Gov El-Rufai And Temperament To Lead

By Simon Abah

Until we groom good people for elective office, people who are selfless, driven by a sense of mission, folks who understand the importance of urgency for change, belief in community, do not wear their opinion on their sleeve, avoid flagging religious views in favour of egalitarianism and to stop putting their snout in the trough of the gravy train and free-booting.

*Gov El-Rufai 

Even if a Martian comes from Mars on a white horse with Marian ideas to transform Nigeria, we would never go above being the self-proclaimed Giant of Africa. (Simon Abah, The Guardian, 30 May 2017, Between presidential and parliamentary system of government). 

Nigeria: The Problem With Gov El-Rufai’s Gonin Gora Demolition Threat

By Moses Ochonu

The problem with El-Rufai is not that he is a bad Governor. The problem, rather, is that he tries so hard to be seen as a good governor, so hard that he ends up undermining his own good works, causing unnecessary controversy, and exposing his bigotry and lack of executive governing temperament. He is a much better technocrat than he is a wielder of executive authority.

*President Buhari and Gov El-Rufai 

He threatened to demolish an entire community, Gonin Gora, in the middle of an ethno-religious crisis. It is a terrible idea to threaten or to actually demolish an entire community whatever crimes some members of that community may have committed. For one, it amounts to collective punishment, a primitive punitive action incompatible with modern, enlightened notions of justice, correction, and recompense. Second, it is a rather lazy, knee-jerk, thoughtless, and ultimately counterproductive response.

President Buhari’s Hausa Republic

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Neither time nor sickness can change President Muhammadu Buhari. He would ever remain parochial and divisive. This is not just an awful attempt to denigrate Buhari and his hallowed presidential office. No, this is how he wants Nigerians to see him in his audio message in Hausa on the occasion of the Eid El-fitr, a feast of Muslims marking the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting.

 If the message had only just enjoyed a surreptitious circulation on the social media with its accompanying non-complicit anonymity and without official imprimatur, it would not have provoked outrage. We would have easily dismissed it as one of the regular affronts to the president by the corrupt who do not wish him well and who in fact prefer an abrupt termination of his government so that they can be free to enjoy their loot. After all, there have been many reports on the social media of the president’s death following which even the British queen had to condole with Nigerians. But the message was released by the presidency and rapturously recommended to the growing horde of the naysayers as an indication that the president is not incapacitated. Clearly, the presidency has not disowned it. And we do not need to split hairs over whether the voice was genuinely that of the president. We accept it is his because the presidency has said so.

But what is clear is that it is either that the handlers of the president who confronted the public with this message as the unimpeachable evidence of the president’s good health deliberately set out to humiliate him before Nigerians or they never reckoned with the baleful consequences of their action. Either way, the audio message has once again confirmed the apprehension that we are a people saddled with a president who is not the right person to manage the complex and combustible affairs of the present-day Nigeria and pull it from the brink of splintering.

El-Rufai’s Blunders And The Christmas Killings In Southern Kaduna

By Moses E. Ochonu

For the people of Kaninkon Kingdom in Southern Kaduna, this was a bleak Christmas. On Christmas Eve and on Christmas day armed Fulani herdsmen attacked and destroyed Goska village, killing, maiming, and burning. This attack occurred in spite of the area having been put under a 24-hour curfew by the state government, an indication of the brazenness and sense of impunity on the part of the well-armed attackers.

*Nasir el-Rufai

The attack is part of a broader genocidal war against the people of Southern Kaduna, a war that is in its fifth year and has killed thousands of people in their homes and farms and destroyed the livelihoods of tens of thousands more. As we speak an estimated 53 villages lay in ruins, some of them occupied by Fulani herdsmen and their cattle, a forceful annexation that recalls the similarly forceful displacement in Agatu.

Let’s be clear: the crisis predates the administration of Governor Nasir el-Rufai, so he cannot be accused of causing it or of being behind it as some people are insinuating. However, his utterances and actions in the past and the present have exacerbated the problem and emboldened the attackers. An ill-tempered man given to incendiary, inciting, and divisive outbursts, el-Rufai has made several egregious errors in dealing with the crisis. Some of these errors are errors of approach, thinking, and mentality. The errors have inspired actions that have wittingly or unwittingly transformed what was a low level series of massacres into a full-blown genocide.

To understand some of the governor’s current failures in dealing with the killings, you have to understand his past utterances, his incendiary character, his insensitivity, and his inability to moderate his thinking and resultant public expressions, all of which offer clues about why he has no credibility or political capital to solve the problem and why he is widely perceived as part of the problem, not its solution. Let’s consider the governor’s many problems in this regard.

El-Rufai is widely regarded as a Fulani supremacist, and with good reason. On July 12, 2012, he tweeted the following: “We will write this for all to read. Anyone, soldier or not that kills the Fulani takes a loan repayable one day no matter how long it takes.” The governor’s response to the killings in Southern Kaduna has been eerily consistent with this mindset. In a recent chat with newsmen in Kaduna, the governor made three statements that substantiate this Fulani supremacist statement from four years ago.

First, he said when he became governor, he traced the attackers to Cameroon, Chad, and Niger and sent a message to them that one of their own, a Fulani like them, was now governor. This statement displays a spectacularly parochial mentality. A governor of a Nigerian state was basically making appeals based on ethnic kinship and brotherhood to a group of foreign killers of people in his own Nigerian state! In other words, he was appeasing his murderous foreign kinsmen at the expense of indigenes of his state who are not his ethnic kinsmen but whose safety and interests he swore to defend. The governor’s shocking statement indicates that ethnic solidarity trumped his constitutional obligations to protect Southern Kaduna citizens from the external threats of foreign Fulani herdsmen.

Second, the governor told the journalists that the crisis began in the aftermath of the 2011 presidential elections when foreign Fulani herdsmen passing through Southern Kaduna were attacked, with some of them killed and their cattle stolen. The governor claimed that the ongoing genocidal killings are revenge for the 2011 attacks.