PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

El-Rufai – Hung by His Own Mouth

kudugana@yahoo.com

 

Easily the most controversial minister in President Olusegun Obasanjo’s cabinet is Malam Nasiru el-Rufai, the Minister of Federal Capital Territory . Since his appointment as minister last year he is the only one to have clashed openly with the Senate, with two ministers  in turf wars, and with the Head of Service, Alhaji Yayale Ahmed over his – el-Rufai’s that is - mass sack of FCT staff.

 

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 October 22, 2003 , “the executive is probably as guilty as the legislature, if not more so.”

 

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 January 17, 2002 in which he disparaged critics of government’s privatization policy, I wrote twice to warn him about the danger of thinking ill of anyone who disagreed with him. At that time he was the boss of the Bureau of Public Enterprise. In my first article on January 23, 2002, I said that privatization was not the only solution to the problems of our political economy; that in the end it was not so much the size of government that mattered in solving such problems, but whose interests a government protected between the rich and the poor and how accountable and transparent a government was. In other words a government could be lean but mean and inefficient, while another could be big and compassionate and efficient. It was, I said, therefore wrong of el-Rufai to dismiss all critics of the privatization policy and of the zeal with which he implemented it, as either ill-informed, ill-motivated or simply lazy.

 

In my second article on February 28, 2002 , I went further to advice him that he should always speak and act with moderation if he was to garner support in carrying out his job. His somewhat abrasive style I said, was bound to create more enemies for him than friends as he diligently, if somewhat over-zealously, went about his assignment.

 

I also suggested to him that he should read and take a cue from a 1986 book, The Triumph of Politics, by David Stockman, U.S. president, Ronald Reagan’s director of budget, who had to eventually pack it in because he discovered that his political godfathers almost always said one thing in public and did the opposite in private. Stockman was in many ways like el-Rufai—young, intelligent and highly committed to what he believed in.

 

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 Federal Capital Territory , el-Rufai has done a fantastic job transforming Abuja into a beautiful, clean and well-ordered city. Anyone who lives in Kaduna, as I do, or in other cities like Kano or Ibadan or Lagos or Port Harcourt, will not but lament the speed with which green belts and open spaces have disappeared to be replaced by shopping malls and lock-up shops and other unseemly structures  due to the greed and planlessness of government officials. Abuja , until el-Rufai, suffered the same fate, probably worse. Since then, he has not only turned things around but he has made sure that the pain that accompanied such a turn around was shared by the high and mighty and the poor alike.

 

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 Abuja will not die. Instead one hopes that the administrators of other cities and towns in Nigeria will copy his example and make their cities and towns begin to look decent and serene.

 

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 Nigeria needs his type, without his  zealotry and careless talk, if it is to develop.