The growing fight between former Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai and National Security Adviser Nuhu Ribadu has brought back a very interesting part of Nigeria’s 2007 succession politics, which El-Rufai wrote about in his 2013 biography, The Accidental Public Servant.
The Guardian says that El-Rufai wrote about what he called the “beginning of our problems” on pages 358 to 360 of the book. It was a dramatic political event involving Ribadu, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, and the future president, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.
Ribadu was the head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) at the time and one of the most important people in Obasanjo’s fight against corruption.
El-Rufai and Ribadu used to be close friends and allies. They had similar political goals and worked together in Nigeria’s halls of power. But 13 years after the book came out, it seems that the two men’s relationship has gotten worse.
El-Rufai recently said that Ribadu told the police to arrest him and was behind an attempt to hold him at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Abuja. Ribadu has said that the accusation is false.
El-Rufai also accused the NSA’s office of buying thallium sulfate, which is a poisonous substance, in a different case.
The National Security Adviser’s Office denied the claim and sent the case to the State Security Services for further examination.
El-Rufai was arrested yesterday at the EFCC’s headquarters in Abuja after being questioned for hours about an alleged N432 billion corruption investigation.
El-Rufai writes on page 358 of the book that is currently going around on social media that things got tense when Yar’Adua told Ribadu that Obasanjo had asked him to run for president.
The narrative makes it clear how Ribadu felt.
“Obasanjo hasn’t told me anything, but I do have a candidate for president: Nasir El-Rufai.” I need to talk to Obasanjo about this.
El-Rufai claimed that Ribadu asked Obasanjo for clarification right away, but it is said that he was not allowed to see the President for two days.
When they finally met, Obasanjo reportedly said he didn’t directly ask Yar’Adua to run, but rather that the governor of Katsina had approached him on his own.
El-Rufai claimed, “As soon as Yar’Adua left Nuhu’s office, Nuhu called Obasanjo to see if he could chat. Obasanjo asked him to come over, but when Nuhu went to the Villa, he couldn’t get past the gate.
“For two days, Nuhu wanted to visit Obasanjo, but Obasanjo didn’t want to see him. When they finally met, Nuhu wanted to know how and why he would make such a choice. Nuhu thought that if we had done well at the federal level, Obasanjo should choose the next president from among federal officials, not from among the state governors he thought were doing a bad job.
Obasanjo first said that he did not ask Yar’Adua to run. He added that everyone else came to him and said they wanted to run, but Obasanjo did not ask Yar’Adua to run. Nuhu was happy and let Obasanjo be.
El-Rufai said that Ribadu first believed Obasanjo and then called him back, saying that Yar’Adua had lied. El-Rufai told Ribadu that he disagreed and that he had known Yar’Adua since 1972 and didn’t think he would make up such a claim.
He came to the clear conclusion that Obasanjo, not Yar’Adua, was being dishonest.
The narrative gets more dramatic when El-Rufai says that Ribadu used what he called “policeman logic” because he thought that Yar’Adua’s candidacy threatened his preferred path to the presidency.
He said that Ribadu “dusted off EFCC files,” looked at corruption complaints against Yar’Adua again, and started looking into Katsina State officials.
El-Rufai said, “It took Nuhu a while to figure out what Obasanjo was up to and what was really going on.” Nuhu’s first thought was like that of a regular police officer: go through EFCC files and look for complaints against Umaru. Nuhu didn’t know it at the time, but he was the one who was in jeopardy, not Obasanjo or Umaru.
“He cleaned up all of his files and uncovered petitions against the governor of Katsina state. Then he started looking into them. He even arrested some local government chairmen from Katsina as part of his probe into the state governor’s misuse of local government monies.
“He was plainly aiming to get Yar’Adua out of the race and leave El-Rufai as the only choice. Nuhu did all of this by himself; he never told me or anyone else until it was too late to give him different advice. I understood what my friend was up to as soon as I heard that the chairman of Mashi Local Government, a young man my sister in Mashi town knew very well, had been arrested.
El-Rufai saw these steps as a calculated way to limit the number of candidates for president.
In a direct conversation that he writes about in the book, El-Rufai stated he faced Ribadu:
“What the hell are you doing, Nuhu?”
He said that Ribadu said they might still “take charge” and derail Obasanjo’s scheme.
El-Rufai, on the other hand, told him not to make things worse, saying that Obasanjo’s readiness to leave office following past third-term scandals was a win for democracy in and of itself.
El-Rufai said that he told Ribadu, “Asking for anything more than this is just being selfish.”
He further said that starting investigations at that point would just make it look like the EFCC was going after people for political purposes.
El-Rufai said that Ribadu was working alone and that he had not made his intentions “open and inclusive.”
He said that Ribadu even asked some of his rich friends to help pay for what he called a “last man standing” tactic.
El-Rufai said that by the time Ribadu supposedly stopped the inquiries, the harm had already been done politically and personally.
“Oby and a few other people told him to stop, and he finally did. If Nuhu had trusted someone with his vision and we had all worked together to come up with a plan for me or anyone else we choose to run for president, we might have come up with a strategy that would have worked.
“However, Nuhu never trusts anyone with his plans.” He liked to plan and do things by himself if he could. That’s just how he is. Things had become pretty terrible for me and everyone else by the time we figured out what was going on and Nuhu had even gotten a few of my rich pals to support and pay for his “last man standing” tactic.
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