Rotimi Fasan
Since Nasir el-Rufai, the disaffected former governor of Kaduna State, lost his mojo after being played by his former friends in the All Progressives Congress, APC, he has assumed the status of a prophet. With all the petulance he can muster, he has promised to send President Bola Tinubu back to Lagos, away from the soft life of Aso Villa. Not satisfied with what would appear to many Nigerians to be words plucked from the metaphysical realms, El-Rufai has with his usual bravado brought mathematical rigour to his prediction (or is it prophesy?). He has been crunching the numbers to prove how Tinubu would be ousted. Or so he claims.
As part of his exertions in this regard, he took his political crusade to Imo State, in the heartland of Ala Igbo. And here we must make a beeline to the Bible to hear what the prophet has to say in the First Book of Samuel Chapter 10 verse 10-11: ‘And when they came thither to the hill, behold, a company of prophets met him; and the spirit of God came upon him, and he prophesied among them. And it came to pass, when all that knew him beforetime saw that behold, he prophesied among the prophets, then the people said one to another, What is this that is come unto the son of Kish? Is Saul also among the prophets?’ And my question today: Is Nasir el-Rufai also among the prophets? Otherwise, what was he doing amid that company of awe-stricken Anglican priests, decked out in full clerical garb?
Igbo politics, with the desperate search for a president of Igbo extraction, is today at a crossroads. The confusion is not limited to Peter Obi who seems to have lost any sense of where his political future lies. After jumping ship from APGA to PDP between 2006 and 2013, his eleventh-hour rush into the Labour Party following his loss in the power play with Atiku Abubakar in 2023, seemed a divine move. With his emergence in the ADC where Atiku’s shadows loom large, the stage seems set for a repeat of what happened between the two men in 2023. While this plays out, Obi keeps one leg between the door of the LP where his influence has considerably waned amid the dog fight among members of the party, a sizeable part of which does not identify as Obidient.
But it was in the LP that a convergence of circumstances, not the least of which were the inimical and ineptly executed policies of the Muhammadu Buhari administration, the same faith ticket of the APC presidential candidates and widespread youth disenchantment- these came together to make his star shine. That move raised his stock as a national figure even if not to the level of the likes of Tinubu or Atiku. I know his supporters don’t like to hear that but it just happens to be the truth. Obi does not yet have what it takes (whether good or bad) to play politics beyond the regional level. This is why even a regional politician like Rabiu Kwakwanso would not contemplate standing as Obi’s running mate. But for the circumstances I have mentioned above, topped by the Igbo desire for a president of Igbo extraction, Obi is still in the league of Tinubu’s and Atiku’s lieutenants, many of whom have only been governors.
Whether by intellect, political sagacity and morality, can anyone truly rate Obi higher than Raji Fashola or Kayode Fayemi? From Igboland itself, how well would he measure against Kingsley Moghalu or Chukwuma Soludo that some South-Easterners love to hate these days? I won’t be surprised, though, if after serving as governor, Soludo becomes the darling of the Igbo in their search for a president. He needs only show the prospects. Obi, a middling performer, was nowhere as admired as he is right now when he was governor. This is one fact many like to forget in their determination to rewrite history and transform contemporary experience into ancient history. Yet, a quick look at the newspapers of that time would prove this point. My hope is that Obi would use the health break he has taken, time he no doubt needs more, and most probably took, to clear the fog in his thinking, especially as it concerns his political direction, to chart a new course from the overexposure of the immediate past.
But there El-Rufai was with a microphone, an unlikely guest of a gawking church, preaching his sermon of Igbo inclusion in Nigerian politics. The continuous voters’ registration, he rightly observed, is lowest in the South-East. But do the Igbo need an El-Rufai to remind them of that? Perhaps, no politician has spewed more divisive rhetoric than El-Rufai. For him, the end always justifies the means. He has and has always enjoyed the facility to talk from both sides of the mouth. He is like some Igbo commentators who are beginning to see Igbo path to the presidency (even when they are still too shy to admit it) not only in El-Rufai’s extremist misbehaviour and Yoruphobia, but in what they call the fiction of Fulani domination, a claim they say originated from the South-West media establishment. I guess it was the South-West media that infused such ideas into the head of their beloved Nnamdi Kanu whose Eastern Security Network was all but established to combat herders’, specifically Fulani, invasion?
Nigerians have no business demonising any ethnicity. What we need is an inclusive society where nobody suffers discrimination based on their expressed faith, ethnicity, biological or social preferences. A society where people can aspire to be the best that they can be and help themselves to the best the land can offer on the basis of equality. El-Rufai’s new admirers in the South-East probably know him better than his near kith and kin in Southern Kaduna over whom he laid a heavy hand for the best part of eight years mainly for ethnic and religious reasons. If for politically pragmatic reasons Bola Tinubu ran on a same faith ticket for which some Nigerians, particularly the Igbo and other Yes-Daddy followers, would not forgive him, El-Rufai did the same thing for purely ethnic and religious reasons. Think!
That’s who Obi now breaks bread, smiles broadly and holds hands with like besotted lovers. Obi is no more a content creator! There is, indeed, nothing politics cannot do. Except make people think logically. Now El-Rufai, Kabiru Marafa, whose seven million votes Tinubu must lose, and Solomon Dalung, all sons of the prophets, have spoken, I ask like the quoted Bible passage goes on to demand: But who is their father?
Vanguard
