A few days before Nasir El-Rufar’s trending, impassioned September 23 letter talking about the ‘apparent silence’ of friends and family members he had ‘publicly stood by,’ I read social media posts lamenting Emir Muhammadu Sanusi I’s supposed betrayal of El-Rufai in his hour of need, especially in light of the role El-Rufai played in rescuing Sanusi from banishment.
I thought the assumption that Sanusi had abandoned his friend was unfair and that even El-Rufai would be reluctant to reach that conclusion because of the delicate position Sanusi occupies and the practical impossibility of reciprocating what El-Rufai did for him when Abdullahi Ganduje dethroned and banished him.
Then El-Rufai’s letter appeared. El-Rufai did not identify anyone by name, so any identification has to remain inferential. But Sanusi seems to me one of the likeliest people he had in mind.
Some of the other obvious possibilities can be eliminated fairly easily. El-Rufai has already publicly declared Nuhu Ribadu and Uba Sani as ‘former friends’ and accused them of working against him. They therefore hardly qualify as the friends whose true relationship with him revealed itself in his moment of personal adversity.
Tinubu is also an awkward fit because El-Rufai has publicly insisted that he and Tinubu were ‘never friends’ in the personal sense. In any case, he is being detained by Tinubu’s government with what seems like Tinubu’s express imprimatur.
And people such as Atiku Abubakar and Rotimi Amaechi have publicly spoken about El-Rufai’s predicament. Atiku and Amaechi have even put his name as a member of their presidential campaign council. That makes silence a poor description of their conduct.
Sanusi fits El-Rufai’s language more snugly. El-Rufai writes that some people may ‘deny our relationship or try rewriting history’ and says his experience may cause him to ‘reconsider the nature of certain relationships.’
He begins by referring to friends whom he had ‘publicly stood by.’ He recalls having ‘stood by people’ in difficult circumstances.
He says he expected no ‘gratitude or reciprocity.’ He then speaks of people he had supported making their own choices ‘now that circumstances are reversed,’ and says he bears no resentment toward anyone who chooses ‘not to do the same for me.’
Toward the end, he even invokes ‘ingratitude.’ Read as a whole, the letter keeps circling back to a very specific moral ledger, which is (1), standing by people when they were in trouble, (2), circumstances are now reversed and some of those people have chosen silence or indifference. That is precisely why Sanusi comes so readily to mind.
The language in the letter suggests a personal, not a political, relationship whose depth was publicly known, particularly one in which El-Rufai had conspicuously stood beside the other person during adversity. Again, Sanusi fits that description almost to a T.
On March 9, 2020, Ganduje’s government dethroned Sanusi as Emir of Kano and exiled him to Awe in Nasarawa State. A federal court later ruled that the banishment and restrictions on his movement were unlawful and unconstitutional.
El-Rufai responded almost immediately. On March 10, barely 24 hours after the dethronement, he appointed Sanusi vice chairman of the Kaduna Investment Promotion Agency. On March 11, he appointed him chancellor of Kaduna State University. On March 13, after a Federal High Court in Abuja ordered Sanusi released from confinement, El-Rufai traveled to Awe, met him and drove away with him.
El-Rufai’s words that day make the present moment especially poignant. He said Sanusi had been with him since their teenage years and had never left him. He added that he, too, could not leave Sanusi at such a moment.
With that history, it is easy to see why people would now look toward Sanusi and ask: Where is he?
I don’t know what El-Rufai, his family or his supporters may know that the rest of us don’t. Perhaps Sanusi has privately done nothing. Perhaps there are conversations and interventions the public knows nothing about. From the outside, though, the charge of betrayal strikes me as extremely unfair.
Sanusi does not possess anything remotely resembling the power El-Rufai had in 2020. He is merely emir, an influential cultural and religious figure, but a powerless symbol of a bygone past, nonetheless. He exercises no executive power. His throne itself exists within a political structure controlled by the Kano State government.
That vulnerability should be obvious from the precarity of his position. He was removed once by a governor and restored by another. Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf restored Sanusi in May 2024 and subsequently left the NNPP for the APC on January 26, 2026. When he did so, he unequivocally described the move as an alignment of Kano with the ruling party at the federal level.
That places Sanusi in a politically, even existentially, awkward position. A highly public intervention on behalf of a cantankerous former governor who is being prosecuted by federal authorities could easily acquire meanings beyond anything Sanusi intends.
El-Rufai is currently in ICPC custody under court-authorized remand while facing charges connected principally to investigations arising from the Kaduna State House of Assembly probe of his administration.
Sanusi therefore cannot reproduce El-Rufai’s 2020 gesture in any meaningful sense. He cannot drive to a detention facility, collect El-Rufai and take him away. He cannot appoint him to a state board.
He cannot use executive power to create an institutional refuge for him. All he has is his voice, his private access to people in power and whatever moral or symbolic authority the throne he sits on still possesses.
And even his voice is politically expensive. When El-Rufai stood by Sanusi in 2020, he did so from the security of an executive office. He was the sitting governor of Kaduna State, enjoyed constitutional immunity from criminal prosecution while in office and had substantial access to the Buhari presidency.
His intervention for Sanusi certainly carried political meaning, but there is no evidence that it threatened El-Rufai’s governorship or personal liberty.
Sanusi occupies a vastly more precarious position today.
His throne has already been taken from him once by political authority. His restoration itself came through another change in political power. It is unreasonable to pretend that an emir in such dicey circumstances has the same freedom of maneuver as a sitting governor.
If Sanusi were to be deposed this time because of an impolitic political gamble, there would be, ironically, no El-Rufai to save him from the certain fate of exile to a godforsaken wilderness in the middle of nowhere.
The absolute bravest thing Sanusi could probably do for El-Rufai is use whatever private access he has to President Tinubu to plead for fair treatment, bail or some accommodation within the law.
Even that would involve potentially self-immolating political risk because such an intervention could be interpreted as sympathy for a man who has become an outspoken adversary of the federal political establishment.
Public denunciation of his continued detention would carry even greater risks. This is why the arithmetic of reciprocity becomes difficult. El-Rufai could stand up for Sanusi without putting his governorship in obvious jeopardy. Sanusi cannot stand up for El-Rufai in precisely the same fashion because he possesses neither El-Rufai’s former power nor his former security.
You cannot sensibly demand symmetrical repayment from people situated in radically asymmetrical circumstances.
I understand why El-Rufai may feel wounded. Months in detention are hardly conducive to detached philosophical calculations about the limitations confronting friends outside. Adversity naturally rearranges one’s mental ledger of friendship. People remember whom they helped, who showed up for them and who vanished when the weather changed.
But Sanusi presents a harder case. If he speaks loudly, he risks turning himself into a political combatant when his throne is already inseparable from Kano’s combustible politics. If he remains quiet, people who remember Awe in March 2020 can easily see a treacherous, self-centered ingrate hiding behind royal robes.
Perhaps Sanusi deserves that judgment. Perhaps there are facts outside public knowledge that would justify it.
From what is publicly known, though, I am not there yet.
El-Rufai rescued a friend while standing on the firm ground of gubernatorial power. Sanusi is being asked to rescue that friend while standing on a shaky throne that Nigerian politics has already pulled from beneath him once. I would be slow to call self-preservation betrayal.