When President Bola Ahmed Tinubu stood before the crowd in Kaduna last week, few noticed the surgical precision of his words. He praised Governor Uba Sani with a flourish, crediting him with transforming the state from a “toxic zone” into a “hub of progress.” The applause was loud, the cheers unrestrained, and somewhere in the acoustics of the crowd, silence took on a name. Not once did Tinubu mention Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai. Yet, the shadows of the former governor danced restlessly across the speech.
To call this omission a mere rhetorical device would be to insult the intelligence of political theatre. It was, as Niccolò Machiavelli once wrote, “a calculated cruelty, done all at once, so the people may forget swiftly, and remember only what follows.” Tinubu did not revise El-Rufai out of history. He reframed him. Therein lies the genius.
Framing, as psychologists like Erving Goffman have argued, is not about facts but about the lens through which facts are perceived. It is the art of naming, of creating meaning. El-Rufai, long known as a framer himself, must have recognized the manoeuvre. This was the master being framed.
Governor Uba Sani was not born from a political vacuum. He was an aide, an advisor, a senator, a loyalist who drank from the well of El-Rufai’s political capital. His campaign was christened the “Sustain Agenda,” a nod to continuity. But continuity, like history, is a contested terrain.
The cheering crowd last week included many former El-Rufai foot soldiers: the social media warriors who, not long ago, defended his policies with the ferocity of Spartan warriors at Thermopylae. Now, they clapped for Uba Sani, as Tinubu crowned him anew. From Aristotle to Alexander, history is filled with the story of proteges who outgrew their tutors, not by destroying their legacy outright but by absorbing it and projecting something new.
Alexander the Great wept when there were no more worlds to conquer; Uba Sani smiles while redrawing the boundaries of the one he inherited. Tinubu’s praise was more than endorsement. It was baptism.
There is no denying that Nasir El-Rufai is a master of framing. As FCT Minister under President Obasanjo, he bulldozed settlements with conviction and then explained it as urban renewal. During his exile in the Yar’Adua years, he framed his silence as principle. Under Jonathan, he wielded social media like a dagger, carving narratives that defined PDP as corrupt and inefficient. And when he aligned with Buhari, he rebranded himself as a northern reformist, cloaked in technocratic garb.
He was not just participating in politics; he was scripting it. Every tweet, every memo, every strategic alliance was a brushstroke in the self-portrait of a reformer. He framed his enemies as relics of a decaying order, and himself as the future. He once framed Atiku as a transactional politician. He painted Buhari as the long-awaited redeemer. He played the political game not just with policy but with perception.
And yet, in Kaduna last week, the master framer was left out of the frame. The silence around his name was not absence but assertion. The throne he once occupied was not destroyed. It was repainted.
What happened in Kaduna is as old as power itself. When Xerxes crossed the Hellespont, he ordered the sea whipped for breaking his bridges. It was performative, but symbolic – a king demanding the universe conform to his will. When Napoleon returned from exile on Elba, former enemies bent their knees again, proving that allegiance is a child of proximity, not principle.
Kaduna’s new reality is a lesson in political psychology. Allegiances in Nigerian politics are often transactional, built on the foundation of “what next?” rather than “what was?” Tinubu’s jab, subtle but sharp, was not just against El-Rufai,but against the narrative he had crafted over the years. In the words of George Orwell, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
And so, we see the past being edited. With Tinubu’s words, El-Rufai’s era is gently recast as problematic, perhaps even poisonous. The applause from those once in his choir now rings like irony dipped in gold. Like Mbeki before Zuma, or Caesar before Brutus, every leader eventually meets their moment of narrative redefinition.
This is not an indictment of El-Rufai’s achievements or failures. It is an observation about the nature of power. As political philosopher Hannah Arendt noted, “Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.” That concert has changed conductors.
There’s an African proverb that says, “Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.” El-Rufai, once the hunter, now risks being rendered the lion in another man’s tale. But his “silence” in the face of Tinubu’s narrative may also be strategic. For someone who mastered digital warfare, his recent restraint is notable.
But power, like memory, is fluid. It is not static. Those who once wielded it must learn the bitter lesson of those who came before. History has no permanent allies, only permanent interests. Today, Tinubu and Uba Sani define the narrative; tomorrow, someone else might.
In Greek tragedy, hubris is always punished by nemesis. In politics, it is often punished by framing. The once-loyal are now recast. The past is rephrased. The toxic is named. The crowd cheers, while the camera pans.
Aliyu is a policy analyst and writes from Unguwan Dosa new extension, Kauna
