Nasir El-Rufai’s verbal diarrhoea
There are political downfalls that arrive quietly, like a candle losing its flame. Then there are collapses so loud, so graceless, so self inflicted that the society watching can only
- By Olabode Opeseitan
There are political downfalls that arrive quietly, like a candle losing its flame. Then there are collapses so loud, so graceless, so self inflicted that the society watching can only wince. Nasir Ahmad El Rufai belongs firmly in the second category. His descent from a-once influential technocrat to a roaming megaphone of bitterness is not just a personal tragedy. It is a study in how a man can talk himself out of relevance, out of respect, and eventually out of the political ecosystem he once navigated with swagger.
The irony is that El Rufai’s undoing did not come from his enemies. It came from the one institution he believed he had mastered: power. And when power finally spat him out, he responded not with introspection but with the only tool he has ever trusted: his mouth.
The wound that never healed
The senate rejection of his ministerial nomination was more than a political setback. It was a public unmasking. For a man who built his persona on being indispensable, the humiliation was total. Not only was he rejected, he was profiled as a security risk, a damning classification for someone who once strutted through Abuja as a reformist czar.
To be fair to Nasir, no one wants that stain on their résumé. But most people would retreat, reflect, recalibrate. El Rufai chose instead to roam the political landscape like a man searching for the nearest microphone to blame someone else.
Since that rejection, he has been inconsolable. The wound has festered into a permanent tantrum. And the tantrum has become his political identity.
A catalogue of contradictions
El Rufai’s political career is littered with the debris of bridges he burned long before he needed them. His tongue has always been his most reliable weapon; and his most conspicuous liability.
•Obasanjo
He once positioned himself as a reformist protégé of President Olusegun Obasanjo. But when the relationship soured, he turned on Obasanjo with the same ferocity he now deploys against Tinubu.
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Obasanjo, for his part, dismissed El Rufai as immature, revealing that he rejected proposals to make him a successor because the young technocrat “needed to grow up.” Those who lobbied for him, such as Osita Chidoka, later admitted Obasanjo was right.
Obasanjo’s assessment of El Rufai in My Watch was even harsher. He described him as a man with a penchant for lying, a malicious liar, and ultimately “a pathological purveyor of untruths and half truths”. He attributed these tendencies partly to El Rufai’s upbringing, citing how he ruthlessly savaged the reputation of his uncle, who in Nigeria’s cultural milieu was effectively his foster father, and how he behaved toward his older half brother in the Air Force. For Obasanjo, these were not political disagreements but symptoms of a deeper character flaw. It speaks to the core of an inability to sustain loyalty, honour, or truth for long.
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•Atiku
El Rufai has attacked Atiku Abubakar for years, painting him as corrupt, entitled, and unfit for leadership. Yet in a moment of political desperation, he recently attempted to recruit Atiku into a coalition against Tinubu.
It was the political equivalent of a man insulting his neighbour for a decade, then knocking on the same neighbour’s door to borrow salt.
•Buhari
His history with Muhammadu Buhari is a masterclass in opportunistic oscillation. In 2010, he accused Buhari of intolerance, parochialism, and economic illiteracy. He mocked him as “unelectable.” By 2015, he reinvented himself as Buhari’s loyal disciple. By 2017, he wrote a scathing memo accusing Buhari’s inner circle of incompetence and arrogance.
Today, he speaks of Buhari with the selective amnesia of a man who hopes no one remembers yesterday’s insults.
•Tinubu
Now, Bola Ahmed Tinubu is the latest object of El Rufai’s verbal diarrhoea. He has called Tinubu’s government a disaster, predicted he would need a miracle to win re election, and accused him of wanting to become a “life president.”
Tinubu’s camp responded with a cold, almost clinical dismissal: El Rufai needs “professional counselling.”
Tinubu himself has said nothing. And that silence is the most devastating response of all.
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Kaduna: A reign of fire and fury
El Rufai governed Kaduna with the temperament of a man who believed dissent was a personal insult. Southern Kaduna bled throughout his tenure. Communities lived under the shadow of violence that seemed to intensify rather than abate. The moment he left office, peace, the very peace that eluded the region for eight years, began to return.
He demolished properties with the enthusiasm of a man clearing personal grudges, not enforcing urban policy. He brooked no opposition. He governed not with democratic temperament but with an iron fist. And today, the same man is gallivanting across the political space threatening hell, brimstone, and fire. Hell knows no fury like a woman scorned. But imagine the inferno when the scorned party is El Rufai.
When your own party washes its hands of you
Perhaps the most telling chapter in this saga is the speed with which his own party disowned him. Barely weeks after his successor took office, the Kaduna State government, controlled by the same APC El Rufai once championed, launched a probe into his administration.
The findings were brutal. The message was unmistakable: We know you. We worked with you. And we want nothing to do with you again.
It is rare for a political party to indict one of its own so swiftly. It is even rarer when the person indicted once strutted as a kingmaker.
Everyone is wrong except Nasir
In El Rufai’s world, he is the only wise man in a nation of fools. He has blamed the senate, the APC, the presidency, the North, the South, the media, and even the public for his woes.
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Everyone is wrong. Everyone is compromised. Everyone is unserious.
Except him.
It is the classic psychology of a man who cannot imagine a world where he is not the centre of gravity.
Tinubu’s silence: The final indictment
For all his theatrics, El Rufai has not received a single direct word from Tinubu. Not one. Tinubu’s silence is not indifference. It is strategy. You do not wrestle with a man who is drowning in his own noise. You let the water finish its work.
The tragedy of a man stewing in his own juice
El Rufai’s fall into political infamy is almost unprecedented. He is not a villain. He is not a martyr. He is a textbook example of a man stewing in his own juice.
He could have been remembered as a reformer. He could have been remembered as a technocrat. He could have been remembered as a man who modernised Abuja and governed Kaduna with vision. This, most regrettably, is the tragedy of a verbal diarrhoea called Nasir El Rufai.
• Opeseitan, a strategic communicator sent this piece from Lagos.
