Two years into his service as Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nasir El Rufai got me into trouble. A good friend of mine who held an important position in one of the top international development funding agencies in North America had put together some kind of “funders’ bazaar”. He wanted to organise a retreat in Africa for selected actors on the Western funders’ front on the theme of urbanisation and urban development in Africa. The idea was to bring some of these funders together for a week in a city in Africa and have them brainstorm on the challenges of modern cities on the continent. My friend reasoned that funders needed to have the occasional retreat in Africa to get a real feel of the challenges and difficulties we face in the process of building functional and efficient 21st-century cities.
What my friend did not tell those who agreed to participate in the retreat was that by confronting them with visual evidence of urban poverty, planlessness, dysfunction, and infrastructural decay in a typical African city, he hoped that it would be easier to make them open their wallets and fund project proposals that such international agencies, known nowadays as development partners, normally fund in the developing world. In other words, he was hoping to blackmail these guys by showing them evidence of African urban decay and underdevelopment.
Consultations were held on where to go for the retreat: Accra? Nairobi? Dakar? Kampala? In the end, my friend unwisely settled for Abuja. Please bear in mind that we are in 2005. Although I specialise in the study and production of culture on the continent, my friend felt I should be part of a retreat on urban development and renewal. I therefore flew to Abuja from my base at the Pennsylvania State University in the United States to be part of that retreat. It never hurts to network with funders anyway.
From the very first day of the event, we made the mistake of taking our Western guests round Abuja: we wanted them to see the sights; to see Abuja at work; to feel the texture and the throb of a rapidly developing African capital. One morning, I was at breakfast, just a few metres away from the table of some of our Western guests. They were having the usual breakfast conversation but in hushed tones. However, I was close enough to hear what they were discussing. Here is a rough summary of what I overheard: if the intention of the organiser was to show us a dysfunctional, underdeveloped, unplanned African city, with the usual indicators of garbage-filled streets, substandard infrastructure, and decrepit public service, then what are we doing here in Abuja?
Don’t blame the Westerners. We had told them that we had challenges. We had told them that things were mediocre and that no critical reflection and intelligence go into urban planning in much of Africa. We wanted them to gain a firsthand assessment of these problems. And we were foolish enough to bring them to Nasir El Rufai’s Abuja in 2005! Where we wanted them to see evidence of the poverty of vision and critical intelligence in the management of urbanisation in Africa; they saw Abuja and began to wonder if we had over-stated our challenges.
Critical intelligence and strategic vision had led El Rufai to the restoration of the Abuja master plan: green areas had returned to the city, strategic demarcations between commercial and residential areas were being restored and respected, waste disposal and allied municipal services were working pretty much the same way they worked in the cities of the developed world. I believe I don’t have to retail what Nasir El Rufai’s Abuja looked like to this audience. Now, there are very harsh critics of Nasir El Rufai’s Abuja and it is not my intention here to delegitimise their critique. In fact, at the end of this lecture, I will even recommend a thorough review of the criticisms in Abuja in order to prevent similar scenarios in Kaduna. However, not even the harshest critics of El Rufai’s restoration of the Abuja master plan – especially those whose illegal eggs were broken to make the omelette – would take away the fact that Abuja worked like a modern city during that period.
On hearing what our guests were discussing at breakfast, I ran to the hotel room of the retreat convener, screaming: “ol’boy, wahala dey o! El Rufai don cause katakata for us o. I just overheard the Oyinbo people saying that we have no problem given what they have seen so far of Abuja o.” To solve our unexpected problem, we put heads together and devised a solution. I am not sure that anybody here in this audience would be able to guess what we did but I am willing to let you try. Oya, what do you think we did?
You are all wrong. We organised a day’s excursion outside of Abuja for our guests. They wanted evidence of dysfunction, of urban rot and decay, of the poverty of vision and critical intelligence in the organisation of our urban spaces, of the wages of decades of corruption in the scatological infestations we call cities in Nigeria. They wanted a first-hand assessment of the symbolic violence we have collectively visited on ourselves throughout our postcolonial history, as evidenced in the sort of shambolic urban spaces we have created all over Nigeria. There was no shortage of slummy spaces of underdevelopment and poverty to take them to – even in the outskirts of Abuja. We could have taken them to Lokoja which, like everywhere else in my own Kogi State, is still in the Stone Age.
Somehow, we opted for Kaduna! Yes, you heard me right. We brought them on a bus tour of Kaduna. In other words, as recently as 2005, we showcased Kaduna as evidence of chronic urban underdevelopment. Because Nasir El Rufai ruined our plans in Abuja, we migrated to Kaduna as a randomly selected shorthand for the collapse of vision, planning, critical intelligence, and leadership in postcolonial Nigeria. Kaduna became our synonym for everything that was wrong in Nigeria: a city in which man was living in disharmony with concrete, steel, and nature; a city in which man still has not figured out where to put his shit and urine in the 21st century; a city in which the cows competing for right of way on the road with man have a superior sense of societal organisation than man. Like Kaduna, like everywhere else in Nigeria! I see therefore an extraordinary hand of fate in the fact that the man whose vision reclaimed Abuja from the doldrums of urban planlessness has now been asked by the people of Kaduna State to lead their difficult march into the 21st century.
Nasir El Rufai was elected by the good people of Kaduna State and that is why we are here. That in itself is good news. However, the overwhelming mandate by which the reality of his election has come to be is both good and bad news. Mallam Nasir, which one do you want first, the good news or the bad news? I will deal with the bad news first, irrespective of your answer. I am a student of political cultures and the psychology of leadership in a global frame. And I believe I can claim with reasonable authority that every leader loves to have a reasonable margin of error which allows for steps to be retraced and alternative visions to be mapped should a particular vision fail. Every leader wants to be able to make mistakes and correct them, depending on his degree of social consciousness and responsibility. Ko ba haka ba?
A leader without a clear mandate, or one with a disputed mandate, or one with a wuruwuru mandate, or one with a magomago mandate, such as we are immensely used to in this country, enjoys the luxury of repeated margins of error and mistakes. Such a leader enjoys incredible latitudes in the department of failure, of mediocrity, of the ordinary, of the unspectacular. On the contrary, there is bad news for a leader who receives the sort of overwhelming mandate that the people of Kaduna state gave to Nasir El Rufai: there are really no margins of error here, no luxury of failure, of mediocrity, of the ordinary. A clear, overwhelming mandate, delivered to one man by a people who overcame fractious fault lines and divisions of faith and ethnicity, is more than a secular act of civic electoral expression. It becomes a sacred pact between the deliverers of the mandate and its legitimate custodian. Let me repeat: the sort of mandate that you, the good people of Kaduna state, have given your Governor-elect, is both spiritual and secular. Ko ba haka ba?
Vox populi, vox dei. The voice of the people is the voice of God. The philosophical verity of this saying is what must inform Nasir El Rufai’s approach to understanding the real meaning of his mandate and its daunting implications. When I hinted earlier that there is a spiritual dimension to a mandate this huge and overwhelming, I was not being unmindful that I am speaking in the context of secular democracy where civics requires us to insist that the spiritual and the secular are like oil and water: they do not mix and must not be mixed. Those of you who are familiar with my public intellection know only too well that I have a special koboko reserved for Christian and Moslem fundamentalists who always threaten the secular essence of our democracy. I do not mean, therefore, that you have elected a spiritual or religious leader. On the contrary, it is Mr. Governor-elect who must view this new responsibility in a spiritual dimension because he has been overwhelmingly summoned to servanthood by the voice of the people, which is the voice of God. To fail the people is to fail God; it is not to heed the voice of God. That is an option that is simply not available to a leader elected with the sort of mandate that the people have given to El Rufai. Ko ba haka ba?
The lack of any option of failure; of any reasonable margin of error, of any latitude for mediocrity and unspectacular performance, is not the only bad news for Nasir El Rufai. Let’s talk a little bit about the condition of our country today. I don’t know where to start or how to even start. Nigeria is a tragedy that renders words hollow. Words are hopelessly incapable of describing the full scale of the postcolonial horror that is Nigeria. If there ever was a Nobel Prize for people who have collectively suffered the most abject forms of traumatisation in the hands of their leaders, the Nigerian people would have no competitors. Because the condition of Nigeria is an indescribable canvass of postcolonial horror and suffering, the most appropriate summary of that condition I want you to retain from this lecture is this: the only thing worse than the condition of Nigeria since October 1, 1960 is the condition in which those who have presided over her affairs since May 29, 2011 are going to leave her on May 29, 2015. Ko ba haka ba?
Fifty-five years of corruption and a stubborn refusal to apply vision and critical intelligence to the construction of nationhood; fifty-five years of cultivating mediocrity and rewarding everything that is negative and contemptible with our system of recognition and value; fifty-years of refusing to rise and live up to our potential and promise as Africa’s hope and the pride of the black race; fifty-five years of sorrow, tears, and blood (apologies to Fela); fifty-five years of deliberately exacerbating our fault lines and worsening our differences rather than see them as the building blocks of a modern state; fifty-five years of excuses, all it takes for fifty-five years of self-inflicted injuries to come together in the shape of Africa’s most spectacular tragedy in the 21st century is to have a leader who doesn’t give a damn if all the goats ate up all the yams in the closing weeks of an unspectacular leadership.
That would solve two problems: no more yams to worry about because every yam has been eaten and no more goats to worry about because every goat has either died of constipation or diarrhoea. No goats, no yams, nothing in the land. One man’s parting shot is to replace corruption with nothingness as the summative metaphor of the Nigerian condition: no light, no water, no salaries, no petrol, no diesel, nothing! Indeed, all the figures and statistics emerging in the last three weeks of the life of the outgoing dispensation point to a nation in coma: domestic debt, external debt, Aso Rock debt, state government debt. None of the official conjurers of the Nigerian state has been able to make the figures add up. I have deliberately avoided citing figures because you are all familiar with the Tweeter handle of our Vice President-elect, Professor Yemi Osinbajo. And I am sure you have been following the responses to him from the officials of the Nigerian state. If the Vice President-elect tweets that we are owing $60 billion in any of our debt portfolios, the Jonathan people and their hired social media caterwaulers will rush out, screaming: “don’t mind him o. We are not owing $60 billion o. We are owing ordinary $50 billion o.”
Therefore, even if we went with figures emanating from official sources – from Aso Rock, from the office of Debt Management, from the office of the coordinating Minister of national economic collapse – truth is that we are dead broke. This country has been run aground. Federal and state governments are borrowing money to not meet any obligations. All the states are in a pathetic condition, borrowing money to collateralise borrowings. On social media, I started an Olympics competition to determine which state is the most backward, the most underdeveloped, and the one showing the most visible evidence of accumulated years of poverty of vision by the leadership. When I heard that the Governor of my own state returned from donating money at a presidential campaign jamboree in Abuja to sack workers because he could not meet salary obligations and proceeded to announce to the remaining workers he had not sacked that he was reducing the salaries he was not paying by 40 percent, I awarded the gold medal of that Olympic competition to my state. Surely, no other state in the country could have it worse?
Nigerians from several states protested that I did ojoro and rigged the underdevelopment and poor governance gold medal for my state. Each retailed reasons why his or her state of origin should win the coveted gold medal. Ladies and gentlemen, I will spare you the entry from Kaduna State. In essence, the State that will be handed over to Mallam Nasir El Rufai tomorrow is not doing too badly in the competition to win the gold medal in the national Olympic competition for the most distressed state in the polity. In fact, if I was operating purely from a Nigerian mindset, I would declare that Mallam Nasir El Rufai needs a lot of prayers from us all in order to be able to “move Kaduna state forward”. Ko ba haka ba?
The bad news is that I am not operating from this routine escapist Nigerian mindset which replaces work with appeals to Allah and God who, ironically, are strong proponents of hard and honest work in the holy books of both religions. There is more bad news for Nasir El Rufai: as bad as the picture I have painted above is, both nationally and domestically here in Kaduna State, it still does not provide any excuse for the people not to begin to see, feel, smell, and touch measurable and qualitative change effective May 29, 2015. I do want to devote some time to this part of the lecture so that what I am saying is understood without ambiguity. One duty we owe our incoming leaders is to help them see that the people of this country, the people of Kaduna and other states, have a very clear and definite understanding of what continuity means and, more importantly, what change means.
“The sky is falling! Nigerians, please bear me witness: my predecessor has emptied the treasury o. My predecessor has shackled me with debts o. He has borrowed money that we must pay for the next sixty years o. Things are so bad. There is nothing to work with. I will probe him; I will not probe him; yes, I will probe him.” As true as these statements are in terms of the actualities they describe, it is also true that they are cliché, repeated ad nauseam by every in-coming administration. Nigerians heard it from Chief Obasanjo and all the governors in the 1999 set; they heard this rhetoric again in 2003; heard it in 2007; heard it in 2011. To hear it in 2015 would be the very definition of continuity because there is nothing in that rhetoric that the people have not heard before.
It is because they are tired of this rhetoric of continuity that they voted massively for people they believe can perform miracles and deliver on miracles. And this is why I do not envy our Governor-elect and also General Buhari at the centre. This is why I have only bad news for them. All the realities which led to a rhetorical culture of blaming outgoing administrations are still here with us and have even worsened beyond our wildest imagination under the outgoing administration. Make no mistake about it, President Jonathan and the outgoing ministers and governors have exercised no prerogative of mercy on Nigeria. They have wrecked and destroyed this country. In South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, or China, they would have been tied to the stakes and executed as economic saboteurs. Yet, I must signal solemnly to Mallam Nasir El Rufai and President-elect Buhari that we are at a moment in our national history when the corruption and brigandage of an outgoing administration can no longer be mobilised as legitimate points of departure by an in-coming administration.
The outgoing administration repeatedly told us to be patient; that transformation and the dividends of democracy could not be delivered with a magic wand; they said that Rome was not built in a day. Then they went ahead to unleash all the goats in Rome on all the yams in Rome and the city of Rome was set on fire in the ensuing commotion. Those who said that Rome was not built in a day then fiddled and danced azonto, even as the city of Rome burned. This is why Mallam Nasir El Rufai does not have the luxury of saying that Rome was not built in a day. I have already heard that rhetoric from our President-elect and I hope that Mallam Nasir will pass the message on to him that we, his supporters, ask him to desist from using that language forthwith. At the national level and here in Kaduna state, we have elected leaders who we believe can do precisely that: abandon the rhetoric of the old leadership and build Rome in a day. And because there is currently no money anywhere – the outgoing government having looted everything – the new leadership must build Rome in a day with only one kobo. This is what the people expect and it is not up for discussion or negotiation by the new leadership.
For the people, therefore, change begins when the leadership in which they have invested such an overwhelming mandate makes a radical departure from that rhetoric and its associated mental universe and invents a rhetoric bordering on the possibility of miracle. The new leadership must not say that they are not miracle workers because that is precisely what the people voted for: miracle workers. The new leadership must tell the people: “I knew that things were bad, very bad, really bad, before I offered myself for service. Hands-on, proactive approach to delivery will now replace the rhetoric of excuses. No action of the outgoing government, no matter how horrible, will be valid enough an excuse for me not to deliver. We shall punish their corruption. Those who looted shall face the full prosecutorial force of the laws of the land. But we shall not use their crimes as justification of inertia on our part.”
A leader who sets out from this perspective, as I expect Mallam Nasir El Rufai and President Buhari to do, would have begun to align himself with the people’s definition of change here in Kaduna State and nationally. And these are demands we are making of our Governor-elect here today. We dare to make these demands because we are confident that he is more than equal to that task of reinvention. We dare to make these demands because we know Mallam Nasir El Rufai’s predisposition. For my part, I dare to make these demands because I know Mallam Nasir El Rufai’s vision and I am willing to publicly stick out my neck for him.
One last bad news for our Governor-elect. The discussion that I want to open up now has to do with the predicament of being Nasir El Rufai and the local and national expectations that come with the terrain of that persona. There are even international dimensions to it because being Nasir El Rufai also evokes a range of responses and expectations from Nigerians in the diaspora: folks either like him passionately or dislike him intensely; he does not evoke neutrality. It must be tough, very tough, being somebody who cannot expect to be judged, assessed, or evaluated like everyone else. It must be tough being somebody to whom everybody lays a friendly or a hostile claim and of whom everybody has considerably higher and heightened expectations. Even those who profess a passionate dislike for him have heightened expectations of him. Ko ba haka ba? TO BE CONTINUED
Pius Adesanmi, a Professor of English & African Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, presented this lecture, originally titled “Building Rome in a Day with One Kobo: El Rufai & the Challenge of 21st Century Kaduna” at the Inauguration of Mallam Nasir El Rufai as Governor of Kaduna State on May 28, 2015.
