It is only in Nigeria that a man like Mallam Nasir El-Rufai can offer a glib lip to the public. In other climes, he will bury his face and weep. After he gave an interview about never joining the PDP, he jumped into an empty shell called the SDP, and he wants the world to shout hurrah.
Many are looking at his national profile and paying less attention to the effect in his home base of Kaduna. As they say, all politics is local.
In his home, especially the APC, his defection is seen as a surrender. It is also seen as good riddance. As he left, many are rejoicing while others are calling for accountability. Those not happy include those whose houses he demolished with a bulldozer’s glee. Those he rid of their jobs. Those who want peace but he drove a wedge between Jesus and Mohammed. He coddled the bandits but, on his watch, they plundered, raped and killed.
What of projects for which billions were allocated but no evidence of work even started? Over 25,000 civil servants retrenched and unpaid? What of chiefdoms taken from people and given over to herdsmen like the Ikulu as Leadership newspaper columnist Simon Musa Reef narrated, or roads neglected like the Kafanchan road where Governor Sani has intervened?
The markets shut down, and they remained shut down until he left. While he was governor, he demolished shops, and the entrepreneurs are not happy. He sacked teachers, and the mallams of makaranta are not happy, especially after he hired replacement teachers and did not pay them. He gloated openly over the slaughter of Shiites in his state. He did not betray the milk of human sorrow. He could not even pretend. In Southern Kaduna, they accuse him of declaring curfew while the goons rumbled into their homes and huts and grunted afterwards like hyenas of occupation.
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The local government politicians did not like him. The lawmakers, perhaps except for his son, have nothing but contempt for him. He is perhaps the only governor in the history of this republic that his legislative colleagues instituted a corruption probe on his activities in office. He might call himself a statesman but I don’t give him that flattery. If he accepts the notion that he is a statesman as he deludes himself, then he is a statesman without a state. I had characterized Peter Obi with that epithet once when he lost his party in the state before he lost his state to another party, and he has never gotten it back. PDP is not ruling the roost in Anambra State. Now, as a labour maven, LP is an underling.
Here is a quote from a press statement by a charity, the Sheikh Dahiru Usman Foundation: “Under El-Rufai’s administration, security forces carried out violent night raids on our Tsangaya schools. They stormed dormitories, brutalized students and staff, and forcibly removed children from their hostels under false pretences. Some of these children remain unaccounted for to this day.” The foundation has given him up to the end of Ramadan to issue an apology. Failing that, they promise to take him to court.
If El Rufai were an iroko, we would see an earthquake in the state. He left the party like a loner. He is a maverick without a structure. No big-time politician, no crowds cheering him out. No big crowd receiving him into the SDP. Rather the youths of the party have described his coming as the profile of an “undertaker.” They described him as “unfit and morally unqualified.”
How could he move anything? As governor, he could not deliver Kaduna State for Tinubu. He gulped a mere 29 percent to Atiku’s 40 percent. What did he do for the president to feel entitled to anything in the government? He did not support the incumbent governor, Uba Sani, to be governor, and if the activist did not draw on his own pedigree, his iteration of the APC structure and his grassroots appeal, APC could have lost both gubernatorial and presidential polls in the state. We can see why his leaving did not inspire a squall. There was no comet seen, the ground did not tremble and even the al majiri did not scream or stream the streets.
Ebenezer Obey sang, “Oyingbo market did not notice that no one came.” In the same token, Kaduna did not notice that anyone left, except for the relief that an irritant is out of their way. They can now sleep without the pesky mosquito on the window sill. He also left as an act of surrender. Having sought the obeisance of the governor and not had it, he accepted that Uba Sani is the numero uno of APC in the state. He had done enough damage. The people have shushed him away like a vagrant goat bleating about in the yard.
The real noise is grating ears outside Kaduna and on twitter. He has been the nasty bird upsetting the dawn with songs without flavour. He wants us to forget that he has cases to answer in Kaduna, over his stewardship. He wants us to think he was such a delicious kilishi in the APC. The gourmet meal must be missed. He feels he is such a giant that one has to crane their neck to see him in the room. He is like Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass’ character Oskar, who is small, insecure, peevish and has to scream to be noticed. His screams and all the plates and pictures and furniture have to break, shatter and scatter. He is a public desperado banging his shoes to gain attention. He is Nicodemus except that he believes he has miracles to offer.
He is not the only disgruntled in the APC. He is just the first to move. He is the first malcontent. He is the Taiwo of defectors. He has been sent to see if the journey is worth it. They will find out, as T.S. Eliot wrote in his A Journey of Magi, that “a hard journey they had of it.” But in Kaduna APC, he is the last malcontent. The party has been disinfected.
He is a metaphor of a fractious and fractured opposition scrambling for a voice. The thing is, whether it is Obi, or Atiku, or El Rufai, or Kwankwaso and the sundry others clucking in the shadows, they are all wounded men. Rather than heal, they want to fight with their limp hands, groggy feet, bruised eyes. If they come together, we shall have a coalition of the wounded, a battery of the battered. Let’s drink to their health!
