Nasir el-Rufai’s Book as Intellectual Fraud?Although
there is no single definition of fraud, the online definitions that
come to mind as one reads Nasir el-Rufai’s book (The Accidental Public
Servant) is “fraud as course of deception, an intentional concealment,
omission, or perversion of truth”, or “an intentional deception made for
personal gain or to damage another individual”. I know el-Rufai as a
brilliant fellow and I certainly expected a definitive book. His stated
objective was to “tell the story of my public service years…” but it
turned out a very bad example of how to write a memoir. It is more of
wild concoctions and commentaries on imagined events outside of his
“public service years”. As I read parts of the book that relate to
things that I should know about, I shook my head in disbelief. I could
not believe that el-Rufai could descend so low. While I will surely
correct many of his wrong narratives in my book, I thought I have a duty
to make a preliminary response – for public records!
Contrary
to his narrative, most of us in government knew that el-Rufai
desperately wanted to succeed President Olusegun Obasanjo as president.
He plotted and schemed, destroying anyone perceived to be potentially in
his way. Obasanjo scorned him; the scheme through the PDP Reform Forum
failed; and with the bid to replace Major General Muhammadu Buhari in
Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) still a work in progress, it is
understandable that the bitterness would find succor in a book to smear
and destroy any known potential threat. The only good person in the
whole book is el-Rufai, and perhaps also my dear sister, Oby Ezekwesili.
For him, it is either that Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was power hungry or that
“Charles was not grateful”. We understand his motives, but for him to
also fabricate stories about Obasanjo, Atiku Abubakar, and Mallam Nuhu
Ribadu the way he did (the three persons that literally made him tick in
government) speaks volumes. What a very grateful person! My people have
a proverb that when a foolish and disrespectful child utters
abomination before his elders, he beats his chest that he has exhibited
uncommon courage.The book is grossly dishonest. It is
amusing to read the purported conversations he had with President
Obasanjo on the third term bid. One reads almost two or three pages as
quotes from the conversation and most parts of the book are replete with
similar long quotes of purported conversations (all in inverted
commas). This tactic was deceptively employed to give the impression of
authenticity to the claims of such conversations. Surely, it is
impossible to report the proceedings of a meeting or conversation
verbatim after the meeting. It would therefore mean either that he was
tape-recording every private conversation he had with people or that he
simply fabricated those long quotes. If he cannot produce the tape
recordings of those conversations (which I believe he doesn’t have), he
should be honest enough to admit that he made up those stories/quotes.
It is too cheap of him to fabricate those quotes and seek to exploit the
gullibility of the reading public to damage other people.I
was amused by el-Rufai’s disingenuous attempt to frame stories about
the Economic Management Team, which he forced himself upon and probably
destroyed. As pertains to me, he lied all the way in an attempt to
concoct a mischievous narrative or plot. He calls Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
“Ngozi”. I call her “Madam”. He tells a fairy tale of how I was a
student or protégé of Ngozi’s father. Sorry el-Rufai, the respected
Prof. Okonjo had left University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) before I
became a student, and our paths did not cross until the mid-1990s (while
my Ph.D was in 1989). If you even called Ngozi on the phone, she would
have confirmed to you that she never got any consulting contract for me
at the World Bank or any multilateral institution as you claimed. If you
cared for the facts, you would have known that I began to interact with
Ngozi in late 1999, in the fourth month of my 18-month consulting
assignment at the World Bank (an assignment to which I was nominated by
three pan-African Institutions – ADB, UNECA, and AERC – for the project
on “Can Africa Claim the 21st Century”). You don’t lie about matters
that have records.
For your information el-Rufai, before I
met anyone of you at the original Economic Management Team, I had (for a
decade) lived in Ethiopia, United Kingdom, and United States of America
(USA) and traveled to 45 other countries as an itinerant scholar and
consultant; worked at the United Nations; been to Oxford, Cambridge and
Warwick Universities; was a visiting professor at Swarthmore, USA; and
consultant to 18 international organisations including the World Bank,
IMF, OECD, EU, ADB, various UN agencies, etc. I have been consultant to
different departments of the World Bank at different times, including
being on the Chief Economist Advisory Council (CEAC) for the period 2005
- 2012 and no Nigerian had anything to do with any of them. I spent 19
months at the Brookings Institution, USA (January 1991 – July 1992; and
three months in 1998) but according to el-Rufai, I went to Brookings
after a consulting job at the World Bank (which would then mean ‘after
2000’?). According to el-Rufai, I became Governor of Central Bank of
Nigeria (CBN) in “mid 2005” instead of May 2004. He manufactures both
the facts as well as the comments.
By el-Rufai’s own
account in the book, the approval to embark on the demolition of
properties in Abuja was obtained on 30th August, 2003. I state (and
challenge him to prove otherwise) that Ngozi was no longer staying at
Bolingo Hotel by the time he started his demolition programme. How can
you then fabricate a story that we met at her suite in Bolingo Hotel and
also fabricate a purported quotation of what I told you, which among
other things, referred to your demolition programme? I thought you were
smart enough el-Rufai to at least lie consistently. Is this not fool
proof that you made up all the quotations in the book?As
at the last count, no less than 15 persons claimed to have recommended
me as Chief Economic Adviser or Central Bank Governor. My simple
response to all is: thank you! Thank you also el-Rufai if indeed you
played the role I have just read from your book that you played in my
appointment as Chief Economic Adviser. Of course, President Obasanjo is
still alive and several of the actors are also alive. In my own memoir, I
will detail how I joined President Obasanjo’s government. I have also
heard fantastic claims of some people that they literally appointed me
governor of CBN. In a recent chat with President Obasanjo, he for the
umpteenth time insisted that nobody can ever claim to have advised him
to appoint me as governor of CBN. He reminded me that even I did not
know—which is a fact!
El-Rufai also conveniently forgot that
he first met me in late 2000 when I came from the US to help the federal
government prepare for the IMF Article IV consultations and also train
senior staff of CBN, Ministry of Finance and National Planning on the
macroeconomic and technical computations involved (paid for by USAID).
el-Rufai chose to forget that he pleaded for my technical assistance to
Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) as a consultant but I told him I was
too busy with my international assignments. I rather offered to attend
any of his privatisation committee meetings anytime I was in the country
and to offer my services free of charge.
He forgot that I wrote
several technical notes to help him succeed, including being the sole
author of the initial draft “Anti-trust and Competition Policy” – all
free of charge!El-Rufai seemed unhappy that I gave every
credit of our achievement to President Obasanjo. Well, I am informed
enough to know that in a presidential system of government, only the
president is elected with the mandate to govern and every appointed
person in the executive branch has a delegated responsibility to assist
him. Only in Nigeria would you see a minister or appointed official
write books to take credit for achievements in office. As governor of
the central bank, I made it clear that I received every award or
recognition on behalf of the president. I have no apologies for that.
Interestingly,
el-Rufai tells the story of the great achievements of President
Obasanjo in restoring the Abuja masterplan, using him as an assistant. I
thank him for at least acknowledging that the idea to restore the
masterplan was Obasanjo’s and that he drove it all the way. What he did
not tell is the story of how el-Rufai’s vindictiveness almost ruined the
exercise as well as the monumental fraud associated with it. This is
for another day!
Of course, el-Rufai could not hide his
opposition to the banking sector consolidation. Unfortunately as we say
in my place, you cannot cover the moon with your palms. You may not like
Soludo or Obasanjo, but in the last 27 years, there are two fundamental
structural transformations of the Nigerian economy that have taken
place – the telecommunications revolution, and the banking sector
revolution (consolidation). Ours was not a mere reform, it was a
revolution! Nigeria’s only transnational corporations were built in
three years.
We put two Nigerian banks in the top 300 banks in
the world and they remain there, and nine others in the top 1,000 (there
was none before my tenure). The Nigerian private sector as we know it
today (especially the new economy in oil and gas and emerging big
businesses) largely owes its wealth to our revolution. The world
acknowledges that without our foresight and courage, the Nigerian
financial system and economy would have collapsed during the global
financial crisis. We developed a robust, transparent and no-nonsense
regulatory and supervisory regime before the global crisis, and left
behind one of the strongest banking systems that was globally rated in
the same league as those of Israel, India, China, and Russia. You chose
to forget that we revoked the licenses of 14 banks in one day
(unprecedented in our history), including banks owned by my friends.
This is a story for another day!
The story of how we built
the world’s fastest growing financial system and Nigeria’s largest
transnational corporations in three years, rescued the entire system
from collapse despite the unprecedented four shocks that buffeted the
system during the global crisis, on course to fully restructure the few
ailing banks before the end of 2009 with or without a penny from
government; and designed the comprehensive roadmap for sustainability
and growth (under FSS 2020) is told in my book. Our Financial System
Strategy (FSS 2020) remains the roadmap till date. Sorry el-Rufai,
there is little you can do about this record. Even with ten 234NEXT
newspapers, and 20 other books, you cannot re-write history!
Since
el-Rufai takes pleasure in reporting what ordinarily should be private
conversations, let me also take the liberty to report that he admitted
to me on April 28, 2013 that what he wrote about me were the
“impressions” he was given. That for me summed it up. My advice
el-Rufai, is that you don’t collect some hair dressing salon gossip,
hearsay, ‘impressions’, and wild imaginations – all intentionally
designed to damage others, and bind them into a book without
crosschecking the facts. That is intellectual fraud!http://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/nasir-el-rufai-s-book-as-intellectual-fraud-/146818/
