Ahead of next week’s presidential poll, Governor Nasir el- Rufai of Kaduna state yesterday said he no longer believed in the quality of leadership around President Muhammadu Buhari, claiming that a Presidency cabal was working towards an Interim National Government, ING.
But both the Presidency and All Progressives Congress, APC, kept mum, as efforts to get their reaction last night proved abortive.
El-Rufai, in an interview with Premium Times, said the leaders around President Buhari resorted to ING after failing to get either Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, Governor, Mr Godwin Emefiele, and Senate President Ahmad Lawan to succeed Buhari.
His comments elicited knocks from the Middle Belt Forum, MBF; the African Democratic Congress, ADC, Presidential Candidate, Mr Dumebi Kachikwu; and a top leader of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP.
However, efforts to get the APC and the party’s presidential campaign council to speak on the issue proved abortive as the leaders declined comments.
El-Rufai, who has been outspoken, especially regarding the naira redesign policy of the CBN, claiming that some “Villa elements” were working against the APC Presidential Candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, told Premium Times, that he no longer believed in the quality of leadership around President Buhari.
Premium Times shared a snippet of the interview on its Twitter handle on Sunday. “I believe in Buhari, I still do and I will never stop, but I no longer believe in the circle around him and the quality of decisions and actions coming out of that leadership,” El-Rufai said.
According to the Kaduna State governor, some non-state actors have their eyes on an interim government as an outcome of the ongoing presidential election process.
Speaking on the people and forces he characterised as elements whose patterns and conduct are consistent with plans to subvert or topple a civilian-to-civilian transition after the next presidential election, he said: “It turned out that some of the wildest stories of conspiracy to derail the transition at best for APC to lose, preferably for the whole system to result in no election, leading to an interim arrangement began to rear their heads.”
He refused to name these “elements” because they are not worth the conventional Nigerian appellation of a political cabal.
The notion of a powerful cabal, according to him, admits a level of sophistication and discipline, which the group around President Buhari lacks.
“I have no problem naming them. I’m not afraid of anybody. But for me, naming them is giving them traction. They are nothing. They are not capable of winning elections. They have no idea of electoral or political legitimacy. They can only hide behind the likes of President Buhari to achieve their objectives,” he said.
On contentious issues around President Buhari and Tinubu, and the perceived mixed signals from the president’s lukewarm attitude to Tinubu’s campaigns, he insisted there are no mixed signals.
“President Buhari considers the APC like a child he conceived and held in pregnancy for 18 months and gave birth to. He will never, I am ready to stake my neck and my life, President Buhari will never work against the APC. He will never work against the candidate of the APC even if the candidate is the devil himself,” El-Rufai said.
The governor insisted that the president is “a party man and an establishment person whose support for Asiwaju Tinubu is sure.”
Painting a picture and illustrating the operational mode of some disgruntled power-hungry cliques within the party that he admitted is hurting the APC, he said: “What is happening is that there are people around the president that had their presidential candidates. They had two candidates that they preferred to succeed Buhari – Godwin Emefiele from the South and Ahmad Lawan from the North – and they got neither.”
Some farmers reportedly purchased the APC presidential nomination form for Emefiele but the central banker did not contest the primaries.