Our reporter/ Former Kaduna Governor Nasir El-Rufai over the weekend acknowledged his contributions to the emergence of a “bandit” as Nigeria’s leader.
El-rufai’s confession is coming two years after he spearhead the 2023 presidential campaign of the then candidate Bola Tinubu.
The outspoken Kaduna state politician, who fell out with Tinubu after his ministerial appointment nomination was blocked by the Senate, spoke in Abuja on Saturday at the 60th birthday lecture of former Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State.
“Nigeria is in its biggest trouble since 1914, and that is why we are together working and conspiring to build a coalition to take Nigeria back on track because it is off track,” El-Rufai said.
Calling Tinubu’s administration a government of “bandits”, El-Rufai said, “It has turned to this level because we have allowed bandits, not the ones in the bushes but the ones in the urban areas called the urban bandits, to take over leadership.”
He berated Tinubu as an incompetent leader who only knows how to grab and snatch power.
“I believe that the problem that we have, which I think [former] Governor Babangida referred to, is that we just get incompetent people, and we hand over leadership to them. Most of them don’t really know what to do. They just know how to grab power but don’t know what to do with it,” El-Rufai said.
El-Rufai’s statement followed his earlier admission that he and others supported Tinubu’s presidential bid despite his cocaine and certificate forgery scandals in Chicago after his defection from the ruling All Progressives Congress to the Social Democratic Party.
Also speaking at the event, Rotimi Amaechi, a former minister of works, said he and other opposition politicians could seize power from the president because they are as hungry as every Nigerian.
“We are all hungry. All of us are. If you are not hungry, I am,” said Amaechi. “So, for us, the opposition, if you want us to remove the man in power -Tinubu -we can remove him from this power.”
Amaechi recalled how, as student unionists, he and others, regardless of their regional and religious differences, rallied massive crowds in protests against former military ruler Ibrahim Babangida and Muhammadu Buhari.
Amaechi, a former presidential aspirant, lost his bid to Tinubu during the APC primary election in 2022.
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