Watching the outspoken Bashir El-Rufai discuss his divorce and hint at another wedding, one thing is clear: he carries the El-Rufai name, brash, unfiltered, and unafraid of controversy.
But here’s the thing about endings. Anyone who has ever shared a home, a name, and years with a woman called “wife” should announce a breakup with regret, empathy, and humility. Even if it fails. Even if expectations collapse. That is someone’s daughter, sister, child. Her family once welcomed you, fed you, trusted you. That history alone should evoke grief, not grandeur.
This matters even more when children are involved. A divorce is never a solo performance. It is a two-way fracture: a failure of tolerance, judgment, expectation, and imagination. The moment things don’t go as planned, “being right” stops mattering. What matters is what broke, and who was left picking up the pieces.
Yet listening to El-Rufai Junior, I heard something else entirely: self-justification, condescension, and zero remorse. Boasting that he has “never toasted a girl” and that his ex-wife proposed to him felt misplaced. Whether true or not, it reads like vanity, not vulnerability.
No doubt, children of politicians, especially a former governor naturally attract attention. But maturity isn’t in collecting admirers. It’s in handling relationships with weight, not pride. Turning personal experience into a flex suggests emotional adolescence, not strength.
Then came the lines that sparked the real debate. Bashir confirmed on X that his marriage to Halima Nwakaego Kazaure had ended, and added: “Divorced and soon to be married again.” He blamed “GenZ wahala” for the split. He announced his next bride would be a Nupe woman from Bida, Niger State, and praised Nupe women for treating husbands “like emperors.”
“I don’t toast babes. Never have… Even my first wife, she was the one that proposed,” he wrote. He ended with: “I want a baby girl by September. Keep doing slay queen here.”
Let’s be honest. Divorce is failure, but not one-sided failure. It’s a failure to adapt, to compromise, to see each other clearly. And praising an entire ethnic group as the “solution” before the marriage even begins? That’s dangerous ground. It builds expectations on stereotypes, not on a person. Today’s ideal is tomorrow’s disappointment.
Whether we accept it or not, marriage demands humility at the end as much as at the beginning. Anything less, and the cycle just repeats with new names, same wounds.
Bagudu Mohammed
bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com
