Nigeria continues to demonstrate, with almost clinical precision, that it remains a territory in which entrenched ethnicity routinely overrides any genuine sense of shared citizenship or national leadership. The current confrontation between the camps of Nasir El-Rufai and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is not a contest of ideas, competence or constitutional principle. It is an ethnic struggle that long predates the 2023 election and is being managed, once again, through the familiar instruments of ethnic brokerage, selective silence and calculated detention.
When El-Rufai stood before the cameras in June 2022 and announced that twelve of the fourteen northern APC governors had agreed to cede the presidential ticket to the South, he was widely portrayed as a statesman. In reality he was performing the classic role of the northern ethnic broker: assembling a regional bloc, extracting a commitment from it, and delivering it to a southern candidate who, at the time, needed northern numbers more than he needed northern affection. The article by Mohammed Bello Doka correctly recalls that this was no casual gesture. Professor Ishaq Akintola of MURIC has since stated that his group first demanded a Yoruba Muslim president as early as February 2021. Realising that Yoruba Muslims alone could not deliver the ticket, they deliberately sought out El-Rufai, the northern politician they judged capable of knitting the North together behind Tinubu. At that moment El-Rufai was not Tinubu’s ally; he had previously described the Lagos “godfather” as someone who needed to be uprooted. The reconciliation was engineered, not organic. The North’s concession was secured by a broker, not by any spontaneous conversion to national purpose.
Southern political elites accepted the gift with enthusiasm and silence. They watched El-Rufai rebuff the naira redesign manoeuvres that threatened Tinubu’s chances, accompany him to Chatham House and defend the Muslim-Muslim ticket. Once the election was won, the same establishment fell quiet. When El-Rufai’s ministerial nomination was withheld in 2023, MURIC warned that the North might never again “hobnob with the South-West” if the champion of the alliance was treated shabbily. That warning has been fulfilled. No prominent southern voice of consequence has defended him. Governors, elders and organisations that once celebrated the power shift have either remained mute or joined the chorus portraying him as simply corrupt. The northern politicians who remain inside the Tinubu administration understand the arithmetic: they are not partners in a national project; they are functionaries whose continued place depends on not challenging the regional arrangement that produced it.
The decision to keep El-Rufai in detention is itself an ethnic calculation directed at 2027. A wounded northern champion who once mobilised the region almost single-handedly, and who has since declared that Tinubu has no viable path to a second term, cannot be released without risk. The man who walked into the arrangement from a position of prior hostility is now the ethnic tiger that must remain caged while campaign structures are assembled. This is not the impartial operation of anti-corruption institutions; it is the management of a regional threat by a presidency whose own political base is unmistakably Southwest and whose “Emilokan” posture has reinforced, rather than transcended, ethnic ownership of power.
The numbers make the ethnic imbalance plain. Between 1999 and 2023 the South occupied the presidency for fourteen years and the North for eight. Should Tinubu complete a full first term, the southern total rises to seventeen years against the North’s eleven. A second term would push the southern tenure to twenty-one years against the same northern figure. Southern voices that now label northern questioning of this trajectory as treachery are not defending a national consensus; they are defending a regional accumulation of power. The same voices expect the North to trust zoning again in 2027, the very instrument whose last use produced the current detention and silence.
What is on display is the enduring dominance of ethnic arithmetic over citizenship. Leadership is not exercised as stewardship of a common polity but as the temporary possession of one regional bloc, secured and defended through brokers, silence and selective prosecution. El-Rufai’s trajectory, from adversary to indispensable northern mobiliser to detained liability, illustrates the pattern with unusual clarity. The North that delivered the 2022 concession now watches the carrier of that concession behind bars while southern elites who benefited most remain quiet. Trust, once broken on these terms, cannot be restored by further appeals to zoning.
Until Nigerians cease to organise primarily as ethnic blocs whose brokers can be activated, rewarded or caged according to the needs of the moment, the country will continue to function as a place where ethnicity overrides both leadership and citizenship. The El-Rufai–Tinubu contest is merely the latest, and most visible, confirmation of that reality.
By Daily Justice
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