When Mallam Nasir El-Rufai referred to himself as an accidental public servant, it resonated with the public, because he approached public service with the mind-set of a private pursuit. A person who works for himself/herself determines what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. But a public servant does not hold all the aces. Public servants are guided by laid down procedures, interests and factors which sometimes are beyond their control.
This column recalls that after El-Rufai was propelled by forces to become the Director General of Bureau of Public Enterprise and later Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, he operated substantially as an accidental public servant. As Minister of FCT, Abuja, he cared not whose ox is gored in his single-minded determination to restore Abuja to its original master plan. While his bulldozers roared, those who appointed him were taking the heat and cleaning the fallout mess.
To get him to pass through the senate to become minister, former vice president, Atiku Abubakar, who nominated him, had to dye the wool, while El-Rufai was enjoying his night sleep. However, when El-Rufai saw that his godfather and benefactor, Atiku, had fallen out with President Olusegun Obasanjo, he shifted allegiance to the president and that shift allowed him to continue his pursuit of public service with the mind-set of a private person.
With his intellectual sagacity, El-Rufai was able to endear himself to President Obasanjo, such that he became a member of the inner circle, otherwise called the kitchen cabinet of the president. While not knowledgeable in the crafty nuances of the public service and/or politics, his capacity to deliver on assignments, which served the purpose, shone brightly. So, with his work as the DG of BPE and Minister of FCT, El-Rufai acquired enough reputation to dream dreams and to assert himself.
When Obasanjo’s successor, President Umaru Yar’Adua showed complete lack of appetite to the idiosyncrasies of El-Rufai, of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, the accidental public servant saw danger and fled. With Yar’Adua, a scion of the northern oligarchy in power, there was no space for blackmail and shenanigans, and so El-Rufai decided to put his combustible energy to further studies abroad. Hibernating abroad and biding his time, an opening came with the death of Yar’Adua, and the subsequent President Goodluck Jonathan’s bid for a second term.
El-Rufai again put forward his sagacious intellect to the service of the emergent coalition of forces which metamorphosed into the All Progressive Congress (APC), the political behemoth that ousted the incumbent president and the candidate of his former party, the PDP. Since he was at the table where the sharing took place, he cornered for himself, Kaduna State as its gubernatorial candidate. With the bandwagon of Sai Baba, El-Rufai, swept into power as Kaduna State governor in 2015; and with the power of incumbency at state and federal levels, coupled with his religious divide and rule tactics, El-Rufai secured a second term in 2019.
Out of power for merely two years, El-Rufai’s impudence and impatience is once again at play. Angry that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu refused to make him a minister, he has left the APC and has joined the Social Democratic Party (SDP), and is inviting every aggrieved member of APC, PDP and the distraught Labour Party (LP), to join in his new sojourn. Former President Buhari, who learnt the political ropes the hard way, quickly disassociated himself from the gamble.
Of course, it would amount to political hara-kiri for Atiku Abubakar to accept to become a boy to his former boy (El-Rufai), by agreeing to follow him to his new gamble. The candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, will likely not take the bait considering the mess that El-Rufai as governor made of his relationship with the people of Kaduna south, mainly Christians. Considering the religious bigotry that El-Rufai left behind in Kaduna, which his successor, Uba Sani, with the help of President Tinubu is trying to clean up, with strategic appointments and social reengineering, no farsighted politician will jump ship with El-Rufai.
Unlike the time of his being an accidental civil servant when he had employers who were ready and willing to clean the mess he lives behind as his bulldozer rumbled through human and material resources in his political endeavour, in SDP, as he was in Kaduna as governor, he would either clean any mess he rakes up, or it will live with him. Going forward, even his past mess will be stirred by his adversaries and the stench may be quite overwhelming. One major explanation he owes Nigerians is his connection with the killer Fulanis whom he admitted he had paid to stop killing Nigerians, and why despite the bribe, they never stopped.
The other accidental politician in the public space presently is Governor Siminalayi Fubara of Rivers State. Drafted from his perfunctory civil service duties as an accountant, Fubara was foisted on the highly octane gubernatorial post of the combustible Rivers State. To further compound his challenges, after winning, he immediately entered into a dogfight with his rambunctious former godfather-turned-foe, Nyesom Wike. A political warrior’s warrior, Wike, has shown himself a rancorous marathon fighter with the capacity to deliver upending uppercuts with devastating precisions.
This column had wondered how Fubara managed to become a governor after he threw away the peace deal President Tinubu had helped him negotiate with Wike. Not only that, he told the president that he was a meddlesome interloper, and he was not obligated to obey his ‘unconstitutional’ peace deal. This column had wondered how Fubara wandered into the government house. Even when the loquacious Wike boasted that he would keep pushing Fubara, to keep making mistakes, like a man afflicted by Cyprian Ekwensi’s sokugo or wandering spirit, Fubara kept stumbling from one error to another.
When the jungle was merely at its infancy, Governor Fubara naively claimed that the jungle has matured. Now that the Supreme Court has withdrawn the carpets he was standing on to grandstand and boast, he was locked out of ‘his property’ (the state legislative quarters) by the (legislators) he had naively inferred were ‘his tenants’. To show that he is an accidental politician, Fubara made a shameful visit to the estranged legislators, in the daytime, with his sirens blaring and the cameras clicking.
If Fubara had any modicum of political sagacity, or even reasonable knowledge of history, philosophy, sociology or political science, he would have sent emissaries to make peace behind the scene, before the showboat of the disgraceful lockout. This column hopes Governor Fubara and Mallam El Rufai are not driving political cars without brakes?
Source : The Nation