The jury is still out on the tenures of Nuhu Ribadu and Nasir El-Rufai, but those who are jittery about history’s verdict on the duo are already out in force, rehabilitating and romanticizing them. The two men themselves suffer from delusions of heroic accomplishment. They have helped stoke an outpouring of revisionist histories that have wittingly or unwittingly fumigated their complicity in the political crimes of the recent past. Their recent actions, however, betray a more sober awareness of the gradual unraveling of their populist self-packaging. They have become vocal in defending their records, while taking cheap shots at the Yar’Adua-Waziri nightmare, which they created. El-Rufai, the more complicit of the two, is understandably more spooked by the prospect of his demystification. Ribadu, for his part, has stuck to more basic, less desperate scripts of self-recovery: the lecture circuit and passionate appeals to our patriotic pathos.
The two men have a right to speak their minds on the affairs of their country even if their commentaries come more from a deep sense of personal loss and humiliation than from a place of patriotic commitment. What is baffling is that their elaborate productions have found purchase with many Nigerians. What’s with us Nigerians? Why do we forget so easily? Why have we forgotten so soon, that we are where we are in the leadership and anti-corruption domains because these two men arrogantly made choices and engineered political outcomes that made our current predicament in the hands of Yar’Adua and Waziri inevitable?
El-Rufai’s spectacular confessions about his proactive, even fanatical, role in the Yar’Adua ascension plan should constitute the gravest, most offensive, and arrogant act of self-indictment. Instead, his revelations are being celebrated more for satisfying our appetite for political sensation than as a Freudian gift that portends poetic justice for the giver. Lost in this reception of El-Rufai’s offering is recognition that the piece, widely published in Nigeria-related media platforms, contained no contrition for the self-incriminating confessions of the former minister’s active involvement in our recent political failures. Did anyone call him out on his parenthetical attention to the Third Term disaster that inspired the alternate “third term” which materialized as Yar’Adua? Is anyone asking him to account for the many self-serving contradictions and deceptions in the write-up? He seeks exoneration not through penitence and apology but through a claim of ignorance. He claims ignorance of Yar’Adua’s proclivities as the basis of his support for his candidacy, tendencies that have now evolved into costly leadership deficits. Yet he proceeded to entertain us with tales of Yar’Adua’s troubling antecedents and ominous red flags of the unfolding leadership disaster. He claims that he fought against Peter Odili’s elevation to the vice presidential slot. Yet he endorsed Goodluck Jonathan, whose wife had been implicated by Nuhu Ribadu’s EFCC in the theft and attempted laundering of $1million. By his own haughty admission, El-Rufai’s imprint appears all over Yar’Adua’s ascension. Yet his narrative pretends that he is disappointed at the logical, predictable outcome of that imposition. What kind of arrogant self-preoccupation permits this kind of dishonesty?
The Turning Point
El-Rufai and Nuhu Ribadu were interviewed by a Nigerian newspaper together in the days in which they straddled the Abuja political arena as fanatical foot soldiers in Obasanjo’s personal army of national domination. That interview, for me, was seminal in its undressing of the duo. Like strung-out juveniles, they bullied and self-congratulated their way out of the interview.
There were two highlights—or lowlights—in that interview. The first was the duo’s forceful defense of Obasanjo’s “innocence” against proliferating accusations of corrupt enrichment at a time of considerable outpouring of damning revelations of the former president’s scandalously corrupt acts—some of them so brazen and crude in their execution that defending or rationalizing them constituted a traitorous insult on the citizenry. Their animated defense of Obasanjo’s personal probity against the grain of public evidence climaxed in El-Rufai’s infamous but deliciously revealing declaration that Obasanjo had N20, 000 to his name when he ran for president in 1999. The revelation would take on its own life as a significant, if unintended, informational offering and would become a credible baseline for gauging the magnitude of Obasanjo’s thievery.
The second was Ribadu’s school-boyish proclamation of El-Rufai as the next energy minister under the yet-to-be-inaugurated presidency of Yar’Adua, which drew a satisfied insider’s affirmation from El-Rufai. There were two take-aways for me from that interview. Anyone who would so shamelessly defend Obasanjo’s integrity at a time when the polity was awash with embarrassing and credible evidence of his many heists had no integrity of their own; and El-Rufai’s giddy, if delusional, expectation that he would be appointed into Yar’Adua’s cabinet as Energy minister was a clear expression of his investment in the Obasanjo-Yar’Adua continuum and this severely undercuts his populist posturing, and, of course, his present-day moralizing. That interview confirmed for me what I always suspected: that El-Rufai and Ribadu were too enamored by their fleeting influence and were too wedded to the rotten system and its principal architects to change it.
I have no internal caution about passing a declarative judgment on El-Rufai. His situation, for me, is a straightforward case of a self-seeking establishment man who has been maneuvered into near-irrelevance by former partners in unpatriotic acts and is now licking his chops and seeking a backdoor entry into respectability. Moreover, his habitation of the political wilderness seems to have done little to moderate his outlandish ego or to inspire contrition. His noisemaking on the fringes of power will irritate Yar’Adua the same way that Karl Rove’s improbable critique of the Bush administration might irritate his former principal. It is just as pretentious, hollow, and hypocritical. It will do little to erase the ledger of moral misdeeds, complicities, and impunities that constitute El-Rufai’s legacy.
Ribadu’s Complexity
Nuhu Ribadu is a more complicated, if deeply complicit, proposition. I stated elsewhere that Ribadu inspires conflicting impulses. I have been cautiously impressed by some of his recent gestures and utterances. It is hard to doubt the sincerity of his recent patriotic performances and the passion of his commitment to an alternate Nigeria. Undoubtedly, some of his patriotic outrage is rooted in his recent humiliation. Nonetheless, I see the beginnings of self-reflexivity and self-critique in his recent interviews. The human ego is a stubborn entity and may stand in the way of a full repentance and apology, but certain kinds of penitence are more effective if performed, rather than verbally expressed. Ribadu seems now to be aware that he squandered a rare opportunity to become a hero of unanimous acclaim instead of the controversial, divisive figure he has become. I admire the humility and human empathy in his recent speeches, even if I still crave a full admission of his many willful failures as chairman of EFCC.
That being said, it is hard to forgive or forget the arrogant and insulting manner in which he dishonored the massive public goodwill that greeted his ascension to the EFCC chairmanship. If we are serious about ending the circle of oppression and larceny that has doomed the country, we are going to have to develop, as Okey Ndibe keeps reminding us, a long memory of the misdeeds of those who enjoyed and abused public trust and goodwill in our recent history. In that spirit, it would be wrong—and dangerous—to be seduced by the appeal of Ribadu’s current demeanor or the current political and economic gloom into giving him a pass on his active role in thrusting us into this sorry juncture.
The Betrayal
For a start, we must never forget that Ribadu’s unconstitutional intrusion into the political arena—his reckless gale of disqualifications in the 2007 election cycle—set the stage for the current PDP stranglehold on the country. That singular act poisoned the political atmosphere so irretrievably that the 2007 electoral process never recovered any integrity or inspired the confidence of the electorate or those challenging the PDP oligarchy. The brazenness with which he facilitated that agenda of restricting the political space to Obasanjo’s anointed candidates altered the electoral landscape and helped consolidate the PDP in power. Because he acted before he reflected, Ribadu failed to anticipate the broader, long-term anti-democratic implication of that authoritarian intervention. When he was forced by unsparing public outrage to defend his action, he claimed that his original list was less political, more inclusive, and that it was doctored by higher powers.
For those of us already outraged by this most undemocratic—and unconstitutional—of actions, that defense was a dagger through the heart. If there was anything worse than Ribadu’s politically motivated, Obasanjo-induced entry into the political space, it was his failure, if he truly wanted to sanitize the electoral field, to compile a truly neutral list of politicians of questionable integrity that, while riling up legal and constitutional purists, might have received popular support. Even worse was his failure to confront Obasanjo and his PDP minions about the alleged doctoring of his list.
Ribadu proved himself in that episode to be a wimpy coward at best and a sheepish errand boy at worst. With Ribadu it was one unpatriotic offense and retreat after another. Now we hear from El-Rufai that Ribadu’s betrayal was even graver. He apparently had the opportunity to save us from the impending calamity of a Yar’Adua presidency but he, once again, buckled in the face of power and his loyalty to it, bowing, we are told, to Gen. Aliyu Gusau, Obasanjo’s National Security Adviser, who, presumably acting on Obansajo’s instructions, asked Ribadu to excise Yar’Adua’s name from his list of corrupt public office holders unqualified for public office.
It is a tragedy that, as El-Rufai tells us, Ribadu succumbed to the wooly explanation of General Gusau that Yar’Adua’s corruption was not personal and that it was “productive.” A man of more steely principle and resolve would have been insulted on behalf of Nigerians at such specious distinctions. Not Ribadu. His loyalty to Obasanjo and to the continuation of his own influence eclipsed his sense of even-handed patriotism. Because of Ribadu’s cowardly capitulation, Yar’Adua’s name exited the list and he became mythologized by Obasanjo and even the duo of El-Rufai and Ribadu as a “clean” governor that fit the mold that Obasanjo and his “reformists” desired as a successor. That was the origin of the current malaise—the same malaise that Ribadu now tries forcefully to disavow.
We must also not forget that throughout his tenure, Ribadu was a serial defender of the integrity of Obasanjo, a man who has since been proven to be a thief among thieves. It was one thing to refuse to dig too deeply into Obasanjo’s many deals or to rattle his political family with zealous probes. That was understandable to a certain pragmatic degree, even if it was morally unacceptable. But Ribadu did stop there. As if to further depress Nigerians, he used every interview to defend Obasanjo’s brazen acts of corruption or to haughtily and dismissively challenge citizens to supply evidence of the former president’s corruption.
It was one thing to conveniently overlook Transcorp, the Obasanjo library shakedown, the PTDF revelations, the miraculous recovery and prosperity of the bankrupt Obasanjo Farms, the Andy Ubah cash smuggling episode, the COJA contracts, the Halliburton scandal and other evidences of Obasanjo’s corruption. But to derisively explain them away as the wild imaginings of Nigerians’ suspicious minds was almost traitorous to the national cause. Let’s not forget that the same Olabode George, former chairman of NPA, whose innocence Ribadu actively defended (“we investigated and didn’t find anything against him because he was only the chairman and didn’t sign any contracts”) is today standing trial on multiple counts of corrupt enrichment. Did Ribadu actually look, or did he, once again, refuse to buck his pattern of prioritizing Obasanjo’s wishes above his moral instincts?
Ribadu Produced Waziri
I believed in Ribadu; I wanted him to succeed, and he succeeded in tackling non-governmental financial crimes, especially the prosecution of advanced fee frauds. But his transition from the independent, apolitical world of fighting fraud to the terrain of Abuja politics corrupted his patriotic fervor. He never recovered. It was not just his selective, politicized approach to the anti-corruption effort that advertized the loss of his patriotic innocence. It was also the fact he reveled more in the headlines, the melodrama, the theatre, and the populism of his work than in its outcomes and long-term ramifications.
I argued in the past that his politicization of the anti-corruption fight actually set back the fight. It gave undeserved legal and populist platforms to corrupt politicians to allege, quite credibly, that Ribadu was abusing his office and pursuing a political agenda. Many politicians who belong in jail are today free because of Ribadu’s shoddy, politicized methods. More significantly, it emboldened yet-to-be-charged corrupt politicians with an anticipatory weapon: accusations of political victimization. Unfortunately, whether it was actually true or not in particular cases, the narrative continued to ring true and to resonate with Nigerians, buying time and sympathy for filthy politicians.
What Ribadu did, beyond the very modest success he had in intimidating and unsettling some politicians (his record on succesful prosecutions of political corruption is abysmal), was to divest the anti-corruption bureaucracy and idea of the credibility that it began with. It was a slow seepage, but gradually, the moral goodwill of the public drained away as irrefutable evidence of political meddling and Ribadu’s complicity multiplied. At the end of Obasanjo’s tenure, the EFCC had become “another Nigerian” institution, compromised, politicized, and morally defanged.
Let me even take my reading of the implications of Ribadu’s misdeeds—not mere mistakes, there is a difference—even further. Ribadu’s compromises and letdowns made Farida Waziri’s emergence possible. Obviously, if Ribadu had held his ground against the pressure from Gen. Gusau, Yar’Adua might not have emerged, stalling the appointment of the laughably incompetent Waziri. But that is a chain of counterfactual causation that is unsustainable. My contention about Ribadu enabling the rise of Waziri is more basic.
Ribadu’s derailment into politically-motivated, selective investigations and prosecutions (another good example of which was the emergency investigation of Odili to intimidate him out of the 2007 presidential race to pave the way for Obasanjo’s anointed) muddied the anti-corruption arena and undermined the pro-EFCC consensus enough to give the coalition of corrupt governors and their friend in Aso Rock a clear opening, in the absence of a unanimous national support for Ribadu’s EFCC, to execute their plan of emplacing a more malleable chairman. This coup would have been virtually impossible, even for a government as deadened to public sensibilities as Yar’Adua’s, had Ribadu not so divided and contaminated the moral loyalties of citizens. But in the atmosphere of disillusionment that only intensified with the rigged elections, Nuhu Ribadu’s populist appeal wore off in correspondence to the EFCC’s loss of moral credibility and independence, and Farida Waziri mutated from a flawed, sponsored candidate of corrupt figures to a tolerable replacement in the eyes of Nigerians who were no longer morally invested in the EFCC. This disillusionment also muted the outrage that should have followed revelations about Waziri’s curious associations with corrupt politicians. The proof of this contention is in the divided, conflicted, and morally nuanced responses to the replacement of Ribadu with Waziri. Nigerians were so sick of the EFCC’s antics in the 2007 election cycle that they mostly didn’t care who headed it. Even the debate on the replacement was conducted in the incestuous domains of intellectuals and commentators, with a decidedly indifferent and, from the government’s point of view, favorable, response coming from regular Nigeria. With Obasanjo on his way out, Ribadu rushed some arrests and initiated some overdue prosecutions in order to rediscover his crime-fighting machismo and credibility. It was too little and certainly too late for many Nigerians. It failed to atone for his recent pro-Obasanjo rascality.
A Call for Caution
Before we anoint Ribadu the patron saint of Progressive Nigeria, let us recall these serious breaches of patriotic trust. If given another chance, Ribadu may behave differently and act in a more morally decisive manner. Before that happens though, let’s not act and speak as if Ribadu had no role in the recent rot, the impact and logical outcomes of which are unfolding to devastating effects in the lives of Nigerians. We cannot keep acting as though yesterday’s political sins have no bearing on today’s unsavory outcomes. Or that complicit individuals who constitute an unwelcome presence in the current political arrangement have by that fact alone become icons of progressive patriotic commitment.
Ribadu was courageous and incorruptible. Those qualities are foundations of heroic patriotism. But courageous and incorruptible people who allow themselves to be used by higher powers to stifle our quest for an expanded political space and full political accountability deserve to have their patriotism scrutinized. Incorruptibility and courage are desirable virtues. But they must be deployed as assets in challenging, not in consolidating, the predatory status quo—however “reformist” the rhetorical preoccupations of that status quo may be. Ribadu allowed himself to be conned by Obasanjo’s reformist rhetoric and succumbed, for good measure, to his own love of the political limelight.
In spite of my strong objection to the elevation of Ribadu to progressive sainthood, however, I see no moral parallel between him and El-Rufai. The two were united by their common loyalty to Obasanjo and to the nebulous constellation of practices called reform. They have now been reunited by common political adversity: persecution in the hands of a paranoid, illegitimate ruler. That’s where the kinship terminates. Ribadu’s courage, even if limited and constrained by misplaced loyalties, and his incorruptibility stand him apart from El-Rufai. El-Rufai is a power freak who is neither courageous nor possessing of personal integrity. Here is a man who stands accused of reckless departures from due process in the allocation of Abuja plots and of awarding plots of land to his cronies and family members but whose defense is that awarding plots of land to his wives and family members was not illegal. Has he ever heard of a quaint little concept called conflict of interest, or given a thought to the fact that what is legal may be inappropriate and immoral?
Obviously, both men are seeking an empathetic reappraisal by progressive Nigerians. In evaluating their records and those of other displaced political actors, we need to remember and recall their roles in directly or indirectly engineering the current mess. There should be no more sympathy or reward for populist grandstanding without genuine contrition and apology for past sins. The political actors of today are taking note on the self-reclamation campaigns of Ribadu and El-Rufai and on the reception we are according their performances.
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