By Adesina Soyooye
“Hints on dumping APC, says Party has left him”
Malam Nasir El-Rufai, the immediate past Governor of Kaduna State, has revealed how he was betrayed by President Bola Tinubu and humiliated out of his Ministerial nomination.
Recall that President Tinubu had forwarded El-Rufai’s name as one of his Ministerial Nominees. But in a move that shocked not a few people, especially, given the role El-Rufai played in the emergence of Tinubu as President in 2023, the Senate rejected his nomination citing security reports.
But in an interview Monday evening with Arise Television’s Charles Aniagolu, El-Rufai revealed that his rejection by the Senate was ordered by President Tinubu.
Ironically, El-Rufai disclosed that it was President Tinubu that goaded him into accepting the nomination and appearing before the Senate for screening. He said Tinubu already offered to him the position of Minister for Power even before his nomination. He said Tinubu told him to come on board so that they would “join hands to defeat the electricity mafia.”
El-Rufai said it was the challenge that they would defeat the mafia that made him accept the nomination but Tinubu changed his mind, ordered the Senate not to clear him over spurious security reports, and dumped him.
El-Rufai: “What is the security issue? Where is the report? Has anyone released the report? There were other nominees with controversial issues that were cleared because the President made the call. The President simply changed his mind.”
El-Rufai also hinted he would dump the All Progressives Congress, APC, and added that the Party has left him. The option left for him, he said is to use another platform in pursuit of what he called his “progressive politics”.
He also made it clear that he would likely not support Tinubu’s second term in 2027. According to El-Rufai, President Tinubu “was never his friend, was never close to him” and in 2027, would consult widely before he would make a decision on whose Presidential aspiration to support.
In the run up to the APC Presidential Primaries in 2023, when it seemed a little obvious that President Muhammadu Buhari was not in support of a Southern Candidate, and by extention, Tinubu, it was El-Rufai who led a delegation of APC Northern Governors to meet Buhari in the Presidential Villa to insist that power should, and must shift to the South.
Days earlier, then National Chairman of the APC, Senator Abdullahi Adamu had, after a meeting with Buhari in the Villa, came out to announce that the immediate past Senate President, Dr Ahmad Lawan, was the Party’s consensus Candidate.
However, Tinubu gave them a bloody nose at the Presidential Primaries by easily picking the ticket.
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