was included anyway. In addition to that memo and the cable, I also obtained the response of the
permanent secretary of the ministry of foreign affairs back to the NIA saying this directive was
wrong: ‘You have instructed us to do it, we have done it, we have sent the cable, but it is wrong to
deny a Nigerian consular services.’ The diplomats did what they were told, but they put their
objections in writing, and covered their backs.
Next, I released the first two documents – the cable and the NIA memo. Of course, Yar’Adua denied
knowing anything and immediately got the head of the NIA, Ambassador Imoehe, fired. I knew Imoehe
from his days in the Nigerian embassy in Washington. He also appeared like a nice guy, servile
perhaps and lacking in self-worth, but not a vicious kind of guy. I have not seen him since I returned
to Nigeria. He was the sacrificial lamb and all the blame was put on him and the ministry of foreign
affairs, with Yar’Adua denying any personal knowledge, as was his practice. I then released the
second letter containing the diplomatic corps’ joint objection. It was addressed to the NIA and copied
to the office of the president, so Yar’Adua could no longer credibly make any claim of deniability. I
also added in subsequent media interviews that Yar’Adua had given the order himself to the High
Commissioner.
“If he says he did not know this, he is lying.” I said. “And he gave the instruction directly to
the high commissioner in the UK. The high commissioner said this to me himself.”
The administration then issued a statement apologizing and saying I should feel free to renew my
passport anywhere in the world as all embassy and consular services were restored, and this is all a
big misunderstanding due to some over-zealous official just going overboard – pure hogwash. It was
the president all along who went overboard.
I called back ‘my brother’, High Commissioner Tafida.
“Well we can renew your passport now, when can you come?” he said.
“I will come. I am going to Dubai and when I come back I will come and renew it.”
“But you said you do not have a passport.”
“I did not tell you I did not have a passport, I only said my passport was full. I have
alternatives.”
“So why did you do all this?”
It could have ended there, and if the administration had any sort of sense, they would have let it drop
there. But they did not. They set up an investigation committee to find out how the media got the
documents. The newspapers told them how: “El-Rufai gave them to us.” I told them all to feel free to
tell anyone who asked that I gave them the documents because I wanted anyone interested to ask me
how I got them. When I went back to Nigeria, one of the questions the EFCC asked me was, “So how
did you get those documents on the passport situation?”
I just laughed and told them I had some of the many ‘investigation reports’ the EFCC had written
about me and asked, “How did I get those reports?” They appeared to be shocked. Virtually,
everything the EFCC had written about me, and the identity of those doing it, I was receiving
regularly, so I knew everything going on. I guess many Nigerians were angry with the persecution that
was going on and thought it was just unfair, so I got all these documents from people I did not even
know – like that lady who called me about the letter to the US banks when I was at Harvard. This is
one of the reasons why even when I get angry with the Nigerian authorities, I cannot afford to be angry
with the ordinary Nigerian. Many people in the government took great risks to send me all those
documents. I had many if not all of them. I will forever remain in the debt of these rare but courageous
people who stood for truth and justice amidst great risk to their persons and careers.
When this was all over, I had a couple of other items to see to. One was to have one of my attorneys
in the US draft a petition to the African Union and ECOWAS Secretariats reporting the Yar'Adua
government for abuse of my human rights and then also file a petition with the United Nations to the
same effect, which is still under consideration. Within domestic courts in Nigeria, I got my lawyer
here to sue the minister of the interior and the comptroller general of immigration for denying the
renewal of my passport and grounding me in one location for a few days, and asked for $150,000 in
damages. [143] Nearly three years later, after overcoming several preliminary objections and several
other delay tactics by the Federal Government and its agencies, we got judgment against the
authorities. The ruling further limited the legality of the government’s ability to tamper with the rights
of the citizens – something that is very dear to me.
Ultimately, I always knew I could win this fight. I was confident I could win because I believed I was
right and they were wrong and I knew I would suffer some inconveniences but in the end it would all
work out. This passport saga particularly was a milestone in the sense that it brought out in very clear
terms that the Yar'Adua government was persecuting me. I think that denial of a right as petty as a
passport confirmed that other bigger violations must be in the works and any Nigerian could relate to
that and could see it was unfair. I do not think anybody believed Yar’Adua when he said he did not
know. Even if he did not know when it was done, when I shouted and complained and it was reported
in the media, he could have fixed it if he did not give the order in the first place, or if he cared to
discharge his oath of office.
Nevertheless, the only reason I was able to return to Nigeria when I did and remained alive and safe
was because Yar’Adua was effectively gone. Had I gone back while he still was in charge and in
control of the coercive instruments of state power, I would have been arrested, detained and I would
not have got out any time soon. I do not think he would have had me killed[144] because by then, he
had been weakened and I think everyone around him could see that it was a matter of time before his
presidency ended prematurely, so nobody wanted the responsibility of my murder. Yet, I was sure
that the Sarki Mukhtars of this world would have had no problem detaining me, throwing away the
key and torturing me while in detention.
I think, I hope, one of the positive results to come out of my fight with Yar’Adua is that I have bought
for me some degree of permanent peace in Nigerian politics, much in the same way I did with Sunday
the bully as a schoolchild. The difference with Yar’Adua is that there was no intervening authority, no
equivalent to the school headmaster to step in and say, ‘Ok, that is enough. This fighting must stop.’
Such was the nature of standing up against the president of a nation, and since the president himself
was the highest authority, there was really no other option but to keep the fight on until one side
dropped. Well, I think we can now say that God’s verdict came on 5 th May, 2010. Contrary to what I
know many people think, I really did not enjoy doing it. I will fight again for my citizenship rights if
faced with no other choice and, well, I believe every citizen must be willing to fight these battles. It is
not about me, but about others that might have been similarly treated in the future if I had not resisted
the oppression of the Yar’Adua
regime and its overzealous goons. In this particular case, the results
speak for themselves and justify the struggle and pains of the experience.
Chapter Seventeen
Five Years of Invaluable Experience
“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your
own problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother,
the ecology or the president. You realize that you control your own
destiny”
- Albert Ellis
In my approximately ten years in public service, I certainly have a few regrets. What I regret the most
was not any decision or action taken but the time spent working to the overall detriment of my family
life and personal development. In retrospect, perhaps I should have devoted much more time to my
family. This regretful feeling became particularly manifest when my loving, brilliant and near-perfect
daughter, Yasmin El-Rufai, died suddenly in London in November 2011, a day before I was to visit
her.
The first two years following my exit from government were a mixed bag – the stimulating intellectual
experiences of completing my LL.B degree in London, and of the Harvard Kennedy School, the
carefully contrived scandals of the Senate hearings on my administration of the FCT, the painful
smear campaign by Yar’Adua and his surrogates, the emergence of loyal friends and betrayal by
others, and the constant struggle to remain focused in the midst of several conflicting emotions and
let-downs by family members and once-reliable allies.
The next three years, from 2009 to 2012, were periods of intense thinking, planning and haphazard
activities in the political realm whose final outcome remains uncertain as I write this. What is clear to
me though, is that the fresh knowledge, new contacts, mostly painful and turbulent experiences and the
lessons of these last five years have changed my life in fundamental ways. So what happened? What
have I learnt in my 50s that I did not know or experience in the first half century of my life? I would
say that I learned a lot more in a few years than most of the preceding years combined. I will attempt
to relate these events in chronological order, and leave the reader to draw conclusions.
The First Near-Fatal Error: Ignoring Politics
Halfway into my Mason Fellowship at the Kennedy School, I concluded that one of the biggest
mistakes that ‘technocrats’ like me and Oby made while in government was not getting actively
involved in party politics. Though as ministers, we were given overnight party membership cards,
some of us abhorred politics because we did not want it to affect our performance or reduce the focus
on our respective assignments. In that regard, Ngozi and Nuhu were the slightly smarter exceptions.
Unknown to Oby and I, Ngozi regularly visited Wadata House, the headquarters of the ruling party.
Nuhu was very much engaged in political conspiracies and late-night intrigues with Obasanjo,
cultivating the friendships of unlikely allies like Andy Uba, James Ibori and Bukola Saraki in the
process. Ngozi engaged the various state governors actively and maintained such contact even after
she left the Cabinet in 2006. Oby and I like to joke in retrospect how naïve we were. We were
‘mumus’[145] who just never got it.
As minister of FCT, I had the unique opportunity to be engaged actively in partisan politics. My
position earned me membership of the PDP National Caucus, the leadership of the party in the FCT
and membership of its state Executive Committee. I pointedly requested Obasanjo to exempt me from
all these partisan engagements and he kindly consented. So I never attended any one of these partisan
political meetings. Perhaps, if I had not declined these opportunities, I would have learnt much earlier
that politics, in the end, trumps everything – economics and friendships inclusive.
Though early in my ministerial term, I attended a few meetings of political office-holders from the
North-West and sat with the governors and ministers of that zone, and of the North-Central Zone (in
which the FCT is geographically located) to negotiate chairmanship of federal boards and parastatals,
I consciously avoided any direct interactions with partisan politics and politicians. I never got
involved in direct party activities until early 2006 just before the collapse of the Third Term project,
when Obasanjo appointed me to several study groups and committees on succession, future political
direction, reforms within the PDP and the like. One such was a group chaired by Senator Liyel Imoke,
then minister of power, along with me, Femi Fani Kayode, Nuhu Ribadu, Bayo Ojo, and Ojo
Maduekwe to think through a succession strategy for Obasanjo. We met in Liyel’s guest house in
Wuse 2. The group (T6) submitted a final report in August 2006.
Another was what Obasanjo and Amadu Ali called the “PDP brain trust” consisting of me, Oby, Femi
Fani-Kayode and Osita Chidoka, under the chairmanship of Babagana Kingibe, who had just returned
home from Darfur. This group was to focus on the reform of the PDP and the design of a political
transition strategy. The committee met mostly in my official residence at the Life Camp but never
submitted any report. I think it collapsed by November 2006 when Obasanjo asked Umaru Yar’Adua
to run for president.
Obasanjo then formed another committee with me, PDP chairman Amadu Ali, Keem Belo-Osagie,
Osita Chidoka and Ojo Maduekwe to review the branding and publicity strategy for the PDP and the
Yar’Adua Campaign. This committee met several times in my Life Camp residence with the
marketing consultant, Rosabel Advertising, with Umaru Yar’Adua personally attending a couple of
the meetings. Obasanjo also appointed me to the PDP Reconciliation Committee for the North Central
Zone in 2006. With a Second Republic minister, Professor Emmanuel Osammor, as chair, we toured
Benue, Kogi, Plateau, Niger, Kwara and Nasarawa States attempting to reconcile feuding party
members and leaders, and mostly failed.
Whether these last minute involvements in the workings of the ruling party and Abuja politics were
helpful to me, or inadvertently served to make me appear threatening to others, is now open to
speculation. The stories of what happened in those various committees, and what Obasanjo did or did
not do will require another book that would chronicle the widespread political intrigue, the raising
and dashing of hopes for real change, and the missed opportunities at critical junctures for our nation
to be put on the path of sustainable progress.
The first lesson that I learnt the hard way had been written by philosophers and political economists
for centuries – every citizen ignores politics at his or her peril. Indeed, thousands of years ago, Plato
already concluded that when good people shun politics and governance, they will suffer under the
rule of worse people. Edmund Burke reiterated this point centuries later in a different way, when he
asserted that the only thing needed for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.
It was during my years of exile and after that I became convinced to get more involved than I had ever
wished in partisan politics. It was perhaps this realization too that persuaded Nuhu to decide to run
for the highest political office as a reaction to our collective victimization, persecution and exile by
political operatives. Ultimately, as we became more involve
d in partisan politics, Nuhu and I ended
up in different camps. This occurred as a result of differing personality traits and how we interpreted
our public service experiences and their aftermath in completely different ways. How this political
separation happened is a matter that I have reflected upon in the last couple of years and learnt some
very important lessons from. In spite of this temporary political disagreement, we remain close family
friends, and inseparable brothers.
January 2009: The Earliest Conversations about Nuhu running for President
I left Nigeria in June 2008 to pursue a masters’ degree at Harvard, and had been declared wanted by
the Yar’Adua administration before the end of that year. Nuhu had been forced out of the EFCC, first
to study at the Nigerian Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies, in Kuru, Jos, and then
unceremoniously replaced by his former police special fraud unit boss, Mrs. Farida Waziri in May
2008. By December of the same year, Nuhu informed me of two attempts on his life, the first being on
the highway from Jos to Abuja, and that the bullet-proof car I left behind for his use practically saved
his life! I counselled that he should leave the country before the bad guys got lucky just once. He
finally slipped out of Nigeria and arrived in London in January 2009. After concluding some
formalities on being admitted as an associate of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University, Nuhu met
me in Washington, DC.
That was the first time Nuhu suggested that one of us should challenge Umaru Yar’Adua for the
presidency in 2011. My response was immediate, simple, short and sharp – I was not interested. If he
was interested, he should start working on it, I suggested. We met again with our group of friends in
London in early April 2009 at the Marriott Park Lane, where we decided it was time for me to begin
The Accidental Public Servant Page 60
