El-Rufai is invoking rights he spent 16 years denying others. Both things are true.

You've been watching the El-Rufai story and probably feeling something complicated. That complication is the actual story.

Here's what happened: former Kaduna governor Nasir El-Rufai wrote to NSA Nuhu Ribadu in January demanding to know why his office allegedly imported 10 kilograms of thallium sulphate, a colourless, odourless, highly toxic compound from Poland. The NSA's office denied the entire thing. Then El-Rufai admitted on television that he got the information by tapping Ribadu's phone. The government moved to charge him with cybercrime. The opposition called it a witch-hunt.

Both things are true. Hold them together.

The harassment of opposition figures in Nigeria is real and it's corrosive. When the state deploys anti-graft agencies as political instruments, today's targets are just yesterday's allies who stopped being useful. That violation is worth naming clearly, regardless of who's on the receiving end.

And: El-Rufai spent eight years as FCT minister and eight years as Kaduna governor with those same tools at his disposal. He used them. The constitutional protections he's invoking now were available in theory to everyone during those years. In practice, they worked for very few people who crossed him.

Here's the structural point: the system being used against him now is partly one he helped build. And the reason you should care isn't sympathy for El-Rufai. It's that this system doesn't stay pointed at former governors. It points wherever power decides. You're watching a former insider learn what it feels like to be on the outside of the machinery he once operated.

Nigeria's democracy won't be saved by leaders who only defend rights when the rights being violated are their own. But it also won't be saved by dismissing violations because the victim once violated others. Both failures let the state off the hook.