Misery, peculiar to the individual, is the genre of private experience. But when co-opted as tribal angst and wielded by a governor in his mathematic of social space, it becomes a weapon.
Having weaponised misery, Nasir El Rufai is armed to the teeth. The Kaduna governor’s penchant for political drama assumes structure amid the spring fertility of his wiles.
Speaking at a summit on the challenges of northern Nigeria, El Rufai said: “Nigeria consists of two countries; there is a backward, less educated and unhealthy northern Nigeria and a developing, largely educated and healthy southern Nigeria.
He cited the north as the most impoverished region of the world and as a centre of drug abuse, gender violence, high divorce rates, banditry, kidnapping and terrorism.
El Rufai’s rhetoric commands an exercise of the eye, not of the mind. At best, he should be accorded the passing tribute of a sigh.
But what’s Nigeria to do? What’s the north to do? Friends, associates and aides must humour and deal with the curious workings of his lilliputian mind.
While they commend and stroke his infinite delusions, secretly, each man and woman on his team and political radar, suppresses the mind’s wars with treacherous nature.
Were he discerning enough, El Rufai would be guided by the parable about a tall man’s genuflection to a short man with mammoth ego; to earn his favour or good graces, the tall man may prostrate, albeit lie in the dust to toady up. He knows, however, that, moments after genuflecting, he may rise to tower above his liege.
Thus is the unwritten rule of political survival. Many of his aides, associates and presumed loyalists are simply “doing the needful” to earn a living, hence their silence is understandable in the face of the governor’s misguided missiles.
Controversy excites the Kaduna governor, no doubt. From his recent vituperation on godfatherism in Lagos to his shameful recant soon after he incurred widespread reproach, El Rufai suffers the ravage of random impressions.
Given his ecstasy at every glance society casts at him, this article too, may serve as yet another victory to the diminutive governor.
His lust for triggering any form of debate about him is visceral and spasmodic. His theatrics, while hackneyed, are hardly about issues. They are chiefly about him: subtle, brazen gambits at generating a buzz and media mention.
In the spotlight, El Rufai feasts like the mythical Narcissus; chewing on vile drama, he reduces outrage and criticism of his plots to soupy and primeval desert.
A man like El Rufai should be ignored, even when he hauls venom and wiles to plow the political landscape with riot and rage.
Contrary to his belief, El Rufai does not speak truth to power rather he spits toxin to power.
His Nigeria as a two-nation rant, for instance, elevates chicanery to inconceivable heights. Having said that Nigeria is made up of a “developing South,” the Kaduna governor whined, that, the north is in contrast, backward and impoverished thus reinforcing a trending argument and subterranean plot championed by his ilk.
We relive El Rufai’s rant with a stunned combination of amazement and disgust.
Call it a daemonic aria, a flight of effete imagination. If contemporary politics thrives on musical artifice, the Kaduna governor’s recent falsetto is his cipher, the fault in his organ valve that renders his melody, frantic fustian dross.
El Rufai, undoubtedly, particularizes his execution of inflammatory speeches with frightening and uncanny detail thus inciting our outrage. But what he actually deserves is our pity. Empathy for his cumbrous afflictions.
In his hands, power has become a conveyance of discord, and a vehicle to his nemesis. El Rufai tangled with power is like Olohun Iyo disappearing to the lure of fatal chorus.
His tirade’s emotional power comes from the brutal contrast between his smirking vanity and the sudden melting of his features beyond recognition. Call it his holocaust and apocalypse.
Standing at ground zero. El Rufai incinerates by innate inclinations; self-intoxicated in the electric moment before lightning strikes and he is reduced to rubble at core.
If El Rufai fails to beat a retreat from the strange path he tows, he would eventually reduce by the sedition of his own ego, like previous travellers on his chosen path.
Pride torn in sparagmos, they lie scorched by ecstasy and annihilation by the seductive Maenads of power.
According to El Rufai, he speaks “the naked truth,” and he added, that, the north still has a lot to be proud of in the person of Aliko Dangote, allegedly the richest man in Nigeria.
Going further, he said: “So, we still have a lot to be proud of. We should be proud of our culture and tradition, as well as unity. You hardly can find someone from northern Nigeria convicted of 419 or being a Yahoo boy. That is something we should be proud of…In addition, our demographic superiority gives us a very powerful tool to negotiate in politics.”
His final call to the northern youth, characteristically, connotes the chicanery of the Nigerian ruling class. “I, therefore, call on you the youth; you account for 80 per cent of the northern population and the future of this region lies in your hands, not in the hands of Dinosaurs like me. I’m 59 and among the oldest five per cent of the northern population. I shouldn’t even be governor; I should have been governor 10 years ago. But ‘na condition make crayfish bend,’ so we are here,” he said.
Of course, El Rufai was right by stating that men like him, should be retired from politics already. He should have been eclipsed with the administration of former president, Olusegun Obasanjo.
Let us also hope, that, his target audience are aware that his speech at the summit was tailored to mute their dissent over his resounding flaws as an elder and objectionable stature amid “the oldest five per cent of the northern population,” as he rightly acknowledged.
His rant was yet another brassy attempt to beguile the north’s youthful electorate via reverse psychology and self-deprecation.
The only conversation the northern youth should be having right now, should be with co-oppressed youths across the country’s geopolitical zones.
El Rufai’s platitudinous chant seeks to divert attention of the northern youth from the crucial issues that requires relentless exercise of the mind.
Failing industries, substandard healthcare, moribund national cashcows, deficient schools, executive profligacy, and deathly politics foisted on all by the selfish ruling class are some of the issues that the northern youth, like their southern peers, must worry about.
On the flipside, men like El Rufai should attempt humility for a change. He could start by picturing himself as a roadside mechanic, a roving cobbler or displaced fisherman of Doron Baga; would he still affect the venom he displays? Would he be afflicted by power and its infernal seductions?
There is no pure Fulani blood, Hausa blood, Yoruba blood, Igbo blood and so on. The purity of a bloodline consists in its capacity for humaneness, justice and truth. No magnitude of kinship, racial or ancestral pride, could surpass the beaming brightness of good deserving of all.
The northern youth must understand that the only pursuit that could count in the national arithmetic is that which situates the individual, for the interest of all.