…A Critical Examination of a Divisive Figure and the Threat to National Unity
By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma
Over the past year, I have followed Nasir El-Rufai’s political theatrics with a mix of morbid curiosity and intellectual disquiet. Not out of admiration – his legacies, most especially as Kaduna’s polarizing governor and enabler of the Buhari administration’s most draconian policies precludes that – but to observe how a man once ensconced in Nigeria’s innermost corridors of power would navigate life as an insider cast adrift.
Nigerian politicians, notoriously allergic to irrelevance, often crumble when stripped of influence. El-Rufai, however, has chosen a different script: reinvention as a “principled opposition leader,” railing against the very system he helped construct. Yet, behind the media blitz and performative outrage lies a far simpler truth: El-Rufai’s politics have never been about ideology or nation-building. They are, and always have been, about El-Rufai!
When news broke in early March 2025 of his defection from the All Progressives Congress (APC) to the Social Democratic Party (SDP), few were surprised. For months, El-Rufai had telegraphed his move through a calculated crescendo of media appearances – lambasting President Bola Tinubu’s “betrayals,” lamenting the APC’s “moral decay,” and positioning himself as a martyr of political witch-hunts.
To the undiscerning, it seemed a bold stand against a faltering administration. But to those familiar with El-Rufai’s playbook, it was déjà vu: the same man who abandoned the PDP in 2009, the CPC in 2013, and now the APC, was merely recycling his oldest trick – party-hopping as performance art. In a private conversation days before his defection, I predicted his exit from the APC to friends. The only uncertainty was his destination. When the SDP emerged as his new vehicle, the irony was palpable: a party once synonymous with progressive ideals now hosting a figure whose governance in Kaduna entrenched ethno-religious division.
What compelled this reflectios, however, was not his defection itself, but the audacity of his rebranding. El-Rufai’s media machinery swiftly cast him as Nigeria’s “last democrat,” a “bold voice” against Tinubu’s excesses. This narrative, amplified by sycophantic op-eds and social media campaigns, struck me as not just disingenuous, but dangerous. Here was a man who, as Kaduna governor, weaponized state power to demolish churches, sideline minorities, and shield Fulani militias from accountability, now posturing as a defender of democracy. Here was the architect of Buhari’s ruinous policies – from botched currency reforms to militarized crackdowns – suddenly posing as a reformist visionary. The cognitive dissonance was staggering.
El-Rufai’s lamentations of “ostracization” ring hollow because they are. His rift with Tinubu stems not from principled dissent but from personal grievance – the denial of a ministerial appointment after the Senate rejected him over corruption and insecurity allegations tied to his Kaduna tenure. His crocodile tears over APC’s “betrayal” ignore his own role in hollowing out the party’s ideals, reducing it to a patronage machine for Northern oligarchs. Even his calls for opposition unity under the SDP reek of opportunism. This is not a man seeking to unseat Tinubu for Nigeria’s sake, but one scrambling to reclaim relevance after miscalculating his indispensability.
This essay, then, is an exercise in peeling back the layers of El-Rufai’s meticulously crafted persona. It interrogates the chasm between his self-mythology as a “tough reformer” and the reality of his career – a trail of broken alliances, sectarian policies, and unbridled ambition. It asks: Is El-Rufai truly an opposition leader, or merely a displaced opportunist raging against his own obsolescence? By examining his political nomadism, his governance in Kaduna, and his psychological need to dominate, we expose not just the man, but the peril of mistaking performative defiance for democratic dissent. In a nation teetering on the precipice of authoritarianism, El-Rufai’s rebranding as a “savior” is not just ironic – it is a warning.
Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai, the former Governor of Kaduna State, embodies the paradox of Nigerian politics – a self-styled technocrat whose legacy is etched in the scars of ethno-religious division. To his admirers, he is a bold modernizer, a Harvard-trained reformer who championed privatization and urban renewal. To his detractors, he is a Machiavellian opportunist whose policies and rhetoric have deepened Nigeria’s most dangerous fault lines.
His career, a labyrinth of contradictions, reveals a man who wields power as both a scalpel and a cudgel: dismantling institutions in the name of progress while entrenching Northern Muslim hegemony under the guise of unity. From the demolished neighborhoods in Abuja to the mass graves of Southern Kaduna, El-Rufai’s trajectory exposes the fragility of Nigeria’s democracy, where ambition often masquerades as ideology and exclusion is reframed as efficiency.
Born in 1960 in Daudawa, Katsina State, El-Rufai’s worldview was shaped by Northern Nigeria’s conservative Islamic ethos. A gifted student, he ascended through elite academic circles, earning a law degree and a Harvard MBA – credentials that later became pillars of his “apolitical technocrat” persona. His early career under President Olusegun Obasanjo, first as privatization czar and later as Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Minister, foreshadowed a pattern of ruthless pragmatism. As FCT Minister, he ordered the bulldozing of “illegal” settlements, displacing over 800,000 predominantly poor residents. Critics decried the act as elitist tyranny; El-Rufai hailed it as necessary urbanization. This duality – destruction framed as development – would become a hallmark of his governance.
His memoir, The Accidental Public Servant (2013), offers a window into his political philosophy: a blend of Northern exceptionalism and disdain for dissent. “The North’s political dominance is non-negotiable,” he allegedly declared, framing any challenge to Hausa-Fulani primacy as an affront to national unity. Yet his career has been marked by ideological fluidity, with party loyalties shifting as readily as the sands of the Sahel. From the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) to the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), then to the All Progressives Congress (APC), and finally to the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 2025, El-Rufai’s defections trace a map of opportunism.
Each transition served a calculated end: abandoning the PDP when Obasanjo’s patronage waned, joining the CPC to align with Muhammadu Buhari’s Northern base, and merging parties to form the APC – a vehicle to unseat President Goodluck Jonathan. By 2025, sidelined within the APC after clashing with President Bola Tinubu, he sought refuge in the SDP, a party historically rooted in progressive pluralism – an ironic pivot for a figure synonymous with sectarianism.
El-Rufai’s governorship of Kaduna State (2015 – 2023) laid bare the chasm between his reformist rhetoric and divisive actions. Southern Kaduna, a region of predominantly Christian ethnic groups, became a flashpoint. His 2018 Land Use Act, marketed as a tool for economic modernization, stripped communities of ancestral land rights, enabling armed Fulani herders to encroach on farmlands with impunity.
Amnesty International documented over 1,200 deaths in the region during his tenure, with survivors accusing his administration of deliberate inaction. Yet El-Rufai dismissed the carnage as “criminality,” even as his government swiftly crushed dissent elsewhere. In 2015, the military – under his approval – massacred 347 Shiite Muslims protesting in Zaria, a stark contrast to his inertia in Southern Kaduna. This asymmetry was no accident; it reflected a governance philosophy steeped in the Sokoto Caliphate’s legacy, where power serves to enforce religious and cultural homogeneity.
The Islamization agenda crystallized in his 2019 Muslim-Muslim gubernatorial ticket, an unprecedented move in a state where 40% identify as Christian. While touting “competence over creed,” his policies betrayed bias: ₦5 billion allocated to renovate mosques and Islamic schools, while 34 Christian schools in Zaria were bulldozed for “regulatory violations.” The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) accused him of “state-sponsored erasure,” a charge amplified when his son, Bello, threatened “bloodshed” against Southern Kaduna critics on social media.
El-Rufai’s defenders pointed to urban renewal projects and a digitized land registry, yet these “reforms” often masked cronyism. The Kaduna Geographic Information Service (KADGIS), for instance, became a tool to dispossess Southern communities, reallocating lands to Northern developers. Infrastructure investments flowed disproportionately to Muslim-majority zones, leaving Southern Kaduna’s roads and hospitals in decay – a spatial politics of exclusion.
His political survivalism extends beyond policy. His alliances dissolve when power dynamics shift, leaving a trail of embittered former allies. Once a protégé of Vice President Atiku Abubakar, he pivoted to Obasanjo during their 2003 feud, orchestrating anti-Atiku probes to curry favor. Later, as a “vocal critic” of President Jonathan, he weaponized ethno-regional resentment, declaring that “a Southerner cannot fix Northern problems” – a narrative that fueled the APC’s rise. Yet his governorship alienated even APC allies; his insistence on a Northern presidential candidate in 2023 clashed with Tinubu’s ambitions, leading to his ostracization. The Senate’s rejection of his ministerial nomination over corruption and insecurity allegations marked a humbling fall – a man who once wielded power as a birthright, reduced to political vagrancy.
His recent defection to the SDP, framed as a moral stand against Tinubu’s “betrayal,” reeks of hypocrisy. The SDP, a party advocating social democracy, now risks becoming a vessel for Northern revanchism under his influence. His courtship of figures like Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar – a Christian Southerner and a Muslim Northerner – is less about coalition-building than rehabilitating his image. Southern Christians remember his complicity in their suffering; Northern elites question his loyalty. Even his anti-corruption tirades ring hollow, given Kaduna’s graft scandals: ₦32 billion in misappropriated debt proceeds, illegal allocation of grazing reserves to cronies. Tinubu’s administration, while arguably motivated by vendetta, now seeks to prosecute him – a poetic twist for a man who once manipulated the state to silence critics.
Nasir El-Rufai’s metamorphosis from a tyrannical enforcer of power to a fiery opposition voice underscores the tragic farce of Nigerian politics – a system where principles are as fleeting as alliances, and redemption is a performance staged for survival. His newfound role as a “scorched-earth one-man opposition,” railing against the Tinubu administration with the same venom he once reserved for critics, is less a rebirth than a grotesque pantomime. Like a Shakespearean antagonist, he wields indignation not as a tool for justice but as a weapon of vengeance, his rage fueled not by the plight of Nigerians but by the sting of personal irrelevance. His defection to the SDP, his TikTok theatrics, and his sudden camaraderie with once-despised rivals are not markers of ideological evolution but the thrashings of a man unmoored from the patronage that once defined him. As Farooq Kperogi astutely observes, today’s dissenter is often tomorrow’s despot: El-Rufai’s “activism” is a transient gambit, a pause in the lifelong project of accumulating power, not a renunciation of it.
His political persona is a study in contrasts – a man whose physical diminutiveness belies a towering, almost volcanic, force of will. Standing at just over five feet, El-Rufai has long defied Nigeria’s cultural fixation on stature, where height and presence are often conflated with authority. What he lacked in physicality, he compensated for with gumption: a combustible mix of audacity, intellectual arrogance, and a Napoleon complex that drove him to punch far above his weight. This relentless drive, oscillating between magnetic charisma and destructive disruption, has made him one of Nigeria’s most polarizing figures – a man whose allies admire his “iron will” and enemies revile as a “tyrant in a technocrat’s clothing.”
El-Rufai’s magnetism stems from his ability to weaponize his underdog status. Colleagues and adversaries alike describe him as a “force of nature” – a man whose razor-sharp intellect, wit, and unshakable self-confidence disarm even skeptics. His rise from a middle-class Northern family to Harvard-educated reformer tapped into a potent narrative: the outsider challenging Nigeria’s bloated, corrupt establishment. As FCT Minister, he cultivated a reputation as a “no-nonsense fixer,” bulldozing illegal structures and bureaucratic red tape with equal fervor. Supporters saw in him a rare breed – a leader unafraid to make enemies in pursuit of progress.
Yet this magnetism is laced with performative defiance. El-Rufai thrives on confrontation, often framing himself as a martyr to vested interests. His 2013 memoir, The Accidental Public Servant, reads like a manifesto of grievance, casting him as the “principled reformer” sabotaged by lesser men. This narrative resonates with Northern Nigeria’s disillusioned youth, who see in his swagger a rebuke to geriatric politicians. Even his critics concede his ability to inspire loyalty; aides speak of his “hypnotic clarity of vision,” while Northern elites tolerate his abrasiveness as the price of having a “fighter” in their corner.
Beneath the bravado lies a psyche shaped by insecurity and a hunger for validation. El-Rufai’s compulsion to dominate conversations – often interrupting rivals mid-sentence – betrays a need to assert intellectual superiority, a trait amplified by his academic pedigree. His governance style in Kaduna mirrored this: a micromanager who centralized power, sidelined dissenters, and framed opposition as “sabotage.” Former aides recount his volcanic temper, with one describing him as “a man who confuses aggression with strength.”
This insecurity manifests most starkly in his relationship with religion and ethnicity. El-Rufai’s fervent advocacy for Northern Muslim hegemony – from his Muslim-Muslim ticket in Kaduna to his dismissive rhetoric toward Southern Kaduna’s Christians – reads less as ideological conviction than as overcompensation. Raised in a region where Fulani identity is synonymous with aristocratic privilege, El-Rufai’s embrace of Islamic fundamentalism and ethno-nationalism may reflect a subconscious bid to cement his legitimacy among Northern traditionalists who initially viewed him as an upstart “outsider”. His vitriolic attacks on Southern minorities and perceived “disloyal” Muslims (like the Shiites massacred in Zaria) serve a dual purpose: to burnish his hardline credentials and deflect scrutiny from his own contradictions.
El-Rufai’s political nomadism – hopping from PDP to CPC to APC to SDP – reveals a man for whom principles are transactional. His defections are not ideological shifts but survival tactics, driven by a Machiavellian calculus of power. Psychologists might diagnose this as narcissistic adaptability: an ability to reinvent himself while maintaining a core belief in his own infallibility. For El-Rufai, parties are tools, not tribes; loyalty expires when utility dwindles.
This pragmatism masks a deeper nihilism. His tenure as Kaduna governor – marked by mass layoffs, land grabs, and sectarian violence – exposed a philosophy of governance as conquest. To El-Rufai, democracy is not a social contract but a winner-takes-all arena where might (and manipulation) makes right. His allegedly infamous quip – “I don’t care if I’m hated, as long as I’m respected” – captures this ethos. It is the credo of a man who views politics as war, compromise as weakness, and dissent as treason.
His psychological profile explains both his successes and his failures. His gumption propelled him from obscurity to prominence, yet his disruptiveness alienated even natural allies. His Kaduna tenure, while lauded for infrastructure projects, left a trail of communal scars. His defection to the SDP, ostensibly to “unite the opposition,” is classic El-Rufai: a high-risk gambit to remain center stage, even as his influence wanes.
Ultimately, he embodies Nigeria’s existential crisis: a nation torn between the promise of reform and the poison of division. His magnetism speaks to the yearning for strong leadership; his disruptiveness mirrors the chaos he claims to abhor. To admire El-Rufai is to admire a scalpel – sharp, precise, and lethal. But as Nigeria bleeds from a thousand cuts, one wonders: Does the surgeon heal, or does he simply enjoy the cut?
Nigeria’s democracy, however, cannot continue to afford the luxury of such cyclical charades. The nation stands at a precipice, its unity frayed by decades of ethno-religious exploitation and its institutions hollowed out by predators in technocratic clothing. What Nigeria needs is not the rehabilitation of figures like El-Rufai – men who treat governance as a bloodsport – but a radical reimagining of its political ethos. It needs leaders who build bridges rather than bulldoze dissent, who prioritize equity over ethnic triumphalism, and who understand that development divorced from justice is merely dispossession in disguise. El-Rufai’s tenure in Kaduna, etched in the blood of Southern Christian minorities and Shiite Muslims, serves as a grim blueprint of what must be rejected: governance as conquest, diversity as weakness, and power as a private heirloom of the Northern oligarchy.
The caution here is twofold. First, to mistake El-Rufai’s performative dissent for genuine opposition is to ignore history’s lessons. This is a man who, as governor, threatened critics with death, paid bandits to “negotiate” peace, and weaponized land reforms to erase entire communities. His current crusade against Tinubu’s excesses reeks not of principle but of spite – a tantrum thrown by a dethroned king. Second, Nigeria’s salvation will not come from recycling disgraced strongmen or clinging to the illusion that “strong leadership” alone can mend systemic rot. The 2027 elections, already simmering with defections and realignments, risk becoming another theater for recycled vendettas unless Nigerians demand more than the same actors in new costumes.
What Nigeria needs is a democracy rooted in accountability, not impunity. It needs institutions strong enough to prosecute the powerful, not platforms that rehabilitate them. It needs opposition parties that coalesce around ideas, not grudges, and a citizenry immune to the seduction of strongmen peddling nostalgia. El-Rufai’s political afterlife – a spectacle of rage and recalibration – should serve not as inspiration but as a warning: a nation that elevates wolves to power, no matter their momentary sheep’s clothing, will forever remain a pasture of carnage. Nigeria’s future hinges not on which wolf leads the pack, but on dismantling the forest that breeds them. The road to 2027 must be paved with more than the rubble of Southern Kaduna’s schools or the ashes of Zaria’s massacres. It must be a path where justice, not vengeance, guides the way – a path El-Rufai, and those like him, will never walk.
El-Rufai’s legacy is a cautionary tale for Nigeria. His career mirrors the nation’s broader crisis: a democracy hollowed out by ethno-religious patronage, where “reform” becomes a euphemism for exclusion. The solution lies not merely in rejecting figures like him but in dismantling the systems that elevate them. Prosecuting human rights abuses, empowering marginalized communities, and decentralizing power are urgent steps. As El-Rufai lingers on the fringes, plotting a comeback, Nigerians must confront the uncomfortable truth: his brand of politics thrives because the soil remains fertile. Until the roots of division are unearthed – the oligarchic structures, the culture of impunity – the cycle of betrayal and violence will endure. El-Rufai is not an anomaly but a mirror, reflecting a nation still struggling to reconcile its fractured identity.
Nasir El-Rufai’s legacy will hinge on whether history remembers him as a visionary who challenged Nigeria’s rot or a demagogue who deepened its wounds. His psychology – a tinderbox of ambition, insecurity, and ideological flexibility – ensures that the answer, like the man himself, will defy simple categorization.
