Senior Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu, Bayo Onanuga, has reignited an old political feud by invoking the biting words of former President Olusegun Obasanjo against ex-Kaduna State governor, Nasir el-Rufa’i.
Onanuga shared excerpts from Obasanjo’s 2015 memoir My Watch (Volume 2), in what appears to be a calculated response to el-Rufa’i’s recent public criticism of Tinubu’s administration. During a television appearance, el-Rufa’i had claimed that “God saved me from the disaster called Tinubu’s government” and predicted that the president would struggle to place third in the 2027 elections.
Responding indirectly, Onanuga posted passages where Obasanjo accused el-Rufa’i of disloyalty, dishonesty, and a tendency for “reputation savaging”. The former president portrayed him as a “pathological purveyor of untruths,” suggesting his behavior stemmed from a troubled upbringing, including the loss of his father at a young age.
Obasanjo described el-Rufa’i as a man who tries to “give himself more ‘height’ than he has,” attributing it partly to what he called “small man syndrome” and a “psychological complex”.
While acknowledging el-Rufa’i’s intelligence, he emphasized that the former minister could only be effective under strict supervision.
