El-Rufai’s Inglorious Mission against Tinubu

Since he lost ministerial appointment in President Bola Tinubu’s cabinet, the former governor of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, has remained inconsolable, unleashing verbal attacks on Tinubu’s administration.

No details of the said security report that robbed him of ministerial appointment were made available by the Senate.

However, many Nigerians had expected the security agencies to prosecute him, if indeed, there was any security report that indicted him.

Kaduna State turned into a killing field under the el-Rufai administration to the extent that the major function of his Commissioner for Security and Home Affairs, Samuel Aruwan, was to brief journalists almost on a daily basis on the number of killings in the southern parts of the state.

El-Rufai had in December 2016, admitted that his government had traced some violent, aggrieved Fulani to Niger, Cameroon, Chad, Mali and Senegal, and paid them to stop the killings of Southern Kaduna natives due to their grievances arising from the killing of their cattle in the 2011 post-election violence.

He claimed that Fulanis are in 14 African countries and they traverse Nigeria with their cattle.

“So many of these people were killed, cattle lost and they organised themselves and came back to revenge,” el-Rufai reportedly said, raising suspicions that his government knew the identities of the killer herdsmen, who have been ravaging Nigeria since 2015.

The killings in Southern Kaduna have since abated under the administration of Governor Ubah Sani.

It is believed that el-Rufai’s utterances as governor did not encourage peaceful co-existence among the different religions and ethnic groups in the state.

Under his administration, the Nigerian military massacred at least 347 members of the Shi’a Muslim group in Zaria in December 2015, though unofficial figures put the death toll at about 1,000.

He once threatened that foreign election observers and monitors who interfered in the 2019 general election would return to their countries in body bags.

At the peak of his glory as governor, el-Rufai established a notoriety for making divisive utterances and disparaging remarks about past and present Nigerian leaders, including his perceived benefactors.

On several occasions, he had declared publicly that President Tinubu was not his man because he did not like his style of politics.

With el-Rufai’s antecedents, it is evident that his current move to mobilise politicians he had despised in the past to unseat Tinubu in 2027 as a revenge for losing ministerial position is dead on arrival.