Nasir el-Rufai, a former governor of Kaduna State, has come under fire from the president for his criticism of President Bola Tinubu’s administration.
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“Small man syndrome” was attributed to El-Rufai by Bayo Onanuga, the Special Adviser to President Tinubu on Information and Strategy, in a Wednesday post via X.
President Tinubu would need a miracle to be re-elected in 2027, according to the former governor of Kaduna State, who made the comment during an interview with Arise Television.
He asserted that his company had polled people across the country, focussing on the South-East and the North, and found that 91% of them disapproved of Tinubu. His estimation puts the level of disapproval in Lagos at 78%.
Onanuga referenced a criticism made by former President Olusegun Obasanjo against El-Rufai in his three-part book, My Watch, in response to El-Rufai’s remarks.
“El-Rufai has an almost compulsive tendency to trash talk people’s reputations. For what reason does he keep doing it? I saw his skill right away when we first met.
Simultaneously, I saw his flaws; the most egregious of them was his one-sided loyalty to Nasir el-Rufai, which he shown to no one else.
He openly lied to me and his coworkers and supposed pals. From what I’ve heard, he viciously destroyed his uncle’s reputation—a man who had been like a foster father to him in his African environment.
A quote from Obasanjo’s book was used by Onanuga to describe the experience of hearing about what he did to his half-brother in the Air Force, who is older than him.
Obasanjo claimed in his 2014 memoir that el-Rufai suffers from “small man syndrome.”
According to furucinovel, el-Rufai served as Minister of the Federal Capital Territory from 2003 to 2007, a position that Obasanjo appointed.
El-Rufai is currently one of the opposition political leaders organising a coalition to unseat Tinubu in the 2027 presidential election.
In March, El-Rufai resigned his membership of the All Progressives Congress, APC, and joined the Social Democratic Party, SDP.