By Farooq Kperogi
There is a popular American political proverb that goes: “Every accusation is a confession.” It describes the tendency for politicians to attribute to rivals the very traits, desires, guilty knowledge, or actions they themselves harbor or have committed.
No one embodies this proverb more spectacularly than Malam Nasir El-Rufai. For example, in 2017, he admitted on national television that he used Kaduna State resources to pay bandits who kidnapped and murdered people.
“Yes, we offered [bandits] money,” he told Channels TV’s Chamberlain Usoh. “We said, ‘Look, if we have to pay you not to kill our people, we’re happy to do it.’ Compensation for life and property has foundations even in the Qur’an and the Bible.”
Eight years later, in an August 31 interview with Channels TV, he declared: “What I will not do is to pay bandits,” then accused his political rivals of doing just that. “It’s a national policy driven by the Office of the National Security Adviser, and Kaduna is part of it.”
Both the Office of the National Security Adviser and the Kaduna State government have flatly denied his claims.
To be fair, El-Rufai did tell BBC Hausa in February 2021 that he disagreed with Sheikh Ahmad Gumi’s call for compensating bandits. And in April 2021, he vowed he would never pay ransom even if his own son were kidnapped. But he never reconciled these positions with his 2017 admission that he did, in fact, pay ransom.
In that same August 31 interview, where he accused the NSA of “empowering bandits,” El-Rufai bragged that he had “dealt with” Christian Southern Kaduna leaders and with Shia Muslims of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN). “I didn’t take any nonsense from them,” he said. “Go and ask them.”
What he described so cavalierly about the IMN was the cold-blooded mass massacre of more than a thousand Shia Muslims and the destruction of their place of worship. One of the victims was my Facebook friend, the brilliant young Bukhari Muhammed Bello Jega, who was murdered along with his infant daughter, wife, and sister.
Another was the family of my former Daily Trust colleague (who’s now a lecturer at ABU), Isa Waziri Gwantu, who lost three children in the state-sanctioned mass butchery.
Set aside doctrinal differences or resentments toward Shias for a moment. These were human beings whose governor ordered their slaughter simply to show he “doesn’t take nonsense.” The sheer cold-bloodedness of bragging on national television about mass killings as proof of toughness is beyond what my mind can grasp. Honestly.
Yet this same governor, who boasts of orchestrating a mass massacre, complained bitterly on AIT that the Kaduna State government he helped install sent thugs to disrupt a meeting of his loyalists on August 30.
I don’t condone violence against him or his associates. But apart from his televised braggadocio about mass murder, Senator Shehu Sani, his longtime political foe, has documented, with videos and news clippings, a sordid history of thuggery and violence sponsored by El-Rufai’s government from 2016 to 2021.
The record is damning. In December 2016, gunmen attacked Senator Sani’s constituency office, injuring many. In July 2017, armed thugs stormed a press conference at the NUJ Secretariat, assaulting Senators Sani and Hunkuyi, other politicians, and journalists.
In May 2018, at Ranchers Bees Stadium, El-Rufai cursed Kaduna’s three senators before cheering supporters and urged attacks on them. Just weeks earlier, thugs had invaded a meeting led by Senator Hunkuyi, killing one man and injuring others.
And in May 2021, thugs attacked peaceful NLC protesters after mass sackings, an assault Sani says was led by El-Rufai’s aide, who was later freed on El-Rufai’s orders.
Now, in his AIT interview on August 30, El-Rufai lamented: “I’m quite disappointed and disgusted… If the authorities don’t take decisive action to end this reintroduction of thuggery into Kaduna politics, well, God help us, because nobody has a monopoly of violence. Nobody has a monopoly of thugs.”
Did he mean by “reintroduction” the continuation of the very violence and thuggery he normalized while in power?
Few Nigerian politicians weaponize the strategy of accusing others of what they themselves did as effectively as El-Rufai. It is his favorite tool for self-preservation, moral reframing, and political attack. That it collapses under the slightest scrutiny has never deterred him.
Whenever El-Rufai hurls accusations, my instinct is to check when he himself did the same things he accuses others of, or to assume, if no precedent exists, that it is what he harbors or intends.
Psychologists call this “projection.” Rhetoricians call it “accusation in a mirror,” where one levels against opponents the very charges that could be leveled against oneself, thereby confusing the public and flipping blame.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of “ressentiment” is also apt. It says moral condemnation can become a mask for the bitterness of lost influence, a way to strike at successors or foes who enjoy the power he no longer wields.
So, when I say every El-Rufai accusation is a confession, I am not showing off a witty American aphorism. I am describing what has now become a consistent pattern in his politics.
The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.
