Re: “My Relationships and the Aftermath” – Posterity is indeed the ultimate judge, and its court is already in session
Mallam Nasir El-Rufai,
Your recent public statement, titled “My Relationships and the Aftermath,” released from the ICPC executive arena on September 23, 2026, has been widely read, analyzed, and debated across the length and breadth of Nigeria. In your text, you adopt a posture of stoic philosophy and spiritual resignation. You speak and preach of adversity as a tool that “illuminates relationships”. You tell Naijas that you harbor no bitterness, that you expect no reciprocity from the allies who have abandoned you in your hour of legal and political trial, and that you leave your ultimate vindication to Almighty Allah and the verdict of posterity.
To an outsider unfamiliar with the trajectory of your public career, this statement might read as the profound reflections of a wronged statesman—a victim of a fickle political class that uses men of intellect and discards them when the wind changes direction.
However, for millions of Nigerians, particularly those who lived under your governance in Kaduna State or watched your policies from afar, your poetic reflections on abandonment carry a profound sense of irony. You speak of your current isolation as an unprovoked trial, but a rigorous examination of your record suggests a different reality. The silence of your former allies, the hostility of the public, and your current political alienation are not a twist of cruel fate. They are the natural harvest of the seeds of sectarianism, arrogance, and high-handedness you sowed throughout your years in public office.
This response is a necessary intervention. Like Awikonko did to the liars from Oyo town about the Yorubas. It is a refusal to allow history to be rewritten by an eloquent and desperate liar. It is a reminder that the adversity currently illuminating your relationships is also illuminating the structural damages your political philosophy inflicted upon the secular and pluralistic fabric of the geographical expression called Nigeria.( apologies to Chinua Achebe and Chief Awolowo ).You are feigning myopism.- You are not a victim of arbitrary political betrayal; you are experiencing the inevitable isolation that comes to leaders who weaponize identity, disregard the rule of law, and rule with absolute disdain for the sentiments of the people.
For decades, your public persona was carefully curated around the concept of technocratic excellence. As the Director-General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) and later as the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), you gained a reputation as a fierce, uncompromising reformer. You were the man who “got things done,” the administrator who valued merit over mediocrity, and the intellectual who could modernize broken systems.
When you, a man from Katsina, assumed the governorship of Kaduna State in 2015, many hoped that this technocratic efficiency would bring development to a state long plagued by ethno-religious volatility. Instead, your tenure revealed a darker, deeply divisive approach to governance. The mask of the detached technocrat fell, revealing an ideological bent that many citizens and religious bodies, including the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), directly characterized as religious bigotry.
You have frequently defended your actions by stating that you are a man of pure logic who disdains the “industry of ethno-religious entitlement.” But true leadership in a complex, multi-faith state like Kaduna requires empathy, balancing, altruism and a deep respect for diversity. You chose the opposite path. You systematically dismantled the delicate political conventions that kept a fragile peace between the predominantly Muslim northern populace and the largely Christian southern population of Kaduna State.
By the time you exited office, you had left behind a state more segregated, more suspicious, and more traumatized along religious lines than at any point since the return to democracy in 1999. The isolation you face today from a broader national coalition is a direct consequence of this legacy; national leadership cannot be built on a foundation of sectarian division.
Nowhere was your sectarian political philosophy more visibly demonstrated than in your decision regarding the 2019 gubernatorial election in Kaduna State. For decades, the unwritten code of Kaduna State politics dictated that a gubernatorial ticket must feature a Muslim and a Christian to ensure that both major religious demographics felt represented at the highest levels of state power.
You broke this convention by selecting Dr. Hadiza Sabuwa Balarabe as your running mate, presenting Kaduna with a Muslim-Muslim ticket. At the time, you defended this as a choice based purely on competence, arguing that religion should not be a factor in governance.
However, the true motivation behind this decision was exposed in June 2023, shortly after you left office. A video emerged showing you addressing a gathering of Islamic clerics. In that footage, you spoke explicitly about the political calculation behind the Muslim-Muslim ticket. You boasted that the arrangement was not a temporary electoral strategy, but a deliberate plan to ensure the sustained political dominance of one religion over another in Kaduna State. You explicitly stated that this model had been successfully replicated at the national level during the 2023 presidential election to prove that the support of a particular religious demographic was no longer necessary to win power.
This viral video shocked the nation. It confirmed what your critics had long alleged: that your appeal to “competence” was merely a rhetorical shield used to hide a calculated agenda of demographic marginalization. You spoke to those clerics not as a secular statesman building a united society, but as a sectarian strategist celebrating the political defeat of a segment of your own citizens.
When a leader uses the pulpit of public office to declare political warfare on a portion of the populace based on how they worship, that leader forfeits the moral right to complain about a lack of empathy when adversity strikes. The political establishment at the national level has distanced itself from you not because they lack loyalty, but because your public admissions made you a political liability in a country that requires cross-regional and cross-religious consensus to govern. I wrote an opinion to warn Obi about you.
Your legacy cannot be discussed without addressing the prolonged humanitarian tragedy in Southern Kaduna. During your eight years as governor, communities in Southern Kaduna—predominantly Christian—suffered relentless attacks, massacres, and displacements by armed bandits.
While security was a complex challenge across Nigeria at that time under the incompetent and fellow sectarian, Buhari , your rhetorical and administrative response to the crisis in Southern Kaduna alienated the victims and worsened their trauma. Just this month, on September 3, 2026, Minister of Defence General Christopher Gwabin Musa openly accused your administration of executing policies that actively deepened these divisions, describing the atmosphere you cultivated as entirely “toxic”. The Minister noted that your governance systematically cut the state in two, creating a climate of fear where citizens from Southern Kaduna felt completely unsafe moving to or living in the north, and vice versa.
Instead of acting as a consoler-in-chief, you frequently adopted an adversarial tone toward the leadership of these communities. You accused Southern Kaduna elders of inventing or exaggerating the crises to extract “peace money” from the state government. You imposed prolonged, economically suffocating curfews on traumatized communities, effectively punishing the victims while the perpetrators roamed free. In a move that many viewed as the height of insensitivity, you openly admitted during a television interview that your administration had tracked down foreign Fulani herdsmen across West Africa and paid them money to stop killing people in Southern Kaduna, under the guise that their grievances were historic. With this, you, Mallam Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai hold the title of the founder of kidnapping for ransom in Nigeria. Prior to your fulanization of this business, it was pure religious bigotry.
When Christian groups and local associations raised their voices in protest, you dismissed them as merchants of conflict. You used the full power of the state apparatus to silence dissent, arresting journalists, activists, and local leaders who criticized your security architecture. Your legal team is currently demanding ₦10 billion in damages from the Minister of Defence over these scathing public reminders of your record, but no amount of lawsuits can erase the deeply held memories of the victims. A ruler who shows no mercy to the grieving cannot expect the public to weep for him when his political fortunes decline. The tears shed in Southern Kaduna under your administration form a barrier of conscience that prevents ordinary Nigerians from viewing your current legal troubles as an act of unjust victimization. Nemesis is on duty.
Your sectarian approach was matched by a governance style marked by authoritarianism, financial recklessness, and impatience for the rule of law. While your statement attempts to frame your current isolation as a spiritual test, the legal reality tells a completely different story.
You are currently detained following extensive investigations by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), an onslaught triggered by the scathing report of the Kaduna State House of Assembly ad-hoc committee. The legislative probe into your 2015–2023 tenure uncovered a staggering ₦432 billion ($587 million in foreign debt and ₦85 billion in domestic debt) that was allegedly siphoned, mismanaged, or laundered under the guise of questionable project spending and fraudulent light rail and CCTV contract awards. The Assembly explicitly recommended your prosecution for abuse of office, diversion of public funds, and money laundering.
Rather than a grand political conspiracy, you are facing multiple counts in federal and state courts. This includes a highly sensitive 5-count charge filed by the Department of State Services (DSS) for allegedly wiretapping the telephone communications of National Security Adviser Nuhu Ribadu—a matter in which the court has reserved its ruling on your no-case submission for October 26, 2026.
In Kaduna, your administration became synonymous with the aggressive cum selective demolition of properties belonging to political opponents, critics, and rival factions within your own party. Furthermore, your labor policies showed a complete lack of human empathy. The mass job-kpaing of over 20,000 public school teachers and thousands of local government workers under the guise of civil service reform threw countless families into sudden poverty. You forgot the fundamental law of political dynamics: that the fear you inspire while in power turns into absolute indifference the moment you step down. The “allies” you complain about today are simply treating you with the same cold, transactional calculation that you applied to the civil servants, political rivals, and ordinary citizens of Kaduna State.
In your statement, you write: “Adversity has a way of illuminating relationships… I stand by my decisions, guided by my faith and conscience, at considerable personal cost.”
This is a masterful exercise in self-delusion. The adversity you face today is not a conspiracy against an innocent man; it is the institutional review of an administration that operated with absolute hubris. For eight years, you acted as though you would never account to any earthly authority. You ignored court orders, dismissed legislative oversights, and ran a highly centralized government.
Your attempt to paint your current isolation as a spiritual test of patience misinterprets the nature of justice. What you are experiencing is not an unjust betrayal by your peers; it is the natural consequence of a career built on burning bridges. You spent years alienated from the Christian population of the Middle Belt and Southern Nigeria due to your sectarian statements. You alienated the traditional rulers by reducing their stipends and restructuring their ancient institutions without consultation; therefore, none was ready today to help sign your bail forms. You alienated the political class through your public arrogance and claims of intellectual superiority.
When a man systematically cuts ties with every segment of society, he should not wonder why he finds himself alone in the wilderness. You are not a prophet suffering for his convictions; you are a politician facing the consequences of a highly divisive legacy.
Conclusion:
Mallam El-Rufai, you concluded your reflection by stating that you leave your final accountability to Almighty Allah and the verdict of posterity. On this point, I am totally and Naijaly in complete agreement. Posterity is indeed the ultimate judge, and its court is already in session as I write.
However, the verdict of posterity will not look kindly on a leader who used his immense intellect not to bind the wounds of a fractured nation, but to widen its chasms. Posterity will remember you as the governor who openly celebrated the political exclusion of Christian citizens in a multi-religious state. It will remember you as the technocrat who allowed ideological sectarianism to override basic human empathy during the massacres in Southern Kaduna. It will remember you as the politician who boasted about religious dominance to an audience of clerics, only to turn around and write philosophical essays about peace and justice when power left his hands.
You are harvesting exactly what you sowed. You sowed division, and you have reaped isolation. You sowed arrogance, and you have reaped a lack of sympathy. You sowed the disregard for the feelings and rights of others, and you are now experiencing a political landscape that is completely indifferent to your plight.
Do not blame the allies who have stayed silent. They are merely following the rules of the transactional, empathy-free political environment that you helped construct and validate. As you reflect in your solitude, look less at the betrayal of your friends like Atiku, Marks, Obi but more at the choices you made when you held the power of life and death over millions of your fellow citizens.
True peace will not come from writing eloquent defenses or adopting the pose of a stoic philosopher. It will only come from an honest acknowledgment of the pains your governance caused, and a sincere apology to the people of Kaduna State and Nigeria whom you systematically divided. Until that fruit of repentance is sowed, the harvest of isolation will continue.
Mallam, let me conclude finally by letting you know again and again that you are the technocrat who shaped kidnapping into a craft, and the sons of darkness grew rich because you revealed the worth of terror. You taught them that ransom could be gathered like grain from a blighted field. And now the nation suffers; the land groans beneath the weight of your teaching, and sorrow has become its daily bread. I cannot give you flowers. I give you the garden, for ransom has watered its soil in Nigeria. The trophy for the heights of kidnapping in Nigeria is yours. No one is more deserving than Mallam Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai .What you lack biologically, you substitute with wickedness. Your holier than all are in your book. Your book speaks volumes of your mentality. Everyone else was bad except Nasir. Atiku who introduced you to Obasanjo was not spared. Obasanjo who made you too was dragged into the mud in your attempt to paint a Saint Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai
Your Epitaph should read:
Here lies the Architect of Southern Kaduna’s Ruin. With a silver tongue he drew lines across the land, and in his wake, left a divided state and silent villages. Let the earth press as heavily upon him as his years of rule pressed upon his people.”
Yours faithfully,
Abiodun Egunjobi