By Luke Godwin Waziri
Dear Mr. Muyiwa Adekeye,
Thank you for the amusement provided by your epistle, “Chidi Odinkalu and the art of peddling lies.” If your intention was to create a case study in defensive obfuscation and historical gymnastics, then consider it a success. Your piece is not so much a defence of your principal – Nasir El-Rufa’i, for whom you have worked as Media Adviser and publicist for over one decade – as it is an indictment of everything that has gone wrong with public accountability, selective memory, and the weaponization of government narratives.
Let’s begin where your imagination truly soared: your claim that traditional councils of Kajuru, Lere, Kagarko, and Kauru (in Southern Kaduna) “applied to be redesignated as emirates.” Fascinating! Are we to believe that these communities, many of them with overwhelmingly non-Muslim populations, suddenly woke up and decided to discard their ancestral identities, voluntarily submitting themselves to a system historically alien to their cultural and religious realities? Next, you’ll tell us that the Gbagyi people applied to become Japanese.
Please, Mr. Adekeye, let’s retain at least a shred of intellectual honesty.
You speak of “territorial naming” as though it were a holy doctrine handed down from the heavens. Yet you conveniently ignore that the “tribal naming” you so detest reflects the lived realities and history of the people who occupy those lands. The Adara chiefdom, for instance, was not an invention of convenience. It represented an actual ethnic nation, with a distinct language, culture, and worldview. This was not a naming error to be corrected by colonial-style administrative fiat, but a reflection of who the people are. The real problem, sir, is not the name, it is the State’s discomfort with any identity that cannot be neatly assimilated into a preferred ethno-religious narrative.
Your attempt to gaslight us into believing the abduction and murder of His Royal Highness, the late Dr. Maiwada Raphael Galadima, Agom Adara III, was entirely disconnected from political tensions is equally disgraceful. You cite eyewitnesses – Mrs. Galadima and one Mr. Stephen Audu Garba – and use them as human shields for a more sinister erasure of responsibility. But curiously, your version carefully dodges the public knowledge that the Agom Adara was in the middle of contesting the State’s attempt to balkanize the Adara chiefdom and forcefully redesignate his people’s identity. However, unknown to him, he had been outstripped by El-Rufa’i’s misuse of official powers who surreptitiously dethroned the late monarch vide an Executive Order that balkanized Adara Chiefdom. The Executive Order ceded the Adara of Kajuru Local Government Area with over 30 Village Heads (including the late Agom Adara who incidentally was of Kajuru origin) into Kajuru Emirate with only two Village Heads. Your principal lacked the audacity to face the late monarch directly. This was what necessitated the abduction and cowardly murder of the late Agom Adara – it was essential to facilitate the implementation of your principal’s malevolent schemes against the Adara and the communities of Southern Kaduna.
You also casually mention that the late monarch only ever interacted with Governor El-Rufa’i “during the regular meetings with the State Council of Chiefs.” And we’re supposed to believe this exonerates your principal? How convenient! So long as it wasn’t a “one-on-one” meeting, you consider the Governor blameless for the spiraling ethnic and administrative aggression that preceded the monarch’s death. But leadership is not only about physical presence; it is about the consequences of policy and power. That you cannot grasp this is deeply revealing.
Your portrayal of the Kasuwan Magani crisis in October 2018 is another performance in selective framing. While you remember to tell us that El-Rufa’i “commiserated” with the victims of the violence, you forgot to mention the consistent pattern of inflammatory statements, demographic manipulation, and high-handed decisions that helped fertilize such crises. El-Rufa’i has long excelled in dropping matches in dry forests, then acting surprised when fires break out.
On the issue of the Traditional Institutions Law of 2021, what a masterstroke of control disguised as reform! You speak of “classifying” chiefdoms and emirates as though traditional identity were a spreadsheet to be edited on a whim. In truth, this was not classification but a strategic redesign of cultural authority in favour of an emirate model more amenable to the governor’s ideological worldview. It was less about unity and more about homogenization, unity by subtraction.
You may recall that in their response to the Traditional Institutions Bill at the time in 2021, the Autochthonous Community Development Associations (CDAs) of Kaduna State rightly accused your principal of giving vent to a strategy to “divide and conquer the indigenous ethnic groups.” When it struck down the deposition of Jonathan Paragua Zamuna, the Chief of Piriga, in June 2024, the National Industrial Court of Nigeria suggested that the powers claimed by your principal under the Traditional Institutions Law of 2021 amounted to an assertion of “executive absolutism”.
Then there’s your precious anecdote about the 2019 killings in Kajuru LGA and your effort to paint Chidi Odinkalu as a denialist. Here, your indignation is loudest, but your evidence is weakest. You claim he “denied the killings”, but you omit that many of his concerns were about the timing, context, and selective outrage surrounding those deaths. In a country where politicians weaponize tragedy and deploy casualty figures like chess pieces, Odinkalu’s caution was not denial; it was due diligence.
The reference to Dr. Jibrin Ibrahim’s tweet is especially ironic. A one-off tweet becomes your Exhibit A in a bid to delegitimize years of principled advocacy by Odinkalu. It’s always amusing when those who thrive on official propaganda try to shame others for scepticism, as if state-issued narratives are gospel and civil society is the problem.
Your claim that Odinkalu was “prosecuted for injurious falsehood” might sound ominous in your telling, but let’s not pretend that Kaduna State under el-Rufa’i was a bastion of justice. The same administration that hounded Odinkalu also harassed journalists, suppressed community leaders, and turned civil resistance into an offence. The fact that Odinkalu “evaded arrest”, in a case riddled with procedural irregularities and without a file record, speaks not to guilt, but to the absurdity of a state trying to criminalize dissent. I doubt if anyone is more obsessed and impervious to facts than you when it comes el-Rufa’i.
Finally, your entire piece rests on the hope that repetition equals truth. But as the philosopher Hannah Arendt once said: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction has collapsed.” You and your principal may continue trying to collapse those lines, but some of us still remember. And to sum it up, the unflattering description which you ascribe to Professor Odinkalu actually fits you perfectly.
We remember that the Adara people didn’t apply to become an emirate.
We remember that the late Agom Adara was resisting – not requesting – redesignation.
We remember that curfews replaced justice, and that silence was demanded, not earned.
We remember, because remembering is resistance.
So no, Mr. Adekeye, your write-up is not a rebuttal; it’s a poor attempt at historical laundering. The real facts, inconvenient as they are, will outlive both your article and your principal’s legacy of imposed identities.
Yours in memory and truth,
Luke Godwin Waziri
A Concerned Citizen of a Still-Wounded State
Luke Godwin Waziri is a lawyer in Kaduna & former General Secretary of the Adara Development Association (ADA)
*This is a selection from right of reply to last week’s column, “El-Tufiakwa for El-Rufai”
