Before he pleaded for due process, critics say El-Rufai denied it to others: A look at his records
As Nasir El-Rufai’s family pleads publicly for his constitutional rights while he sits in detention, a growing number of critics is asking a pointed question: where was that same standard when he held power?
A Kaduna-based advocacy group put it more bluntly, accusing the former governor of “selective amnesia” after he recently condemned what he called arbitrary arrests by the current administration. “It is astonishing that a man under whose watch journalists, activists and critics were routinely arrested is now presenting himself as a victim of political intimidation,” the group, Kaduna-Scribe, said in a statement issued by its national chairman, Comrade Ezekiel Gambo.
The remark reopened a debate that, by most accounts in Kaduna, never fully closed. El-Rufai’s eight years as governor, from 2015 to 2023, were defined by sweeping reforms and just as sweeping controversy, allegations that now surface with new intensity every time his current legal troubles make headlines.
The Shiite crackdown
The most serious allegation being recirculated centers on the 2015 clashes between the Nigerian Army and the Islamic Movement of Nigeria in Zaria. In a widely shared post, public commentator and ambassador-designate Reno Omokri alleged that 347 Shia Muslims — men, women, children, and infants, were massacred during the period, with some other estimates put closer to 1,000. Omokri also pointed to the deteriorated health of IMN leader Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, who was detained for years afterward, describing his condition as reduced to a “barbaric and pathetic state” under El-Rufai’s watch.
The clashes involved joint military and state security operations, and questions of direct command responsibility remain contested. El-Rufai has not, as far as public record shows, offered a detailed rebuttal to the specific death toll figures being cited now.
Southern Kaduna’s unresolved insecurity
Communities in Southern Kaduna bore some of the heaviest costs of his tenure. In Madamai, Kaura Local Government Area, attacks on September 26 and December 18, 2022, left scores dead and homes burnt, displacing residents into internally displaced persons camps. It was also under his administration that more than 100 students of Bethel Baptist Science School were abducted. Banditry and kidnappings persisted from Birnin Gwari to Southern Kaduna despite repeated military operations and security briefings.
El-Rufai’s consistent defense was structural: he argued governors lack operational control over security agencies, placing responsibility on federal authorities and constitutional limits on what state governments can independently do. Critics counter that leadership is ultimately judged by outcomes, not jurisdictional layouts, a debate that remains unresolved among residents who lived through it.
A pattern of demolitions
Perhaps the most well-documented thread in El-Rufai’s controversial record is his use of demolitions, a pattern that predates his governorship. As Minister of the Federal Capital Territory from 2003 to 2007, the Housing and Land Rights Network alleged roughly 800,000 people were rendered homeless through mass evictions and demolitions across Abuja communities including Wuse, Mpape, Dantata, Jabi/Kado, and Dei-Dei.
As governor, the pattern continued, but took on a sharper political edge. The Kaduna State Urban Planning and Development Agency demolished properties linked to political opponents, including a property belonging to Senator Suleiman Hunkuyi and one belonging to lawyer and APC stalwart Inuwa Abdulkadir. His administration’s special adviser on media, Muyiwa Adekeye, defended the demolitions at the time as regulatory enforcement rooted in public safety and urban planning, not political targeting. Affected politicians disagreed, calling it intimidation aimed at forcing submission.
Journalists, activists, and a disappearance that was never solved
Omokri’s post names several journalists and activists he says were arrested for covering El-Rufai negatively: Jacob Onjewu Dickson, Segun Onibiyo, Midat Joseph, and Audu Maikori the last of whom reportedly fled Nigeria for the United States. “Audu Maikori had to escape Nigeria for the United States, where I met him, interviewed him, and shuddered in terror at what Nasir El-Rufai did to him,” Omokri wrote.
The case most frequently invoked by critics, however, is that of Abubakar known online as Dadiyata, a social media commentator and vocal critic of El-Rufai who disappeared in 2019 and has never been found. A Kaduna State lawmaker, Kefas, has questioned the circumstances of the disappearance, drawing on accounts from Dadiyata’s family. The case resurfaces almost reflexively whenever El-Rufai raises concerns today about arbitrary detention, critics argue the irony is difficult to ignore.
For his part, El-Rufai has consistently maintained the opposite framing — that the entire investigation is political persecution tied to his defection to the opposition ADC, which he has called “the only surviving opposition party in Nigeria.” In handwritten statements submitted to ICPC investigators while in custody, he invoked his constitutional right to silence, stating he would respond to the allegations only in court.
The debate that won’t stay settled
What makes this moment different is not that the allegations are new but that they are being actively re-litigated in real time, on the same platforms where his wife’s pleas for compassion are also spreading. Reno Omokri’s Facebook post and Kaduna-Scribe’s public statement both landed within the same news cycle as Asiya El-Rufai’s appeals to President Tinubu, turning what might once have been separate conversations sympathy for a man in custody into the same argument, playing out in the same comment sections.
Whether that argument resolves in court, where it belongs, or simply hardens further into competing public narratives, is likely to depend on how the prosecution itself unfolds in the weeks ahead.
