Former President Goodluck Jonathan has
described Kaduna state governor, Nasir El-Rufai
as a liar whose penchant for lying has even been
confirmed by his former boss and ex-president
Olusegun Obasanjo.
Jonathan said this while reacting to a statement
made by El-Rufai at the end of the national
economic council (NEC) meeting in Abuja on
Thursday, where he, El-Rufai alleged that
Jonathan was partial in the disbursement of the
ecological fund while he was in office.
“What President Goodluck Jonathan did was to
take N2 billion 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,”El-Rufai had told state house
correspondents. Dismissing El-Rufai's claims,
Jonathan in a statement signed by his media
aide, Ikechukwu Eze, said there is no truth in El-
Rufai's claims.
“That Malam Nasir El-Rufai governor of Kaduna
state has an incurable knack for lying has been
proven by his own boss, former President
Olusegun Obasanjo who described el-Rufai in his
book-My Watch Volume 2 as follows: ‘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. With such a description, we are not
surprised at his recent comments after the just
concluded national economic council meeting
where he accused former President Jonathan of
only sharing the national ecological fund to PDP
states.
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 breath
that states under non-PDP parties like APGA
and Labour party also benefitted.
The fact remains that the ecological fund is a
specialised 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 o