As was to be expected, May 29, 2009, the 10th anniversary of the Fourth Republic – or the Third if you discount military president, General Ibrahim Babangida’s diarchy that was aborted by his cancellation of the June 12, 1993 presidential election – provided political pundits with an opportunity to review Nigeria’s political-economy since the final (?) retreat in 1999 of soldiers from politics after dominating it for the greater part of the country’s nearly half a century of independence.
The date also provided the pundits with the opportunity to review two years of the administration of President Umaru Musa Yar’adua whom former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, handed over to after a record eight years as the longest serving civilian ruler since 1960.
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Among those who delivered their assessments was Nasir el-Rufa’i, a former minister of the Federal Capital Territory. For three consecutive days from May 29, Leadership published his assessment of President Yar’adua.
El-Rufa’i, an accomplished technocrat and a super minister if ever there was one – by his own admission during his time he “supervised many other assignments in addition to Abuja; like the Civil Service Reform, Sale of Government Real Estate in Abuja, National ID Card System, the National Census, etc.” – is hardly your typical political pundit. But few reviews of Yar’adua’s two years in office were as well informed and insightful as the former minister’s. At a total of seven full pages of Leadership it was certainly the longest in any Nigerian newspaper.
The information and insight El-Rufa’i provided in his three part essay should not surprise any one; he himself said he played a key, even if somewhat reluctant, role in the emergence of Yar’adua, then the reserved and insular governor of Katsina State, as the presidential candidate of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, and eventually, as the president.
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“Obasanjo,” he said, “concluded that unless he found a way to acquire and sustain the loyalty of Nigeria’s powerful (and mostly corrupt) governors on the one hand, as well as his team of technocratic reformers on the other, his succession will be out of his hand. He took two steps – first he asked me and four other Abuja based senior federal and party officials to come up with a succession strategy. This kept the reformers which I was a key member engaged and loyal to him. He then announced that he expected to be succeeded by one of the state governors and encouraged virtually all the PDP governors to join the race to be President. These two moves ensured that his estranged vice-president, Atiku Abubakar, and other aspirants like General Ibrahim Babangida had few governors to recruit to their camp.”
After several meetings, said el-Rufa’i, his team, subsequently joined by Malam Tanimu Yakubu, one of Yar’adua’s confidants and now his Chief Economic Adviser, wrote the first draft of the succession paper in London in June 2006 and submitted it to Obasanjo in August with a princely price tag of seven billion Naira ($56 million then). “President Obasanjo thanked us and promptly filed it away and never adopted any of our recommendations.” Instead the president, el-Rufa’i said, decided to pick Yar’adua as his successor.
It is noteworthy that Yar’adua, alone of all the governors, never showed any interest in contesting for the presidency. It is even more noteworthy – and interesting - that el-Rufa’i did not tell his readers why Obasanjo threw their paper into the wastepaper basket, at least metaphorically speaking.
The answer was simple. Obasanjo, always good at playing dumb, was smart enough to see through the submission by el-Rufa’i and Co. as a self-serving piece of paper because it recommended its members as the president’s worthy successors without saying so in black and white. Obasanjo knew that his so-called reformers were hardly any less self-aggrandizing than the governors they loved to condemn as corrupt. After all were they not, for example, principal beneficiaries of their reforms as could be easily seen from the public properties they sold to themselves and to their families and cronies at give-away prices?
At every opportunity el-Rufa’i has defended his record of privatizing public property. His latest defense was perhaps his interview in the NEXT of May 19 which the newspaper entitled “El-Rufai’i comes out swinging at ‘hypocrites’”. In that interview he defended his allocation of land in Abuja to himself, his family and cronies on the grounds that what he did was legal. The newspaper had asked him if such an allocation was not immoral even if it was legal.
“This,” he said, “is all Nigerian hypocrisy. What ethics did I violate?...If there is any code of conduct that says as long as you are a minister, you should not allocate land or you should not exercise your functions in a way that your relations or your friends that are qualified should not benefit, then let them bring it out. But, there is nothing in any law or ethics that says that I cannot do what I did.”
However, in his long essay in Leadership, el-Rufa’i condemned similar conduct in Yar’adua back when he was governor of Katsina State. Hiding behind critics of the president, el-Rufa’i quoted them as saying Yar’adua as governor awarded contracts without any bids “almost entirely to three companies that are closely related to him – Lodgiani Nigeria Ltd. (the Yar’adua family business), B. Stabilini & Co. (Nigeria) Ltd. with Aliyu Bala Kuki (a close family friend) and Mangal Enterprises (Yar’adua’s alleged campaign financier)”. Yet he admitted the companies performed satisfactorily.
In taking what Leadership described as his “frank look” at two years of Yar’adua’s administration, el-Rufa’i said it was a period of “great expectation (but) disappointing outcome.” Inadvertently the former super minister’s words were merely sour grapes and self-indicting.
After what was a long psycho-analysis of the Yar’adua in his essay going back to the president’s secondary school days, el-Rufa’i said he had doubts about his suitability as president not only on health grounds – it was an open secret that he suffered from kidney problems. The former FCT minister said he later found out from his good friend and EFCC’s chairman, Malam Nuhu Ribabu, that Yar’adua’s name was initially in the list of those the anti-corruption agency indicted for corruption. It was, he said, removed later on only because of the intercession of Obasanjo’s National Security Adviser who allegedly said “Umaru’s corruption was not personal but was productive.” (This, sadly, could only cast doubt on the integrity of Ribadu’s anti-corruption crusade.)
Yet not only did el-Rufa’i say he worked tirelessly to get Yar’adua elected as president. It was public knowledge that he (el-Rufa’i) campaigned, at least indirectly through Ribadu, to join Yar’adua’s cabinet as energy minister. This easily opens el-Rufa’i to a charge that he is sour with the president only because he never realized his wish especially after the president himself publicly gave the world the impression that he would retain the services of el-Rufa’i and Co. as some of the whiz kids of the Obasanjo administration.
In the early paragraphs of his essay the former Abuja minister said Nigerians were in high spirits in May 2007 because Obasanjo was about to “successfully transfer power democratically from one elected government to another, handing over a sound economy that is almost debt-free with healthy reserves of over $45 billion.” If there were any Nigerians who were upbeat about the future of Nigeria’s political-economy in May 2007, they could not have been more than a handful; not after the terrible mess Obasanjo made of the general elections and the sharp decline in security and living standards of Nigerians that resulted from his economic reforms.
Since then Yar’adua may have done little to improve the lot of the much abused Nigerians but any fair-minded person can see that there is little qualitative difference between now and what he inherited from his benefactor. What is more, Yar’adua has not had the benefit of the historical oil windfall his benefactor enjoyed for virtually his entire eight years as president.
It is in this sense that el-Rufa’i’s criticism of Yar’adua as a disappointment can be considered as self-indictment; the mess we are in today is by and large the mess the president inherited as a result of Obasanjo’s so-called economic reform, a reform in which el-Rufa’i, by his own admission, played a key role.
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