Nasir El-Rufai’s defections: PDP, CPC, APC, SDP

Perhaps the most important political event, this week in Nigeria, so far, nobody knows if there would be a free-for-all fight in Rivers state tomorrow, or some melodrama in Osun state or elsewhere, before the week runs out – is the announced defection of Mallam Nasir El-Rufai from the All Progressives Congress party (APC) to the Social Democratic Party (SDP). In a signed statement dated March 10, 2025, El-Rufai says “at this point in my political journey, I have come to the conclusion that I must seek another political platform for the pursuit of the progressive values I cherish”. In plain terms, he no longer finds the APC useful, the same party which he had thought he would continue “to align (with) up to the time I choose to retire from politics”.

He helped to create the party in 2013, and worked to secure the APC’s election victories in 2015, 2019, and we may add – 2023. It was on the platform of the party that he served as Governor of Kaduna state from 2015 to 2023. He says “the party has treated its membership with contempt in the last two years”. By this, he is obviously referring to himself. “I find this no longer acceptable”, he declares. And so now, in effect, El-Rufai has resigned from the APC to join the SDP and “adopt it as the platform for our future political engagements and activities”. His objective is to help form “a unified democratic platform to challenge the APC in all elections and bye-elections between now and 2027 by the Grace of God.” In other words, his goal is to get the APC out of power most certainly and with God as an accomplice!

Nasir El-Rufai joining the SDP is the fourth political platform that he would have been associated with publicly since the return to civilian rule in 1999. His first port of call was the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) when President Olusegun Obasanjo emerged as President, after the June 12 debacle that lasted for six years with grave implications for national unity, progress and stability. In 2011, he became a member of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) after his return from exile. In 2013/14, he aligned with the APC, and now, he has ported as they say in common parlance to the SDP. Nasir El-Rufai according to those who knew him was a smart, resourceful little known Quantity Surveyor and Business Administrator with a First-Class brain, doing his own little thing in his own little corner until he was brought into public service first by the military administration General Abdusalami Abubakar in an advisory capacity. He eventually came into prominence when as is widely believed, he was invited to join the Obasanjo administration by Waziri Adamawa Atiku Abubakar who was then Vice President of Nigeria.

He was appointed Director General of the Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE). In that capacity, he proved himself as a competent and knowledgeable technocrat, becoming in the process a key member of the government’s economic team in key areas such as privatization, commercialization, energy security and the oversight of due process within the economy. Nasir El-Rufai was an influential member of an inner group within the Obasanjo team of well-informed, young technocrats and intellectuals – the shining stars of the administration; Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Oby Ezekwesili, Nuhu Ribadu, and Charles Chukwuma Soludo. He had the ears and the eyes of the President.

He was later rewarded with a Ministerial appointment when he was appointed Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) in 2003. He was a colourful, bold, outspoken and assertive Minister who insisted on the sanctity of the Abuja Master Plan. He earned a reputation as “Mr. Demolition,” demolishing over 900 buildings including the properties of highly placed members of society. He ended up with not a few enemies, and a community of critics. The Obasanjo administration completed its tenure in 2007. The Yar’Adua administration that followed was practically anointed by President Olusegun Obasanjo but both Obasanjo and his foot-soldiers who wheeled the Yar’Adua Presidency into existence were disappointed. After an initial thank-you visit to Ota, accompanied by members of his family, Yar’Adua soon began to assert himself in power as his own man. He refused to kow-tow to any Godfather.

Obasanjo’s former aides fared worse. Whatever sense of entitlement they thought they deserved was given short-shrift treatment by President Yar’Adua. Nasir El-Rufai was one of the lonely victims of the period. President Goodluck Jonathan who had been Yar’Adua’s Vice President and who succeeded his boss after the unfortunate incidents of illness and death, and the doctrine of necessity also did not feel compelled to over-pamper the old Obasanjo brigade. Many members of the group naturally became critics of the Jonathan administration, yesterday’s men and women who fervently believed that they could sabotage the new power elite in Abuja to regain relevance. Those who could find programmes of study abroad did so, those who could find jobs too, some went into exile, while others found a new vocation as public affairs commentators and a censorious, aggrieved band of agitators.

This group found an opportunity for vengeance between 2013 and 2014 when they joined forces with others, notably Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu and other members of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), as well as a faction of the PDP, known as the new PDP (nPDP) led by Senator Bukola Saraki. There was also General Muhammadu Buhari’s CPC, and the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP). These groups came together to form a party known as the APC on February 6, 2013. Coalition politics had been tested with considerable success in other African countries – Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania – it was therefore not surprising that Nigerian opposition politicians embraced the same option. Nasir El-Rufai was indeed one of the key architects of the coalition. General Muhammadu Buhari was the candidate, the rallying point.

He was re-packaged and sold to the Nigerian people as a soldier turned democrat. The APC was a gathering of strange bedfellows. They had one mission: to take power back to the North and to remove President Jonathan from power. President Jonathan famously had said that his ambition was not worth the blood of any Nigerian. He was committed to the idea of free, fair and peaceful elections. When it became obvious that INEC was going to announce Buhari as winner in 2015, President Jonathan conceded defeat. While President Buhari presided over Nigeria’s affairs at the centre, Nasir El-Rufai was Governor in Kaduna State (2015 – 2023) with considerable influence within the ruling party.

I have given this background to paint a picture of how Mallam Nasir El-Rufai has been part of the making of Nigerian politics since 1999. He has told part of his own story in a book titled The Accidental Public Servant (Safari Books, 2013, 712 pp). In the lead up to the 2023 general elections, he was one of the voices of reason in the APC who defended the principle of Rotational Presidency, in this instance from North to the South and he supported Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu who claimed the credit for bringing Buhari to power as a civilian President in 2015, and insisted that in 2023, it was his turn to become Nigeria’s President. “Emilokan (It is My Turn), he said. Given the fervour with which Mallam El-Rufai championed Tinubu’s cause, it was perfectly reasonable that he would expect to be rewarded for his loyalty and support.

The hope that this would be so was in fact raised by Asiwaju Tinubu, himself, who as President-elect publicly announced that El-Rufai would be a member of his team. It was an open invitation with witnesses in attendance, the only person to be so honoured by the in-coming President. Politicians invest. They expect returns on their investment. They may mouth platitudes about serving the people but they are actually in politics to serve their own selfish interests. There may be exceptions to the rule and there are notable ones including Nelson Mandela, Obafemi Awolowo, the Sardauna Ahmadu Bello, Margaret Ekpo, Aminu Kano, Ibrahim Waziri, Tafawa Balewa… El-Rufai, as expected made the list of Ministerial nominees but to everyone’s consternation, he purportedly failed security screening. How? The President had cleared him even before his nomination.

His friend, from their days of partnership and comradeship since the Obasanjo years, was the National Security Adviser (NSA). Nuhu Ribadu would not clear Nasir El-Rufai? Which security clearance is that? Well, that was the beginning of Nasir El-Rufai’s troubles or the complication of it. A perfect storm. Trouble in Paradise. He would later be accused of mismanagement of public funds by the Kaduna State House of Assembly. The lawmakers said they were looking for N423 billion! purportedly spent without following “due process”. He denied any wrong-doing during his eight years as Governor of the State.

Some of the officials who worked with him as Governor, including his Chief of Staff and four others were called in for investigation and interrogation. They were later arraigned by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) on charges of money laundering. It did not take too long before El-Rufai, known for his outspokenness, started fighting back. In January, he said he could no longer recognize the APC – a party that he helped to create, which has now been taken over by others and he has been left behind. The party, he affirmed, no longer practices internal democracy, it has since abandoned its founding principles and has been taken over by illiterates and internal mercenaries! “No party organ has met in two years – no caucus, no NEC, nothing. You don’t even know if it is a one-man show; it’s a zero-man show.”

By February this year, the matter had degenerated into a face-off between Mallam El-Rufai and NSA Ribadu. The former Governor condemned the President’s economic reforms and the quality of the people implementing the reforms, some of which he considers “wrong.” He frontally accused the President of being the one who rejected him as a Ministerial nominee. Still firing from all cylinders, El-Rufai said his friend, Ribadu is not good enough to be the country’s National Security Adviser. He accused him of working hard to tarnish his reputation, because he thinks he, El Rufai, poses a threat to his 2031 Presidential ambition. The biggest blow came yesterday with him walking away from the APC.

This should not be surprising to students of Nigerian politics though. It is usual practice for Nigerian politicians to move from one political party to another. They are driven not by ideological beliefs, or principles, but convenience, expediency or wherever they think they can easily realize their ambitions. There are Nigerian politicians who since 1999 have been in different political parties. This is Nasir El-Rufai’s fourth. He must be given credit however for the forthrightness of his defection statement: he is calling on opposition politicians to unite and get the APC out of power in 2027. He is not quite mouthing those pretentious cliches about saving Nigeria. He has drawn a line in the sand. His exit from the APC is the equivalent of the declaration of political war.

This was a strategy that worked in 2015. But there is no guarantee that it would work again this time around. Nonetheless, it is clear that El Rufai is not alone. He has been seen visiting and meeting with other politicians who many have an axe to grind with President Tinubu and the APC, and there has been so much talk about a Grand Coalition to unseat President Tinubu in 2027. This is easier said than done. It may not be so easy to intimidate Tinubu out of office, and certainly not by the likes of politicians who were once beneficiaries of his own method of politics. They know him. He knows them too. Those who do not know anybody are the hapless masses in whose name the politicians commit atrocities, and settle their differences when it suits them. Tinubu also does not have a strong opposition challenging his government.

Between 2013 – 2015, the then emergent APC had a team of aggressive, hyperactive and hypertensive spokespersons who specialized in abusing and attacking the Jonathan administration. I should know. I was a constant target of their malicious vituperations. President Tinubu does not have that kind of challenge. He has at least one prominent agent within the PDP, at the highest levels, who is also within the corridors of power serving Tinubu. The planned Grand coalition of anti-Tinubu opposition forces may also be dead on arrival as there is no clearly identifiable, symbolic figure to lead the gathering. The ambitions of the key figures are equally dissimilar. Nasir El-Rufai who has now presented himself as a rallying and roving coordinator plays a kind of politics that could alienate many. As Governor in Kaduna State, he was constantly accused of favouring one religion against the other, and within the larger Nigeria space, his critics consider him a polarizing, irredentist.

The SDP which he has opted to join had its brightest moment in Nigerian politics way back in 1993, when Chief MKO Abiola won the June 12 Presidential election on its platform, and even that outcome was annulled. That was 32 years ago! By showing his hands and intentions so early, so prematurely, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai may have begun a long journey into political wilderness. As a two-time yesterday man, he should know better, except he is playing the Trumpian game of striking first, to force a negotiation. But even that does not look like a prospect. The Presidency has dismissed El-Rufai’s defection as “inordinate ambition.” His former colleagues in Kaduna APC have simply said: “we are unperturbed… we are not disturbed and we are not going to lose sleep over El-Rufai’s moves.”