El-Rufai’s Mirage of Progress: The Ruins Behind the Rhetoric
By Maxwell Bako Dogara
When history finally casts its unblinking gaze on the years of Nasir El-Rufai’s governorship in Kaduna State, it will strip away the gilded veneer of “performance” and expose a troubling legacy of deception, half-finished dreams, and a burdened populace. Some are already asking the daunting question: Didn’t Elrufai leave behind multiple abandoned projects? Well, this is topic for another day.
What was once loudly touted as “urban renewal” and “infrastructure transformation” is now increasingly seen for what it truly was—a hollow show built on unsustainable debt, abandoned projects, and a disturbing indifference to fiscal responsibility.
El-Rufai’s time in office was marked by ceaseless self-promotion. His media machinery churned out sleek narratives and glossy images of infrastructure supposedly redefining Kaduna’s future. But behind the fanfare were glaring truths deliberately concealed from the public: roads left half-constructed, public buildings gutted and abandoned midstream, schools demolished and never rebuilt, and billions of naira in foreign and domestic loans racked up under the guise of “development.”
Today, under the weight of this debt, Kaduna State groans. The very projects used to justify those loans—meant to “uplift” the state—are rusting, crumbling, or completely untraceable. Far from being a model of excellence, El-Rufai’s legacy now resembles a graveyard of abandoned ambitions. Yet rather than own up to these failings, he expects his successor, Governor Uba Sani, to quietly absorb the political and economic backlash—an expectation as insulting as it is dangerous.
Kaduna’s citizens are rightfully enraged. Many recall how El-Rufai dismissed warnings from stakeholders about the sustainability of his spending. He accused critics of “playing politics,” all the while plunging the state deeper into the red. His assurances of “economic prudence” now ring hollow as new audits reveal eye-watering liabilities running into hundreds of millions of dollars.
The arrogance is galling: a man who left behind a fiscal time bomb now postures as a misunderstood visionary. But the people of Kaduna are no longer fooled. They are demanding accountability. The truth is that El-Rufai didn’t build for the future—he borrowed against it. And now, with the lights off and the cranes gone silent, the ruins are all that remain.
