The Accidental Public Servant
Page 58
across the street to another bank and the Harvard University credit union and opened two accounts on
the same day, depositing a bit of cash in each. I did not think much of it then because as a Nigerian I
was used to being treated that way – you never know what some Nigerian somewhere in the world
has done in some bank to cause it to put a red flag on all Nigerians, so I let it go.
A couple of months later, I received a phone call from an unfamiliar number in Nigeria. It was a lady
who worked in the office of the secretary to the government of the federation. She introduced herself,
told me that we had never met, but she lived in Abuja, thought I did a wonderful job as minister and
that during my tenure she was able to buy her own house, so she thought the world of me because this
changed her life. I thanked her and explained that I was just doing my job. She said she worked in the
registry of the office of the secretary to government of the federation and she came across a letter
written by the secretary to the government of the federation to two banks in America. She thought that
the letter was most unfair and that was why she decided to call me. She then read the contents of the
letter to me.
The letter was addressed to the presidents of Bank of America and Citibank. The title of the letter
was something to the effect of, ‘Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai, Nigerian fugitive.’ I do not remember the
exact wording of the letter and I am still trying to obtain a copy of it – she promised to keep it for me
– but it explained that I was a cabinet minister in the previous administration that had become a
fugitive from justice and was known to be living in the United States, spending hundreds of millions
of dollars that the Nigerian Senate had investigated and found I had embezzled. The letter then went
on to state that the Nigerian government had information that I may be operating bank accounts in that
bank and to be advised that any monies in such bank accounts may be the proceeds of crime that the
federal government of Nigeria had a claim or an interest in.
Now, I did not operate any bank account with Citibank. I think they just took a shot. But I presume that
when Bank of America received that letter and then saw me in their system as a student with $52,000,
this probably gave them pause. Frankly, if I were in their shoes and did not know better, I probably
would have done the same. The lady asked if I had a fax so that she could send me the letter, but I did
not. I offered to have someone pick up the letter from her on my behalf, but she refused. “I will not
give it to anyone. I do not trust anyone with this, I could lose my job,” she said. “But I will keep it for
you anytime you are coming to Nigeria, or if I am going abroad, I will carry it along with me.” I still
have not had a chance to retrieve the letter as I lost contact with her when my phone was stolen in
Boston some months later.
Around that time, my statistics professor at Harvard, a famous Mathematics professor and author,
Deborah Hughes Hallett, had asked me to be her course assistant since I was one of the top students in
the quantitative methods class during the summer programme. One of the officers of my mid-career
Masters' programme eagerly approved and remarked how pleased she was with how much value I
was adding to the programme. I responded that I was just glad to be there and in the course of that
conversation, the official revealed something that up to that point I did not know about.
“You know, shortly after we admitted you, we got a letter from your government saying you
were an inappropriate person to be in our programme,” he said. “We looked at your
references and concluded that they had far more credibility than the Nigerian government, so
we just ignored it.”
My recommendations were written by Oby, who was then vice-president at the World Bank, Rosa
Whitaker, who was assistant US Trade Representative under Clinton and Bush and a good friend, and
the third one from Hakeem Belo-Osagie. Both Oby and Keem were successful Harvard alumni, which
counted for a lot in the eyes of the Kennedy School. I had obtained a written reference from General
Abdullahi Mohammed, the chief of staff to the president of Nigeria. Instinctively, I declined sending it
to Harvard, and returned it to him unopened after being admitted to the Mason Fellows programme.
Hearing this comment, I am glad I trusted my instincts and did not use that ‘government’
recommendation.
I was shocked. “Really?”
“Yes, it is true.”
“May I have a copy of this letter?”
“Not on your life.”
This response was to be expected I suppose – Harvard is always wary of being involved in needless
controversy or the prospect of being sued. But anyway, these smaller things I found to be far more
irritating than the bigger things. The bigger things, the public things, are easier to handle because they
were out and I could respond, but this sneaky underhanded stuff was typical of Umaru Yar’Adua and
his cowardly gang. The more I saw that, the more I was convinced that even though he denied any
involvement, Umaru had to be behind this. My friends in Nigeria still recommended I restrained
myself, but my anger kept rising. This was beyond smearing my reputation; it was taking deliberate
steps to reduce my ability to live, even though I posed no threat, immediate or distant, to the
Yar’Adua Administration and Umaru’s craving for absolute power.
Then in October my lawyer forwarded to me a letter[135] from the EFCC requesting me to return
again to answer some questions on some unspecified land matter beyond what I had made a written
submission on. Since I knew this would be the end of my programme if I went back to Nigeria, there
was no way I was going to physically go back until I finished school. My lawyer wrote the EFCC to
inform them that I was busy in a graduate degree programme, but would be happy to answer any
questions they wished to submit through my lawyer. The EFCC’s response advanced the request a
step: I had to come back physically or else the EFCC would declare me wanted, which they
eventually did at the end of 2008. The EFCC’s Director of Operations, Tunde Ogunsakin, and Farida
Waziri’s spokesman, Femi Babafemi, gleefully announced that I was a ‘wanted man’ and they would
not take any questions from the media about it, save to claim that I had ‘N32 billion unaccounted for.’
I knew they wanted to grab headlines, but I really did not think that Yar’Adua would want to make
this a protracted fight because he was really not the type to engage in open confrontations. At heart, he
knew he had skeletons, his wife and daughters had even more and he had no stomach for open fights
which could reveal more of these.
Of course, the fight did become protracted, which was against the wishes of both Umaru and I. One of
the reasons for this was that my political friends in Nigeria did not agree until much later on - around
April 2009 - that it was Yar’Adua that was behind everything. Had I started open attacks against
Yar’Adua immediately, maybe it would have ended faster because he would not have stood for too
much of that. Everyone around me except one or two of my closest friends, were against my attacking
the president for a variety of sensible as well as undisclosed reasons. Some were simply scared of
the prospect
of confronting a sitting president, and the powers he had to deal with an ordinary citizen.
Some had commercial interests – existing or prospective – that they thought would be jeopardized if I
started attacking the president and they were well known as my friends. Yet others truly believed that
the president was not a bad guy and that I should give him a chance – he had just appointed me to the
national energy council, so where was I getting the idea that he was the one behind all of this? I knew,
having been in government, that no minister or government official would take on a high profile ex-
public officer like me without at least testing the waters with his boss that it was ok. So even if
Yar’Adua was not the initiator, he had to have supported it covertly or overtly.
To me, the best way to solve the problem of this nature was to attack someone higher up in the
hierarchy such that even if I lost, I stood a chance with an attack where he is most vulnerable. When
an ordinary citizen fights a government, even if that citizen ‘loses’, the public at large will allow for
the fact that the citizen tried to stand up to an entire government – the public loves a good David and
Goliath dustup. No average person will sympathize with Goliath.
From my standpoint, attacking an EFCC chairman or a cabinet minister would not suffice. It would be
beneath me to attack a sub-cabinet official like Farida Waziri. A cabinet minister was like my equal,
four years late and I have always preferred to fight someone bigger than me so that even if he beats
me up, everyone else will look at my opponent – much like they did when I fought Sunday the bully as
a child – and say, ‘This is not fair – it is a bully beating up a small kid.’ But despite my natural
instinct to attack Yar’Adua, I deferred to the wishes of my friends as I did not want to jeopardize
whatever they had at stake, whether personal, relational or commercial, because it would not have
been fair for them to be punished for a fight that was never theirs to begin with.
For the time being, I had to be patient and take a lot of hits from Yar’Adua while I waited for each of
my friends to catch up to my view and realize I was right all along. That finally happened around
April of 2009, when one of my friends’ contacts in the EFCC confirmed that Yar’Adua had
personally directed Farida Waziri to charge me for any criminal offence – even if it was a traffic
offence – because he no longer cared about my innocence. He made it clear, and his Attorney General
Michael Aondoakaa confirmed it to me in September 2010, that he did not care if there was a good
case against me or not, and whether the government would succeed in securing a conviction. He just
ordered that I must be charged for any offence to facilitate my extradition so the EFCC staff went
scurrying around to frame one. At that point, we all agreed that Yar’Adua was behind this, so I went
for him with all I had - which was a lot.
The counterattack begins
I was engaging in a battle against a government, so I at least needed to enhance my communicative
abilities to be equal to that of a government. This necessarily meant equipping me with people who
were familiar with how to wage this counter-campaign at an international level. I hired people
outside Nigeria who were instrumental in rolling out this element of the strategy, which had both
offensive and defensive components.
At the beginning of 2008, through my Washington DC advisor, Riva Levinson, I met a lawyer
named Robert Amsterdam, who specialized in international criminal cases that had a political
element. At the time, one of his higher profile cases was representing the Russian energy magnate
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former owner and CEO of Yukos, who has been in jail in Russia for more
than five years. But at the time, what Bob was interested in was some oil deal in Nigeria. Nigeria
then had approached the Russians to do some oil and gas deals and Bob knew the Russians well. His
take was that the Russians were just going to sign a deal but will never actually get out any oil or gas
because they had a lock-hold on Europe in terms of gas particularly, but also some oil. What they had
been doing all over the world was going to countries that could be competitors to Russia as far as oil
and gas supplies were concerned, and just locking the supply – pre-emptive strikes, so to speak. I
arranged for him to meet with Tanimu Yakubu, the economic adviser to President Yar’Adua in
London, so they could work out what they could do together.
Bob had been a regular visitor to Nigeria since the mid-1970s, so he understood what kind of
environment it was and could do something about it. When my own problems with the Yar’Adua
government started, retaining him was a no-brainer. I knew that when I told him that if I returned to
Nigeria at the time, I would be detained and injected with a culture of hepatitis and HIV, he would not
think I was crazy, because he knew that this kind of thing could happen where we came from. In the
beginning, my idea was that Bob was retained to defend both Nuhu and I, because Nuhu’s problems
had also begun at that point and he had also escaped from Nigeria at the beginning of 2009.
Nuhu initially consented and even attended a meeting in London with Bob’s team and me. Then he
changed his mind and ended up going a different route. I knew that we both needed someone like Bob,
a political lawyer with a track record of defending dissidents around the world, to do this for us. His
role was to be a convenient and articulate speaker on my behalf in the international court of public
opinion. He also assisted with some legal research surrounding our lawsuit against the government
when the EFCC put out the story of ‘the unaccounted for 32 billion naira’, a case still underway that I
may also pursue outside Nigeria.
Former Attorney General Mike Aondoakaa later admitted that they expended considerable resources
to object to and slow down the lawsuit by signalling officials and agencies joined as respondents
because it was clear that the government was unlikely to win. We had four or five of these sorts of
cases – any time the government went public with an allegation, we got our lawyers to sit down,
reframe the allegation into the falsehood that it was, and go to court to obtain a declaratory judgment
disproving it. Unfortunately, the cases were dragging at slow speed through the system and the
government may have been covertly interfering with the pace at which the cases were being heard, but
Bob achieved what he was hired to do, which was: raise the cost of persecuting me - internationally.
Till death do us part
While Bob was busy doing what he did best, I turned to what I did best – inviting bullies bigger than
me to take a swing at me in front of an audience. I knew I would go back to Nigeria as soon as my
programme at Harvard was over. I also knew that when I got back, bad things were going to happen
to me – I was likely to be arrested and detained at the minimum, of this I was certain. I also knew that
if I was going down, I was not going down alone or without a fight. So I had to think of what I could
do to make it emotionally painful for the other side and how to escalate the reputational cost to
Yar’Adua for making my life difficult or putting me in danger. I knew he would do it, but I wanted it
to cost him a whole lot. I wanted to ensure that if any
thing bad happened to me, Yar’Adua would
become an international pariah and the Nigerian government would pay a heavy price internationally
and domestically. I did not have control of any coercive power and I could not inflict pain on them as
they would on me. The only thing I could do was to destroy Yar’Adua’s reputation and that of his
government. I, therefore, became the proverbial patriot who loved his country but hated his
government.
In the end, that was what I did. All of my efforts, all of my essays at Harvard, the American radio talk
shows I spoke in, all of the speeches I made at think tanks like the Centre for Strategic and
International Studies, my op-eds in Foreign Policy and FT blogs, the several workshops I participated
in, were all geared toward giving Umaru sleepless nights. One of the papers I wrote at Harvard about
Yar’Adua is now part of every foreign intelligence agency's file on him. It was an essay in April of
2009 entitled, ‘Umaru Yar’Adua: Great Expectation, Disappointing Outcome’ [136] exposing
Yar’Adua for what I believe he was, - a pretentious, marabout-dependent, incompetent man- and
posted it in four parts on my personal Facebook page. I took my time and waited a week for everyone
to read the first part and people immediately started calling me up commending me: ‘This is great!
When are you posting the second part?’ I later learnt that it was eventually serialised in full in two
national newspapers, Leadership and Punch, both of which enjoyed high circulations across Nigeria,
at the papers’ expense. Then I was later informed that someone who read the essay and liked it had
paid half a million naira per page to publish it as an eight-page advertisement in a third newspaper,
just so that more Nigerians could read it.
I knew Yar’Adua hated that essay (and its author) because it hit him where I knew mattered most to
him: Umaru liked to be seen as the good guy, the nice guy, the kind, humble, gracious guy. He did not