The Accidental Public Servant

by El-Rufai, Nasir

  when I went back to Nigeria and was approached to get the government then under the acting

  presidency of Goodluck Jonathan to drop the charges against me, I refused. “I do not want the

  government to drop the charges against me,” I said. “The charge against me is that I have committed

  an offence by approving the allocation of a plot of land to my wife. That is the kernel of the charge

  against me. I want a judge to rule that it is an offence to do so. Every Nigerian is entitled to a plot of

  land in Abuja if he is above the age of 18. If my wife applied in 2001, and I got to the FCT in 2003,

  and she finally got a piece of land in 2006, I do not see how that can be an offence. It is not like I got

  there and on my first day I said to people, bring my wife’s papers to approve an allocation for her.” I

  still stand by this position.

  I never had a chance to confront Umaru directly about this so, as I said, the most I can do is make

  some observations and draw certain conclusions from what I have learnt from those close to him. The

  first thing I would say is that Umaru and I had a historical problem in that from day one, he

  considered me a competitor. I still do not think he ever forgot or forgave Nuhu’s initial reaction to his

  presidential candidacy, and then to top it off, he was misled into thinking that Obasanjo’s short list of

  successors consisted of two people: him and me. Yar’Adua, with his deep feelings of insecurity,

  came into the job feeling that I was a potential problem – I was not only a past competitor, but could

  be a future competitor. Yet he kept trying to bring me in close, and when I told him I was not

  interested in working for him, I think that persuaded him that I was up to no good, I was retreating to

  re-arm. Even when I thought it was better to leave town, that did not work either, because he thought I

  was going abroad to get this big arsenal of American, British and other ‘imperialist’ friends that I am

  supposed to have. Quite honestly, I really did not care and I never had, about this sort of thing.

  Secondly, there was the Obasanjo factor. I had no doubt in my mind, and I had a variety of indications

  of this, that Obasanjo told Yar’Adua the truth - I was difficult to control. I also think that when I

  outlined my plans to be studying abroad for at least the first two years of his tenure, he felt snubbed

  and it would be typical of Yar’Adua to take my retreat additionally as a sign that I had no regard for

  him. Putting all these things together with Nuhu’s attitude and investigations, he likely considered us

  two dangerous northerners that he could not trust and who needed to be taken care of. It was a simple

  matter of making sure he covered all his angles. Southerners would be waiting until 2015 regardless,

  so there was no need to worry about any of them. Northerners posing a potential threat had to be

  eliminated.

  I know that he had plans to at least do his two terms, but I do not think he factored in his health. Had

  he known he was going to die before his first term was over, I do not think he would have bothered

  with it all, but this is all just supposition. I am now quite certain that he knew he was not going to do

  much work, so he would have plenty of time to devote to knocking out everyone else. I had the

  reputation of getting things done, his doing nothing evoked memories of our accomplishments,

  particularly in Abuja. Everyone in Nigeria was concerned about electricity and everyone, even my

  own enemies, was writing opinions suggesting that I was one of the few that had proven capability to

  fix it. That kind of thing would certainly worry a president who had given up on delivering.

  More than just an inconvenience

  There is, of course, a difference between suspecting a smear campaign is being waged against you

  and knowing that you are in danger. While I was studying to complete my LL.B. in London in May

  2008, I was also arranging to return to Nigeria in June to retrieve my student visa so that I could go to

  Harvard that summer to begin a master’s degree programme. Nuhu had asked me not to come back to

  Nigeria in June 2008 out of concern because of certain things he was noticing already underway. He

  was not in the EFCC and thought that if I came back to Nigeria I would be in some danger. Jendayi

  Frazer, who at the time was the US Assistant Secretary of State for African affairs, was aware of the

  danger of going home and told me I could collect my visa from the American embassy in London if I

  wanted, but I insisted on going back. Once I was there, the EFCC came to my house to ask me

  questions about particular land allocations, which I had already answered during the public hearings,

  so I gave them a pre-written 118-page explanatory document and we all left it at that. When I went to

  the airport to return to London for my LL.B. exams, something was definitely not right. I had checked

  in, my baggage was already on the plane and when I handed over my passport for my exit stamp,

  internal security informed me that they had been told not to allow me to fly out that day.

  “Ok. Am I under arrest?”

  “No.”

  “Well I have to travel. I have the right to travel. If you are not arresting me for an offence,

  then I have a right to travel.” The SSS does not have the power of arrest.

  “Well I am sorry sir, I am following orders.”

  I called my lawyer, Abdul-Hakeem Mustapha, and informed him that I was being illegally detained at

  the airport and was going to miss my flight, so he should get ready to sue the federal government for

  violating my civil rights. I then called the head of the internal security service in Nigeria - the

  Director General of the SSS, Gadzama, who was my senior at Barewa College.

  “I have been detained by your people, what is going on?”

  He knew nothing. Five minutes later I still had not heard from him, so I called the chief of staff to the

  president, who was the chief of staff when we were in government. I told him what was happening

  and he became very upset. He too knew nothing but promised to check on it and get back to me. After

  about 15 minutes, I was permitted to board and was still able to catch my flight. I did not know when

  I would come back to Nigeria again, but I knew this incident at the airport was not a mistake.

  As the plane took off from Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport that morning and turned northwards,

  I knew I would not be able to return to Nigeria for quite a while. It turned out to be 23 months of

  exile.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Exile

  “To me, there is something very powerful about being totally alone

  and far from home. It gives you a perspective about life you could

  never have any other way. It is a rush, partly because you have no

  identity or connections to where you are. You could be anyone,

  anything. You could be nothing.”

  – Owen P. Grover

  When I left the country, thoughts of exile or asylum did not cross my mind as I was embarking on a

  12- month course of study. Exile is what happens when circumstances have forced you to keep away

  from your country, but on a temporary basis. Asylum, on the other hand, is permanent, but like exile,

  also involuntary. You accept that your life, limb or property is in danger in your country and you are

  driven to live in another country so you request for political asylum and intend to never return unless

  circumstances change. Being a
refugee I think is voluntary, either as a political imperative or because

  economic circumstances force you to leave your country willingly and move to another. So exile and

  asylum are involuntary, while being a refugee is to some extent voluntary, broadly speaking.

  This is why I considered myself an exile. I was now an exile, but would not seek asylum. The

  Yar’Adua government, of course, wanted me to apply for asylum, and the attorney general even

  alluded to the fact that I was attacking Yar’Adua because I wanted to justify my application for

  political asylum in another country. [131] I did not hesitate to respond that I would never seek asylum,

  I would come back, because I would not live permanently anywhere else.

  I do not know why, but when Nigerians leave Nigeria for more than a few days, we really begin to

  miss our country. This I noticed my first time in England as a married man, in 1985. Nigerians I knew

  abroad or at home, were and still are fond of complaining all the time about our country, and yet we

  miss it. A friend of mine recently told me a story that I thought captured this quite well. She used to

  work for me in the BPE and has dual Nigerian-British citizenship. She had her first daughter when she

  was in her early twenties, the daughter was born and raised in the UK, and grew to be 28 or 29

  without ever having visited Nigeria as an adult. A couple of years ago, the daughter visited Nigeria

  for the first time since she was a young child. When the daughter came back to the UK, she packed her

  bags, sold her house and moved to Nigeria.

  “That is very strange,” I told my friend. “I would like to ask your daughter why she made such

  a drastic decision.”

  My friend said, “Well I asked her the same question and she said it was very simple – she

  just loved the lack of order. She loved the anarchy, the fact that you do not have to pay your

  bills, the fact that if you drive too fast or beat a traffic light, you can negotiate it. She said in

  England, if you beat a traffic light, you are sure to get a ticket or you pay a fine at the end of

  the month, and if you do not pay that fine, you will get dragged to court and could go to jail.

  But in Nigeria, everything is negotiable. She loves that about the country.”

  I am a law and order type of person, so I do not think I can say that I miss the same chaos about

  Nigeria. But I did miss home terribly-- the networks of friends and family, the food, especially my

  favourite jollof rice, the climate, the sight and sound and smell, the contentious jostle, the hustle and

  flow, the sense that you belonged to your own corner of earth.

  Prior to my exile, the longest I had ever been away from Nigeria at a stretch was about three months,

  so the idea of exile of indefinite duration I found really tough to handle. I had great difficulty

  accepting that anyone could say that my country was not mine to live in – it was an affront to my sense

  of citizenship. The thought that President Umaru Yar’Adua would attempt to deprive me of my

  citizenship and residency rights enraged me. I had to face him and we had to sort it out one way or the

  other, even if it meant one of us dying, more likely me. [132] If I was not at Harvard attending the

  Mason Fellows Programme, and was instead just living idly in the US, I would have returned

  immediately to Nigeria the moment the persecution started. But I was certain that if I had returned to

  Nigeria, I would not be allowed to go back to the US to complete my degree programme and I was

  determined to do that because I had been waiting ten years to do so. So I thought, first things first, I

  will first complete my academic programme, not be distracted, and put it behind me - then face

  Yar'Adua full time and end it - one way or the other.

  A Lonely Year on the Charles River

  Among the things that made my exile easier was that first, one of my sons, Mohammed Bello, was

  studying for his undergraduate degree in the Boston area and my wife Hadiza, eventually joined me. I

  had an austere two-bedroom apartment in Peabody Terrace, one of Harvard’s many graduate

  apartment blocks in Cambridge, but my wife did not like Boston very much, so she would frequently

  visit Washington where her sister lives, as well as family friends like Dr. Angela Onwuanibe, Stella

  Ojukwu, Oby, Ngozi and many acquaintances working at the embassy and at the World Bank. In the

  end, she moved to live in Bowie, Maryland as she increasingly found DC to be more liveable. She at

  least had family and a community of friends there. From my end, I really spent most of the time

  reading. My graduate programme required the reading of some 300 pages of course material every

  day, which gave the sense that Harvard really overworked its students to make them feel like they had

  come to the greatest school in the world. I do not think they believed that everyone would read it all,

  but I did end up reading almost all of it, which left me little time for anything else, Yar’Adua and his

  goons included. I was and remain very grateful to God and Harvard for the lonely experience of exile,

  as painful as it was, because the programme kept me very busy and left no room for me to be unhappy

  about what was going on in Nigeria. My summer programme of seminars went quickly and the

  master’s programme required me to take eight classes, which equated to eight credits over twelve

  months, two semesters. The school recommended very strongly that each student takes three or four

  classes per semester. I decided to take five credits in the Fall Semester which included the winter and

  my logic was simple: I hate winter, I hate the cold, and I knew that I was going to be unhappy and be

  mostly in my room, so I thought I would take five classes and just stay focused on the readings. I

  figured that if I passed the five classes, I could then take three classes in the spring when the weather

  would be much better, and I would be able to go out and enjoy it and go to Washington for the

  weekends.

  In addition to taking five classes, I was also a teaching assistant, which effectively meant taking six

  classes. I had to attend the sixth class, prepare for it and also set aside what was called in Kennedy

  School lingo, ‘office hours’. This meant I sat with my classmates on Sunday and assisted them with

  their homework because the assignments were due on Mondays, and the professor knew from

  experience that most people waited until Sundays to do homework. This meant I could not go to

  Washington for weekends in my first semester. When spring came, instead of taking three classes, the

  minimum I needed, I ended up taking four and did not enjoy the weather as much as I had thought.

  The Politics and Ethics of Statecraft

  It was only as a result of this intense studying, coupled with my physical withdrawal from the street-

  level manoeuvrings in Nigeria, that I was able to learn many lessons and come to certain conclusions

  about the past number of years. One of the most revealing came in the form of a class entitled, ‘The

  Politics and Ethics of Statecraft.’ The course was taught by a Catholic priest named Brian Hehir. I

  became curious about it during the ‘shopping’ period, in which all professors spend a week teaching

  a sample class for 45 minutes so students could get some feel for each professor’s style. Since I had

  never in my life actually studied politics or political science in a classroom, I thought I should take a

  class on politics – after
all, this was the Kennedy School of Government. Joe Nye had a politics class

  but it was Americo-centric, the whole soft power thing. I had read enough about the US and I needed

  something more, something different in political science. On a lark, I attended Professor Hehir’s class

  during the shopping period and he totally swept me off my feet.

  The syllabus focused on the characteristics of a handful of great leaders in history: Otto von

  Bismarck, Charles De Gaulle, Henry Kissinger, JFK, Woodrow Wilson, Tony Blair and Jimmy

  Carter amongst others. What was most compelling about this class is that it helped me understand that

  leaders in general possessed huge components of both good and evil in their character and leadership

  styles. Of that group, there was no one leader that did not have a significant blemish. Some had a little

  bit more evil than others – Bismarck was amazing, and De Gaulle was a huge egomaniac. That was

  when I began to understand Obasanjo a little more. I always had difficulty understanding how

  Obasanjo could sit with us and preach about sacrifice and transparency one moment and then the next,

  sit with Gaius Obaseki, the GMD of NNPC, about how to get some payments to the PDP from some

  oil or LNG deals. I never understood how a person could do this and sleep well. How can one have

  Obasanjo’s complex personality and sleep well at night? Studying Bismarck, De Gaulle and the rest

  helped me make sense of this duality in leaders.

  The class also had one advantage: no end –of-term written examinations. Instead, each of us was

  required to write a final essay about a leader, dead or alive, that we had studied on our own. I wrote

  on Obasanjo and I received an A, one of only two in the class. I was also the only student who had

  actually worked for the leader he or she wrote about and since it was first-hand, I had an added