el-Rufai And Season Of Infamy

For a man who is vertically and horizontally challenged, these are certainly not the best of times. Not long after his inauguration as the governor of Kaduna state on May29, 2015, latent matters in the politico-economic chemistry of Kaduna soon became manifest; making seething issues to set out as rekindled sentiments and renewed grievances that left Southern Kaduna especially as the guinea pig of the orchestra. All the same, a culture of one finger salutation for the governor emerged no sooner as a commonplace among the cultural communities and electoral mass that make up Kaduna, signifying that the victims of the bestial campaign, hegemonic malice, and nocturnal ambush in the Southern part of the state will neither stand alone nor go down lonely, the one finger being symbolic that, come 2019, go must Nasir el-Rufai. And, go he must, even for his brazen dislike of Southern Kaduna people and their future.
Relying on a dubious alibi of security vulnerability, of which he is arguably complicit, he foisted boko haram on the people by forging the closure of all tertiary institutions there, even as primary and secondary schools operate without hindrances from any security threat!
And the omens have continued to straddle at el-Rufai. In the first stanza of President Buhari’s medical vacation in London, the Kaduna governor was reportedly unable to manage his ambition and its taller shadows, to the extent that he bruised and battered a buccaneer collective, and threatened the agenda of an incendiary and reactionary cabal that casts a cyst around Buhari both at home and away.
However, the first in his penance serial came almost immediately as he was tactically ‘engaged’ but actually designed out of abridged ceremonies on the arrival of Buhari in the wee hours of that morning of angst and turmoil in a makeshift military landing facility in Kaduna where, curiously, el-Rufai’s deputy became a preferred and choice guest of honour.
It is not altogether unusual for ill-tempered times to bear a bad or unsavoury season. This milieu also captures the helplessness of el-Rufai. Some idle lot, misguided precipitously, and certainly disconcerted and disoriented even in the limited sense of ‘Northern’ nationalism, opted to fester the plight and blight of el-Rufai, by choosing to make Kaduna the base of their tempestuous charlatanism misrepresented as the “Kaduna Declaration”.
el-Rufai’s misfortune is that many have refused to believe his innocence or lack of complicity in the arm-chair activism of a so-called coalition of youths apparently unable to appreciate their circumstance and define their future. This misfortune deepens the more for el-Rufai as his call for the arrest of the group has failed to yield desired results. Does el-Rufai, with the reputation of a maximum dictator with uncommon talent for dealing with ‘erring’ journalists and hounding them out of sight with the dutiful abandon a pest controller will pests, really meant it when he called for the arrest of those misbegotten youths who committed unmistaken and unmitigated felony by openly emasculating the constitution of the federal republic by expelling the Igbo from the North? Why has it been impossible for el-Rufai to arrest this group when they have not hidden who they are and where they are operating from? If this group is rather amorphous and difficult to hound down, what of Ango Abdullahi, who has not only cheered the youths, but lent adult ‘sobriety’ and elderly amnesia to this particular case of youth failure, and looks adequately as the template for this deviant irredentism? It is to this extent el-Rufai is bearing a double image in the public court, no matter for how long his call for the arrest of the ‘youths’ subsists, and for as long as people like Ango Abdullahi continue to walk free and pretend to be nationalists.
No doubt, it is a refreshing irony that the noise of an idle group has engaged the energies of an active class that has been devoting man hours to douse the resultant tensions and passions. This explains why, in spite of its dubious foundations and questionable origins, it is more of a constructive nonsense than a nonsensical construction. Yes, many have rightly dismissed the quit notice – read in most places as for all southerners – from the North as an inappropriate counterpoise to the Biafra agitation. For one, it heightens a sensitivity of a civil war; and brightens the background for crisis. On the score of good, the development has adequately engaged the smooth talking Acting President in the past few weeks, with a huge potential to further smoothen his oral speech competence. Secondly, whoever conceived the joke, and whatever are its underpinnings, the
development has succeeded immensely in diverting national attention from the absence of President Buhari from power, and the state of his illness, to the state of the nation and the drift to unnecessary crises.