “National aspirations” between 2004-2007 included such key elements like the shrinking of both the expenditure of governance and the participation of government in business; the creation of a modern national identity card system; a road map to a potential boom in the solid mineral sector to relieve the over-dependence on crude oil; strengthening of the banking system; a national mortgage system to drastically reduce a 17 million housing units deficit; and monetization of fringe benefits to reduce the lavish and wasteful lifestyles of public officeholders at the expense of the state.
I admit it: reduced to this bare summary, there does not seem to be anything particularly extraordinary about this set of programs and ideas. But in the context of the discursive rhetoric of El-Rufai’s passionate arguments in the article, these ideas take on an urgent, visionary quality. Repeatedly, El-Rufai states again and again in the article that the vast majority of Nigerians are poor, subject to insecurity, prone to vastly inferior or inadequate hospitals, clinics and amenities while those in power wallow in obscene consumption and display of wealth. He pleads that time is not on our side, that our leaders must get their priorities right or we will sink further and further into devastation by insecurity, corruption, and poverty. One could not agree more with El-Rufai on these observations. And in a phrase that I particularly found resonant, El-Rufai in the article describes budgetary procedures in our country as a “fictographic art” full of much drama and noise but disconnected from the things that could cure governance in Nigeria of its endemic wastefulness, incompetence and paralysis.
In contrast to all of this, El-Rufai argues in the article that between 2004 and 2007, Obasanjo’s administration charted a course that was bold, visionary and confident in its mission. Here is a sentence from the article that gives a flavor of the rhetorical flourish with which El-Rufai makes this claim: “The vision of that Obasanjo administration was to make this the last generation to merely speak of Nigeria’s potentials. We were determined to realise those potentials, confident that we had the talents to create wealth from the vast natural and human resource endowments of the country, leveraging the energies of its young people and latent assets in the Diaspora.”
No great debating skills or prowess are needed to demolish this claim. 2004-2007 happens to coincide with Obasanjo’s second term in office. From his near impeachment close to the end of his first term (1999-2003), Obasanjo came into his second term a bitterly insecure ruler, a wounded lion who wanted to make everyone pay for his injured pride. He became paranoid toward all real and suspected enemies within and outside his party, the PDP; conversely, he demanded absolute loyalty from everybody, from members of his cabinet to the lowliest functionary of the presidential villa. He subjected the party to his absolute control. He ran government like a fiefdom, while paying lip service to respect for technocrats and a special responsiveness to foreign bilateral business and governmental powers. He ignored or even flouted decisions of the Supreme Court that went against him or his administration. He used government to enrich his cronies, sycophants and hangers-on. In some particularly notable instances, he placed mediocrities in high office, as in the case of the barely literate hair dresser that he made the Speaker of the House of Representatives. In some states of the federation, he installed stark illiterates like Andy Ubah and Lamidi Adedibu as political godfathers with more real power and authority than the executive governors of the states concerned. In the year 2006, he had a prolonged, bitter feud with his Vice President, Abubakar Atiku, in which both men voluntarily revealed how gross and unconscionable they were in looting the coffers of the nation to enrich themselves and their cronies. Perhaps the most important economic legacy of his rule was a massive transfer of wealth into a few hands at the expense of the vast majority of Nigerians. And his rule ended with the disgrace of his failed bid to have a third term in office, but not before he had taken the whole country through extremely bitter, cynical and divisive elite politics.
Is it the case that, in making the claim that this period marked years of hope and promise for Nigeria, El-Rufai is ignorant of these universally known facts of Obasanjo’s performance in office between 2004 and 2007? No, absolutely not, for El-Rufai was in the thick of it all as one of two or three of the most trusted of Obasanjo’s loyalists during the period. As a matter of fact, El-Rufai presided over the privatisation of state and public enterprises through which a vast transfer of wealth to private hands was made in those years of Obasanjo’s second term. More specifically, El-Rufai was objectively an accomplice to the subordination of the party to Obasanjo’s personal megalomaniacal control; he provided both the practical muscle and the justificatory rhetoric for how a “strong leader” with a sense of mission and “national aspirations” could and should bypass ignorant and backward party bosses. Of course, it was not the case that the PDP was ever much of a disciplined, enlightened and patriotic party. But both Obasanjo and his loyal servitor, El-Rufai, belonged to the party and they putatively held their cabinet posts at the pleasure and in furtherance of the aims of the party.
I understand that in his new book, El-Rufai is highly critical of Obasanjo, though reportedly in a careful, muted and nuanced manner. As I remarked earlier in this piece, I have not read the book so I don’t know the distance he has traveled between the book and this more recent article in which El-Rufai aggressively touts Obasanjo as a ruler who, between 2004 and 2007, seemed to be Nigeria’s, Africa’s and the Black race’ answer to all our problems. I would argue that this issue throws some light on what I said earlier in this piece about the centre-right worldview and praxis of El-Rufai. Stripped of all the rhetoric, the central ideas of El-Rufai in the article under review here are, one, that the market, not the government, should be the motive force of the economy and, two, once the state or the government has provided the basic infrastructures, it should sell off all state and public assets and enterprises to those who have the means to buy them. But since in ideology what is left unsaid or unspecified is as important as what is said and specified, we must note that it is out of a deliberate silence that El-Rufai completely leaves out the matter of how those to whom public wealth is transferred come by the means with which to buy and own public assets. In the Nigerian case, the answer to this all-important question is that it is the same state, the same government from whom they get the means to buy and buy cheaply from the state or government.
On a closing note, let me remark that in the article I have been discussing in this piece, El-Rufai never once mentions the PDP by name. The only party that he mentions is the newly formed APC and this is strictly only to suggest that the “agenda” of Obasanjo in those years between 2004 and 2007 should be the only agenda of the APC. And even then, his faith is not really in that party; rather, it is in a strong leader with the vision and will to complete, in El-Rufai’s own words, what those who “inherited” power from Obasanjo could not accomplish – the “mission” spelt out in the “national aspirations” articulated by Obasanjo in those pregnant, promising years. This “leaderism” is the right-wing core of El-Rufai’s centrist faith in a market-driven economy under the expert management of efficiency-minded technocrats. I understand that after he decamped from the PDP, El-Rufai joined the CPC. That party has fused with others into the newly formed APC and as a consequence, El-Rufai is hedging his bets on the APC. In Nigerian elite politics, we know only too well of the phenomenon of AGIP – Any Government In Power. Thanks to El-Rufai, let us now also recognise APIP – Any Party In Power.
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
