By Ehi Ekhator
The immediate past Nigerian President, Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan agreed that the governor of Kaduna State, Malam Nasir El-Rufai has an “incurable knack for lying”, as written in Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo’s book.
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Obasanjo in his Volume 2 book (My Watch) said “Nasir’s penchant for reputation savaging is almost pathological. Why does he do it? He is brilliant and smart. I grant him that also. Very early in my interaction with him, I appreciated his talent and brilliance. At the same time, I recognised his weaknesses; the worst being his inability to be loyal to anybody or any issue consistently for long, but only to Nasir el-Rufai. He barefacedly lied which he did
to me against his colleagues and so-called friends. I have heard of how he ruthlessly savaged the reputation of his uncle, a man who was like, in the African setting, his foster father. I shuddered when I heard the story of what he did to his half-brother in the Air Force who is senior to him in age.”
Jonathan was responding to El-Rufai’s claim during the last National Economic Council (NEC) meeting where he alleged that Jonathan shared the National Ecological Fund to PDP States.
El-Rufai said “What President Goodluck Jonathan did was to take N2bn each from the Ecological Fund and gave to some PDP states. Any PDP state that was not his friend, like Kano and Kwara, didn’t get.”
Narrating why some states didn’t receive the NE fund, Jonathan through his media adviser, Ikechukwu Eze said “It is so easy to expose Malam Nasir El-Rufai as a liar being that Akwa-Ibom, a PDP state governed by the then Chairman of the PDP Governors Forum and a close confidante and major supporter of the then President, Senator Godswill Obot Akpabio, did not get the monies alluded to by Malam El-Rufai from the Ecological Fund as did multiple other PDP states including Ekiti state, a state governed by a thoroughbred patriot and Jonathan supporter, Ayo Fayose.
“Also, it is false that non-PDP states did not get monies from the fund. Nemesis catches up faster with liars than any other agent of evil. El-Rufai was probably led by the gods against his own sinister plot to confess in another breathe that States under non-PDP parties like APGA and Labour party also benefitted.
“The fact remains that the Ecological Fund is a specialized fund with certain constitutional requirements which must be met before a state can access the funds. EVERY state benefitted from the fund under President Jonathan who bent over backwards to accommodate states that had difficulty meeting the criteria for accessing the fund.
“El-Rufai’s sinister narrative was intentionally silent on the over N10 billion specially deployed to fund the Great Green Wall (GGW) project in some northern states, in view of the need to work with the rest of Africa on the African initiative to check desert encroachment in the Sahelian states. These states included Zamfara, Jigawa, Kebbi, Sokoto, Katsina and Adamawa. Others are Yobe, Borno and Kano which belong to Mallam El-Rufai’s class of ‘non-friendly’ states that he alleged never benefitted from any discretionary fund.
“Similar principle applies to the conditions for accessing the Universal basic Education fund where some states have not had access to what is due them, because they are yet to fulfill the mandatory criteria for allocation. Would it then be right in the name of El-Rufai’s position on equity to blame the failure of those states to access their UBEC funds on Jonathan?
“It is really sad that judicious presidential interventions to tackle emergencies and other pressing national needs are being interrogated in a rather facile manner, by those who never get tired of playing
dirty politics.”
It could be recalled that in October 2015, El-rufai also accused the former President of spending N64 billion on Independence Day celebration and later, the then presidency released N333 million as the actual amount spent, accusing the Kaduna governor of feeding the public with lies.
El-Rufai in a similar note had accused Jonathan and the then President of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor of founding and funding Boko Haram to the tune of N50 billion.
Jonathan urged Nigerians to “be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath” whenever El-Rufai who he described as a notorious liar, opens his mouth.
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