PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA El-Rufai – Hung by His Own Mouth
Easily
the most controversial minister in President Olusegun Obasanjo’s
cabinet is Malam Nasiru el-Rufai, the Minister of
However, it is not just his high-profile clashes that have made him the most controversial minister, but his mouth as well. Most people, not least Senators Nasir Ibrahim Mantu, Deputy Senate President, and Jonathan Zwingina, Deputy Senate Majority Leader, would agree that the minister truly has a basket-mouth, to use a Nigerian parlance. Mantu and Zwingina, you will recall, were the two senators el-Rufai accused last year of demanding a 54 million Naira bribe to facilitate his senatorial approval as minister. This accusation caused a huge political uproar within and outside the ruling Peoples Democratic party, an uproar which ended somewhat inconclusively.
However,
though it ended inconclusively, indications
were that public opinion was decided on el-Rufai’s side, even though
he could not prove his allegations beyond invoking God as his witness.
As a columnist, I was among a few who argued that el-Rufai’s
allegations should not be swallowed hook, line and sinker. “In this
affair,” I said on these pages on
My position was based on credible information that a senior figure in the presidency did pay up, albeit reluctantly. I then argued that the only possibility for getting to the bottom of it all was by setting up a judicial inquiry into the matter. “The only chance - and it is merely a chance – of ever knowing the truth,” I said, “is if a judicial commission inquires in to it.”
Predictably no such a commission was set up and both the accused and the accuser carried on in their offices happily ever after. That was, until last week when el-Rufai started yet another controversy by calling the senators who had asked him to explain certain appointments in his ministry, fools.
For belonging to a minority that dared to ask questions about his allegation against Mantu and Zwingina, el-Rufai sent me an e-mail the following day accusing me of taking bribe from Mantu. I did not say he was lying against the two ranking senators. I only argued that in the light of credible information that the executive did not reject the demand, el-Rufai should have let sleeping dogs lie, or in the alternative, he should have rejected his appointment as minister if he wanted to remain firmly ensconced on his moral high horse.
Since I started my journalism career as a cub reporter in 1973 and since I started writing columns in 1978, I have been accused of many vices, but no one, until el-Rufai, had accused me of taking bribe to express an opinion. I did make a serious mistake of assuming he was the source of an article in PUNCH which purported to give the inside account of the controversy, but I did not think that was enough to accuse me of taking bribe. At first I felt anger about the charge Eventually my anger turned in to sadness. I felt sad and sorry for him because something told me that it was a matter of time before his mouth would get him into serious trouble. For, as his own Hausa kin would say, baki shike yanka wuya, meaning roughly, it is the mouth that hangs its owner by his neck.
Long before the Mantu/Zwingina episode and before he accused me of taking bribe from Mantu, I had worried that el-Rufai’s mouth would one day hang him and possibly outweigh his other virtues, including his reputation for diligence and personal integrity.
Following
an article of his published in the Daily
Trust of
In
my second article on
I
also suggested to him that he should read and take a cue from a 1986
book, The Triumph of Politics, by David Stockman,
If el-Rufai thought my comments put me in the class of his ill-informed, ill-motivated and lazy critics, he never said so. Indeed on one occasion when I met him in his office as BPE’s boss and reminded him to read Stockman, he seemed to have taken my advice in good faith.
You can imagine my shock therefore when he accused me of taking bribe from Mantu for merely saying he needed to more than invoke God as his witness if people were to believe that his allegations against Mantu and Zwingina were the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
With the on-going stand-off between the Senators and the Presidency over his remarks that they are all fools for asking him to account for his appointment of special assistants and reportedly paying them in dollars, el-Rufai has at last succeeded in landing himself in precisely the kind of big trouble I had always feared he would land himself in by his careless talk.
Somehow,
however, I feel sad rather happy for all my vindication. I am sad
because after he was forced to eat crow last Thursday and apologize to
the Senators over his gratuitous insult, it is hard to see el-Rufai
exhibit the same infectious enthusiasm about his job as he has shown
hitherto, even if the senators back away from their demand, as I believe
they should. For, there can be no disputing the fact that as minister of
the
El-Rufai
deserved praise for such good work and firm resolve. This, however, is
what now stands threatened by his foolish remarks and his somewhat
abrasive style. One can only pray that whatever happens to him, the
environmental revolution he has started in
One
also hopes that whether he remains a minister or not, el-Rufai would
have learnt his lesson that he cannot always be right and that not all
those who disagree with him are either ill-informed, ill-motivated or
foolish. He is essentially a good and diligent man and |