By Farooq Kperogi
Nasir el Rufai and Abubakar Malami are suddenly the objects of public pity in some corners of Nigeria’s political commentariat. Yes, my default ideological temperament is to empathise with and fight for the underdog. But El-Rufai and Malami are no underdogs. They are merely (temporarily) subdued top dogs whose canine viciousness is only momentarily at bay but will recrudesce should they get back in the saddle of power and influence.
Their defenders, some of whom have urged me to intervene on their behalf in line with my record of defending the oppressed, say they are victims of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s selective justice. I don’t dispute that. Since not even a single manifestly and self-evidently corrupt, Tinubu-supporting APC member is being tried for corruption, it’s entirely reasonable to assume that had El-Rufai and Malami chosen to remain in the APC, they would have been shielded from any legal consequences for their well-documented abuse of power.
Nonetheless, their immediate past history of similar selectivity and invidiousness against opponents and underdogs strips them of consideration for compassion, at least from me. El-Rufai and Malami were no apostles of compassion and due process.
They are now learning, from the wrong end of the stick, what they normalised, defended and inflicted on others when they predominated over the political landscape.
Of course, I don’t expect the folks in the ADC, in whose flock El-Rufai and Malami now fly, to mirror my position. Still, the morally serious response to this moment cannot be to pretend that what is happening to them descended from a moral vacuum.
Even the rhetoric of their defenders is revealing. The ADC has not said El-Rufai and Malami had spotless public records. It has instead said, correctly, that justice should not be selective. Fair enough. But selective justice is precisely the moral and political ecology in which both men flourished luxuriantly just a few years ago. What their defenders demand for them today is what they often denied others yesterday.
Take El-Rufai first. As FCT minister, he earned well-deserved notoriety for cruel, unjust Abuja demolitions and forced evictions on a scale that human rights groups found unacceptably staggering. That is why he is known as “Mai Rusau”, which means the demolisher, among Hausa-phone northern Nigerians. It is similar to his English moniker, “Mr. Demolition”.
On May 15, 2008, for instance, Reuters reported that nearly one million residents had been evicted from their homes in Abuja between 2003 and 2007 as part of the restoration of the city’s so-called master plan. It noted that El-Rufai said he had “no apology” for the demolitions.
You may support urban planning enforcement if you like, but the ruthlessness and human cost of those actions were early glimpses of the governing philosophy that made El-Rufai who he is: power first and only, compassion be damned.
His years as Kaduna governor made the pattern more nakedly political. I have written copiously on this and won’t repeat what I have written. Suffice it to say that he hunted and hounded opponents, including powerless people whose only strength derived from their ability to raise their voices against his tyranny, with a ruthlessness that has no parallel in the history of Kaduna State.
On September 23, 2017, I wrote of “El-Rufai’s Morbid Fixation with Death of His Political Opponents”, among other articles I’ve written of his well-known predilection for unleashing and celebrating murderous violence against people who disagree with him politically, leading me to call him “an intolerant psychopath with homicidal impulses”. That is not the biography of a man whose hands are clean in the politics of intimidation.
Malami’s case is, if anything, even harder to sentimentalise because his most infamous offenses against the rule of law were not hidden in bureaucratic shadows. He defended them openly. On July 26, 2019, TheCable reported him saying he disobeyed some court orders in order to protect “public interest”.
On July 27, 2019, Punch reported that the federal government’s refusal to obey court orders granting bail to Ibrahim El-Zakzaky and Sambo Dasuki was tied to the same twisted Malamian doctrine of “public-interest” judicial selectivity. It is difficult to overstate how corrosive that doctrine was. Once an attorney-general publicly teaches the state that court orders are optional whenever power invokes “public interest”, he licenses impunity from the highest legal office in the land.
In other words, Malami was not some helpless bystander to executive lawlessness. He was one of its clearest doctrinal salesmen.
The same habit persisted into later controversies. On October 13, 2022, Premium Times reported that after the Court of Appeal ordered Nnamdi Kanu’s release, the federal government, on Malami’s watch, said it would not release him.
And on December 6, 2019, Reuters reported that Omoyele Sowore was re-arrested by DSS operatives hours after being freed on bail. Malami said on Dember 17, 2019, that he couldn’t ask the DSS to release Sowore even when the courts said he should. In a delightful twist of fate, Sowore revealed in late February this year that Malami had reached out to him and his lawyer “to facilitate his bail from Kuje Prison”.
When people who applauded, excused, or ignored these episodes of lawlessness or selective application of due process that Malami was notorious for ask that he be extended the treatment he denied others, they are simply announcing that procedural abuse is intolerable only when it touches their faction.
This is why the current moral positioning of some defenders of El-Rufai and Malami is so suspect. They are not wrong to insist that prosecutions should be transparent, lawful and non-selective. I endorse that entirely.
But they are wrong to imply that these two men symbolise injured innocence. They do not. They symbolise the instability of factional privilege in a system where the law often trails power like a servant. Their real tragedy is not that they are being treated in ways that are unimaginable in Nigeria. Their tragedy is that they are being treated in ways that are utterly familiar in Nigeria, except that they are no longer on the dispensing end of the familiar cruelty.
There is no denying that Nigerian anti-corruption energy often softens toward the politically useful and hardens toward the politically estranged. That impression is precisely what gives oxygen to the complaints of El-Rufai’s and Malami’s sympathisers. But it still does not make the two men martyrs.
So, yes, El-Rufai and Malami are experiencing the perils of not aligning with the people in power. That is plainly part of the story. But it is not the whole story, and it is certainly not the most morally interesting part of it.
The most morally poignant part is the selective memory of their defenders, who want Nigerians to look at today’s suffering and forget yesterday’s abuses. They want us to respond to current persecution without recalling prior persecution. They want sympathy severed from memory. That is too high a price.
My own view is simple. They deserve due process because everyone does. But they deserve no canonisation, because neither has earned it. And if tomorrow either man returns to the commanding heights of power, nothing in his public record suggests he would become a born-again democrat who suddenly discovers the sanctity of restraint and the merit of tolerance.
Their current misfortune is therefore both political and karmic. It is political because it arises from loss of proximity to power. It is karmic because it is being visited on men who had helped normalise the very abuse whose sting they now feel. So, I will reserve my tears for worthier people.
