El-Rufai: Judging Others, Evading Judgment

Ibrahim Jubril

There comes a moment in public life when rhetoric collides with record, when posture meets proof, and when the architecture of a carefully curated reputation begins to fracture under the weight of its own contradictions. For Mallam Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai, that moment has arrived: quietly, inexorably, and far from the stages on which he once lectured the nation on virtue.

For years, El-Rufai fashioned himself as a moral sentinel in Nigeria’s turbulent political landscape. He spoke with unyielding certainty, governed with severity, and condemned with relish. Corruption, he suggested, was the vice of lesser men; accountability, the standard he alone seemed prepared to enforce. He was the puritan in a fallen city, forever ready to indict others for ethical failure. Yet the record now confronting his legacy tells a far more unsettling story.

The comprehensive probe conducted by the Kaduna State House of Assembly into his eight-year administration has profoundly unsettled the mythology of spotless stewardship. The legislative findings; painstaking, expansive, and damning in implication, revealed a pattern of governance marked by extraordinary financial opacity. Massive loans contracted with limited safeguards, contracts whose execution bore little resemblance to their cost, withdrawals that strained the boundaries of due process, and an administrative culture dismissive of institutional restraint all featured prominently. What emerged was not the portrait of disciplined reform, but of power exercised with alarming latitude.

This reckoning matters because as governor, he built his public identity on moral superiority. He was never content merely to govern; he appointed himself judge in the public square; swift to ascribe bad faith, eager to assign blame, unapologetic in his harsh verdicts against colleagues and critics alike.

For daring to point out a seemingly innocuous error of the El-Rufai administration, I was once exiled from my beloved Kaduna State for close to five years! El-Rufai was then the Emperor of Kaduna and the all-knowing. That same man now finds his administration referred, through formal legislative process, to anti-corruption agencies for further action. The irony is stark. The standards he weaponised against others have returned, sharpened by record and process.

As investigations advanced and prosecutions involving former aides commenced, El-Rufai’s conspicuous absence from Nigeria became impossible to ignore. Though no formal declaration of exile was made, his prolonged stay abroad, coinciding with mounting institutional scrutiny, has fuelled widespread speculation. In Kaduna, most discerning persons are well aware that Mallam Nasir El Rufai has gone on self-exile; obviously running from prosecution for a plethora of fraud-related cases. A figure once omnipresent in national discourse now communicates largely by proxy, his physical distance mirroring a growing distance from the accountability he once demanded of others.

That absence was briefly punctured at the 23rd Daily Trust Dialogue, where a speech attributed to him was read in his stead. The address was remarkable not for its insight, but for its selective memory. It railed against governance without accountability, selective law enforcement, decayed infrastructure, unpaid salaries, and ethical collapse. To attentive listeners, the language sounded uncannily familiar; echoing, almost verbatim, the conclusions of the very legislative probe into his own administration. Only this time, the mirror was turned outward. It was a moment of unintentional self-indictment.

More troubling are persistent reports, unproven yet widely discussed, that while abroad, the former governor remains politically active, holding private consultations supposedly secret locations abroad, with political actors bent on upending at all costs, the current administration both at the federal level and Kaduna State. In a democracy, dissent is legitimate. But dissent that appears driven by grievance rather than principle, conducted from afar while questions of accountability remain unresolved, invites skepticism. Power exercised without responsibility is precisely the condition El-Rufai once warned the nation against.

Meanwhile, Kaduna State has moved on; and the contrast is instructive. Under the inclusive leadership of Senator Uba Sani, the state has begun a deliberate departure from the politics of discord that defined much of the previous era. Where confrontation once prevailed, dialogue is now emphasised. Where ethno-religious tension was inflamed, reconciliation is pursued. Governance has shifted from severity to stability, from spectacle to substance. Kaduna is calmer, more cohesive, and increasingly forward-looking.

Perhaps the most telling verdict on El-Rufai’s absence is this: Kaduna is not diminished by it. The state is embracing larger dreams and broader aspirations, unburdened by the polarisation that once characterised its public life. The politics of constant antagonism has given way to an ethos of rebuilding: socially, economically, and morally.

History judges more than legality; it judges temperament, consistency, and integrity. El-Rufai’s defenders may argue that courts, not commentaries, will determine culpability. That investigations are not convictions. All of that is true. But reputations are not undone by enemies alone; they are eroded by contradiction.

The tragedy of El-Rufai’s unraveling lies not only in the allegations that trail his administration, but in the collapse of the moral shelter he constructed for himself. By elevating himself as a standard others could not meet, he ensured that any fall would be measured against the height of his own proclamations. By governing with contempt for dissent, he narrowed the space for credibility when scrutiny turned inward.

In the end, the self-styled puritan stands confronted by the very questions he once posed to others. Whether he returns to face them openly or continues to address the nation from afar will shape the final chapter of his public life. But one truth has already settled beyond dispute: Kaduna has turned the page. The future is being written without him.

Jubril, a developmental economist lives in Zaria and can be reached at ibroj63@gmail.com