– Accuses El-Rufai of Lying About Missing Activist Dadiyata, Says He Nearly Shared Same Fate

Human rights activist and journalist Steven Kefas has levelled serious allegations against former Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai, accusing him of lying about his knowledge of missing activist Abubakar Idris — popularly known as Dadiyata — and suggesting that the state’s security apparatus may bear responsibility for his disappearance.

Speaking on a Channels Television programme, Kefas directly challenged El-Rufai’s recent claims on Arise Television, where the former governor , now an opposition figure in the African Democratic Congress , insisted he had no knowledge of Dadiyata until after the abduction was reported to police. “We only got the report of Dadiyata’s existence and that he lived in Kaduna State after his family reported to the police that he was abducted,” El-Rufai had told Arise TV, adding that investigations pointed to abductors who came from Kano.

Kefas dismissed this account as implausible and contradicted it with findings from his own investigation into the disappearance. He said he had personally travelled to multiple locations, visiting Dadiyata’s school and interviewing his family, friends, and colleagues in an effort to reconstruct the events surrounding the abduction. According to Kefas, Dadiyata left Kano at 9pm on the night he went missing and arrived in Kaduna around 2am, maintaining a phone conversation with someone throughout the journey. His wife told Kefas that abductors were waiting at the gate of their home and that Dadiyata was taken along with his car.

Kefas said he attempted to obtain Dadiyata’s phone call records from his service provider ,a step he believed would have exposed those responsible ,  but was stonewalled at every turn. He also rejected El-Rufai’s claim that Dadiyata was not a critic of his government, calling it “ludicrous.” As evidence, he pointed to a striking detail: that El-Rufai’s own son sent a ram as a Sallah gift to Dadiyata’s family just days after the activist went missing , a gesture the family rejected. “The only reason El-Rufai is claiming Dadiyata was not a critic of his government is because Twitter has disabled his account,” Kefas said.

But perhaps the most striking part of Kefas’s testimony was personal. He disclosed that he had come within a hair’s breadth of suffering the same fate as Dadiyata, and that only a chance act of human kindness had saved him.

He recounted how he was abducted in Port Harcourt in July 2019 ,  just months before Dadiyata vanished , under what he described as strikingly similar circumstances. Fierce-looking men who identified themselves as police officers seized him without showing any warrant and transported him to a police station, where he was detained under strict instructions that no one was to speak to him. It was there, in that isolation, that a female police officer quietly handed him her phone and allowed him to contact his family. The resulting social media outcry, he believes, is what prevented his enforced disappearance. “That singular event prevented my enforced disappearance like Dadiyata,” Kefas said.

The account adds a new and troubling dimension to the unresolved case of Dadiyata, who disappeared in August 2019 and has not been seen since. It also deepens questions about the role of state actors in the targeting of critical voices during El-Rufai’s tenure ,  questions the former governor has consistently denied.

Kefas himself went on to spend 162 days in Kaduna Maximum Security Prison on charges of inciting public disturbance and defamation, before a sustained campaign of threats ,including an alleged chemical attack on his home in 2022 , eventually forced him to flee Nigeria..