Governor Nasir El Rufai of Kaduna State is one of the most controversial governors in the country today. Always in the eyes of the storm, El Rufai is a very close friend to President Muhammadu Buhari, and is even seen in certain quarters as the de facto Vice President of Nigeria and heir apparent to President Buhari when he most have completed his Presidency.
Last year, El Rufai wrote what appears to be a personal letter to President Muhammadu Buhari in which he made some critical comments about President Buhari’s goverment and later got the letter leaked to the press.
El Rufai presides over a restless state of Kaduna where blood always flows like river arising from the activities of Fulani herdsmen, and he keeps a blind eye to it. There are insinuations that Governor El Rufai has a hand in these killings.
Under El Rufai’s watch, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), in Kaduna State is factionalized. Out of the three senators representing the state in the National Assembly, El Rufai is not on speaking terms with two of the senators and has equally incurred the wrath of many other legislators and bigwigs of the party in the state.
On Thursday last week, a faction of the APC in the state loyal to both Senator Suleiman Hunkuyi and Senator Shehu Sani, decided to locate to a new secretariat building, from where on Sunday this week, along with several other lawmakers both at the state and National Assembly as well as many other APC members in the state, they served a six months suspension on El Rufai for anti-party activities.
But in an early morning commando operation this Tuesday, El Rufai who is used to demolishing people’s property, rolled out his bulldozers and brazingly demolished the building housing the Secretariat of the faction, claiming that the house had violated building law and that it had not paid tax since 2010.
This is madness. What a brazen act of rascality and political intolerance? Why is it that only after two days the APC faction had located to the building that El Rufai and his government remembered that the house had violated the state’s building law and had not paid tax for eight years?
Expectedly, many Nigerians, including the Senate, rose in total condemnation of this act of hooliganism, political intolerance and intimidation. These are members of the same political party, what happens if it is another political party in opposition? Surely this does not portend good tidings for 2019.
Mallam Nasir El Rufai caught his political teeth in the early years of the present political dispensation when he was given the responsibility of overseeing the liquidation of federal government owned companies, otherwise known as the Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE).
This was one of the misnomers of the Obasanjo Presidency, when government owned companies were auctioned out to private agencies and individuals in the name of privatizaton and commercialization of government enterprises. El Rufai and his political masters clearly took care of themselves in the course of the exercise.
Nasir El Rufai was next appointed Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), where he exhibited most animalistic instincts by levelling down people’s houses and structures at will, in the name of recovering the Abuja masterplan.
Highly ambitious and always ready to bite the fingers that fed him, El Rufai is not on speaking terms with most of the people that helped him to climb the political ladder including former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar and former President Olusegun Obasanjo.
