In the theatre of power, some scripts never age. Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, written five centuries ago, remains the definitive manual for understanding political ambition, betrayal, and survival. Its principles find fertile ground in Nigeria’s contemporary political drama, where the fallout between President Bola Tinubu and former Kaduna Governor Nasir El-Rufai offers a masterclass in Machiavellian statecraft—not merely in the falling out, but in the calculated choreography of the nomination process itself. To understand this saga is to understand that power, in its purest form, is not about virtue or loyalty but about the cold, unyielding mechanics of survival.
Machiavelli’s treatise was never intended as a moral guide but as a practical one. He argued that to acquire and hold power, a prince must operate beyond conventional ethics when state stability—or his own survival—is at stake. Success, not virtue, is the ultimate measure. Yet he warned of a central paradox: while a prince can transgress moral norms for security, he can also become a victim of his own exceptionality, ruled out of the very safeguards he violated. This duality is the prism through which to view the Tinubu-El-Rufai saga, a drama that unfolds in three distinct but interconnected acts: the alliance of necessity, the nomination as a strategic diversion, and the final neutralization, with the ever-present possibility of resurgence.
Machiavelli observed that princes rise through fortune or through ability, but most rely on the assistance of others. In 2023, El-Rufai was not merely a supporter but an architect of Tinubu’s victory. He mobilized northern governors, campaigned relentlessly across the region, and secured electoral votes in a zone where the President was historically weak. According to former minister Solomon Dalung, “El-Rufai brought Tinubu… remove El-Rufai, Tinubu would not have won in 2023.” This was never friendship. It was a calculated transaction—El-Rufai needed Tinubu to ascend and protect his post-gubernatorial relevance, while Tinubu needed northern legitimacy to validate his southern-centric ambition. In Machiavelli’s terms, they were bound by necessity, not affection. The prince, Machiavelli warns, must never fully trust those who serve him out of their own ambition, for men are quick to change their nature when it serves their interests. The alliance was always destined to fracture because it was built on mutual utility, not mutual trust.
Here lies the most subtle application of Machiavellian doctrine: the nomination process itself. When Tinubu submitted his ministerial list to the Senate in July 2023, El-Rufai’s name was conspicuously included. The nomination appeared as a reward for loyalty—a public gesture of gratitude that satisfied El-Rufai’s expectation and quieted northern political allies. But Machiavelli would recognize this as a masterful feint. By nominating El-Rufai, Tinubu achieved three objectives simultaneously. First, he shifted public attention away from his own role in any eventual rejection, allowing the Senate to serve as the heavy hand. Second, he placed El-Rufai in a vulnerable position—undergoing public scrutiny, security clearance, and Senate grilling—while the President remained above the fray. Third, and most crucially, he bought time. The nomination process stretched over weeks, during which Tinubu consolidated his cabinet with loyalists, reducing El-Rufai’s bargaining power and ensuring that when the rejection came, the President’s inner circle was already secure.
The inconsistency of the Senate’s screening process further exposed the selective application of security concerns. Several governors who had campaigned alongside El-Rufai—including some from his own geopolitical zone and political persuasion—were nominated, screened, and cleared without incident, despite possessing what might reasonably be considered comparable or even more significant security profiles. These individuals, many of whom had presided over states with profound security challenges, including banditry, insurgency, and communal violence, faced no substantive obstacles to their confirmation. Their nominations sailed through the same Senate that suddenly found El-Rufai’s clearance problematic. The explanation lies not in any unique threat posed by El-Rufai but in political convenience.
The ministers who were cleared represented, in many cases, a rather poor demographic and regional representation of the north, yet they were confirmed because their presence served the political equation of the moment. They were pliable, unambitious, or sufficiently indebted to the presidency to pose no future threat. El-Rufai, by contrast, was none of these things. His independent stature, his network of northern allies, and his demonstrated capacity to mobilize made him a liability in a cabinet that Tinubu intended to control absolutely. The Senate’s selective scrutiny was not a triumph of due process but a performance of it—institutional theatre designed to produce a predetermined outcome while preserving the appearance of impartiality.
When the Senate eventually withheld El-Rufai’s confirmation, citing security concerns allegedly arising from a Department of State Services report, the President could claim plausible deniability. “I nominated him,” Tinubu’s posture suggested, “but the institutions spoke.” This is Machiavelli’s principle of indirect action—achieving a goal while concealing the hand that moves the pieces, leaving the public to blame the machinery rather than the master. The ministers who were cleared, regardless of their qualifications or regional representativeness, served a different purpose. They were political conveniences, placeholders who would not challenge presidential authority, whose presence in cabinet would not shift the balance of power or create alternative centers of influence. Their confirmation was never in doubt because their confirmation posed no threat.
This pattern of elevating then neutralizing powerful allies is a recurring theme in political history, transcending cultures and eras, and it offers chilling parallels to the Nigerian experience. In ancient Rome, Emperor Tiberius cultivated Sejanus, the commander of the Praetorian Guard, as his most trusted deputy. Sejanus consolidated immense power, eliminating rivals and positioning himself for succession. Yet when Tiberius sensed Sejanus’s ambition had grown too great, he orchestrated his fall through a series of letters read before the Senate—denouncing the very man he had publicly praised for years. Sejanus was executed, and his body was torn apart by the mob. The prince had used his ally, then discarded him through institutional machinery, exactly as Tinubu is accused of doing with El-Rufai. In modern America, President Richard Nixon relied heavily on Attorney General John Mitchell, his campaign manager and closest confidant. Mitchell oversaw Nixon’s reelection and wielded enormous influence. But when the Watergate scandal unraveled, Nixonl allowed Mitchell to become the primary scapegoat—prosecuted and imprisoned—while the President maintained public deniability until his own eventual downfall. Mitchell, like El-Rufai, had been indispensable, but the prince’s survival required his sacrifice. Closer to the present, consider the treatment of General James Mattis under President Donald Trump. Mattis was celebrated as a revered military strategist who lent credibility to the administration. Yet when Mattis disagreed with Trump’s foreign policy decisions, he was quietly sidelined, his resignation accepted with minimal ceremony. The prince had extracted the legitimacy he needed, then discarded the instrument. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s relationship with former ally Ahmet Davutoğlu followed a similar arc. Davutoğlu served as Prime Minister and architect of Turkey’s foreign policy, but when his independent stature grew threatening, Erdoğan systematically undermined him—removing his authority, isolating him from party machinery, and forcing his resignation. Davutoğlu now leads a marginal opposition faction, a shadow of his former influence.
Once El-Rufai was denied the ministerial portfolio, the relationship dissolved predictably. El-Rufai now describes the Tinubu administration as governing to enrich themselves, holding philosophies contrary to everything he has been taught. Tinubu, in turn, has been accused by Dalung of orchestrating legal distractions to occupy El-Rufai until after 2027—a classic Machiavellian strategy of containment without open confrontation. Yet Machiavelli also teaches that the fallen can rise again, provided they learn from their errors. El-Rufai’s current marginalization offers him a distinct advantage: the freedom of opposition without the constraints of office. He can criticize, organize, and rebuild alliances while Tinubu bears the burden of governance—with its inevitable failures, economic hardships, and public disillusionment. Should El-Rufai return to prominence, whether in 2027 or beyond, he will likely be more cautious—more attuned to Machiavelli’s warning that the prince who relies entirely on fortune is lost when fortune changes. He will understand that indispensability must be coupled with irreplaceability: cultivating multiple power bases, maintaining independent networks, and ensuring that no single prince holds his fate entirely. The humiliated ally who survives becomes the most dangerous adversary because he has learned the rules of the game from the very master who tried to destroy him.
The Tinubu-El-Rufai clash is not a cautionary tale about betrayal but about the inevitable mechanics of power. Machiavelli understood that the tools used to gain power become the tools used against you. El-Rufai’s methods—intense loyalty followed by rapid defection—are now being employed by his former allies to contain him. Tinubu, having secured power, must now defend it against the very force that helped him acquire it. This is the paradox of sovereignty alive in twenty-first-century Nigeria: those who help create a prince can quickly become the new homo sacer—the one who can be politically eliminated with impunity. The nomination process was not a failure of due process; it was a masterstroke of Machiavellian staging. It allowed the prince to appear generous while being ruthless, to reward publicly while punishing privately, and to clear the politically convenient while sacrificing the politically dangerous.
Yet beyond the personal drama lies a sobering national consideration. El-Rufai’s track record as Kaduna State governor, particularly his aggressive push for infrastructure development and policy reforms, suggests a technocratic disposition that Nigeria’s power sector desperately requires. One need not endorse every aspect of his governance to acknowledge that his expertise in navigating complex policy challenges could have been channeled toward the nation’s debilitating electricity crisis—a problem that has stifled industrial growth and impoverished millions. The country’s power challenges, which have defied solutions for decades, might have found a more resolute advocate in a minister who has demonstrated both the political will and administrative capacity to drive difficult reforms. Whether such outcomes would have materialized remains speculative, but the loss of that potential contribution, however measured, is a casualty of the power calculus that prioritizes political containment over national competence. History teaches that the prince who humiliates his former allies plants seeds of future resistance. El-Rufai may be down, but if Machiavelli’s principles hold, he will rise again—wiser, more cautious, and acutely aware that in the game of thrones, survival belongs not to the loyal but to the vigilant. In the end, Machiavelli forces us to ask: in a system where the end always justifies the means, what happens when the means turn on the end? The answer lies in the uneasy, unpredictable dance of power currently playing out in Nigeria’s political arena—a dance as old as statecraft itself, and as current as tomorrow’s headlines.
By Hassan Husaini