Former Commissioners who served under ex- Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State have faulted incumbent Governor Uba Sani’s assertion that his relationship with his predecessor is intact.
The former Commissioners who signed a statement as “Members of the Kaduna State Executive Council, 2015-2023”, said Uba Sani has indeed “broken ties” with their boss.
According to them, “Uba Sani keeps saying in public that he has good relations with Mallam Nasir El-Rufai. But he cannot credibly claim to believe himself or his own assertion that he has nothing to do with the House of Assembly “report”.
Their statement continued, ” It is telling that Uba Sani is unable to admit in public that he has broken ties with his predecessor whom he used to praise effusively and incessantly as his leader and mentor. It is a mark of dishonour to persist in claiming that there is no rift with a man whom you have serially betrayed and slandered, despite his matchless contributions to your career and emergence as a presidential aide, senator, and now governor. Perhaps Gov. Sani cannot find a way to spin the fact that his SUSTAIN campaign was about continuity of the work of the El-Rufai administration with his latter day pretence that his predecessor did nothing for eight years. A former APC leader recently reminded El-Rufai about how he put their friendship on the line to defend Uba Sani’s right to participate in the 2018 APC senatorial primaries for Kaduna Central. It is noteworthy that El-Rufai left Kaduna immediately from the venue of Uba Sani’s inauguration as governor and returned to Abuja to pursue a private life.”
The ex commissioners alleged that “It is obvious that Uba Sani and his enablers are busy working to ensure that criminal charges are filed against senior El-Rufai administration officials to justify the N423bn claim and advance their plot to destroy the reputation of Mallam Nasir El-Rufai and injure his political viability. Uba Sani and his enablers are straining for validation through the filing of criminal charges. The mission seems to be to hang something on their targets, even if they cannot sustain their missing N423bn claim.”
Read the full text of their statement below:
Update on rehashed Kaduna allegations and executive actions
As former commissioners and members of the State Executive Council in the El-Rufai administration of Kaduna State 2015-2023, we issued two public statements in response to the “report” of an ad-hoc committee which the Kaduna State House of Assembly adopted on June 5, 2024. Our statements of June 14 and July 9, 2024 were categorical in rebutting the lies and innuendos that both the Kaduna State Government and its lackey House of Assembly tried to pass off as an independent legislative report. Despite leaking online an undated and unsigned copy, the Kaduna State House of Assembly did not even have enough confidence in its own ‘report’ to oblige formal requests for certified true copies of the said report.
Isn’t it curious that seven months after its 5 June 2024 release, the recommendation portion of the “report” is now being circulated afresh as if it was just released? Some outlets even put the ‘Breaking News’ to describe their tasteless rehash of the “report”. It is easy to connect the dots between this resurgence of deliberate slander and the recent comments of our leader Mallam Nasir el-Rufai on the state of the APC and the party’s departure from founding principles under its current managers.
Our two press statements of June and July 2024 emphatically denied the claims in the House of Assembly ‘report’ about any missing N423bn under the El-Rufai administration. The statements showed the gross earnings and expenditures of Kaduna State in those eight years. Only those inclined to fiction are able to entertain the claim that 40% of the state’s earnings in eight years went missing. We also demonstrated that several of the external loans the “report” listed were either not drawn at all by the El-Rufai administration or were due for disbursement only after its tenure had ended. The “report” even listed an external loan for a railway project that was never contracted let alone disbursed. Confirming its purpose as an exercise in fantasia, the ‘report’ wilfully double counted several tranches of disbursement of the World Bank Performance-for-Result credit.
The loans that had their disbursement beginning during the El-Rufai administration like AGILE funded some of the schools that the 2015-2023 administration built, but which the incumbent state government is very happy to commission or complete and commission without giving due credit. The World Bank funded CARES monies are being passed off as a personal project of the incumbent, something that we shunned as the administration that qualified the state for it. The El-Rufai administration negotiated and met the conditions to ensure that Kaduna State was one of the six states selected for the USD 150m AfDB loan for the Special Agro-Processing Zones (SAPZs). The SAPZ bid was to advance the El-Rufai administration’s focus on value addition as the next step in its support for the State’s agriculture sector and job creation, and its position as the leading producer of maize and soybeans, among others. Even though that loan had not been disbursed as at May 2023, the “report” listed it as expended. Even in comments made this week, Uba Sani is happy to claim the SAPZs while deriding those whose hard work made it possible. Road projects funded by RAAMP loans are being claimed without the humility to admit as much. It is a game of alleging that N423bn is missing and smearing his predecessor while happily claiming as many of its projects as possible. It is a brazen instance of duplicity.
Mallam Nasir El-Rufai had in July 2024 filed a fundamental rights enforcement action at the Federal High Court in Kaduna against the denial of fair hearing by the Kaduna State House of Assembly and the Kaduna State Government. His appeal is pending against the judgment of that court declining jurisdiction over the matter and its order remitting the case to the Kaduna State High Court.
Since June 2024, several of our colleagues have been invited and interrogated by the anti-corruption agencies. Two of them have been arraigned before the Federal High Court, Kaduna, on charges filed by the ICPC. Bashir Saidu was first abducted, Gestapo-style, on the streets of Kaduna on 31 December 2024 and taken to a magistrate court which remanded him in prison till 21 January 2024. He is still in prison despite being granted bail on the charges at the Federal High Court and in the other matter filed at the State High Court by the Uba Sani government. Jimi Lawal was also granted bail by the Federal High Court on the charges filed against him by the ICPC. Like Bashir Saidu, he remains in prison despite fulfilling his bail condition.
Shortly after Bashir Saidu and Jimi Lawal were granted bail, KADGIS, the state government’s agency for land management,suddenly suspended verification services for certificates of occupancy. This is a crude attempt to deny the liberty that a court had lawfully restored to these two gentlemen. It is also an instance of cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face, as the suspension of verification services is also denying the state revenues just to further punish two former officials for the incumbent’s vain pleasure..
Uba Sani keeps saying in public that he has good relations with Mallam Nasir El-Rufai. But he cannot credibly claim to believe himself or his own assertion that he has nothing to do with the House of Assembly “report”. It is telling that Uba Sani is unable to admit in public that he has broken ties with his predecessor whom he used to praise effusively and incessantly as his leader and mentor. It is a mark of dishonour to persist in claiming that there is no rift with a man whom you have serially betrayed and slandered, despite his matchless contributions to your career and emergence as a presidential aide, senator, and now governor. Perhaps Gov. Sani cannot find a way to spin the fact that his SUSTAIN campaign was about continuity of the work of the El-Rufai administration with his latter day pretence that his predecessor did nothing for eight years. A former APC leader recently reminded El-Rufai about how he put their friendship on the line to defend Uba Sani’s right to participate in the 2018 APC senatorial primaries for Kaduna Central. It is noteworthy that El-Rufai left Kaduna immediately from the venue of Uba Sani’s inauguration as governor and returned to Abuja to pursue a private life.
It is obvious that Uba Sani and his enablers are busy working to ensure that criminal charges are filed against senior El-Rufai administration officials to justify the N423bn claim and advance their plot to destroy the reputation of Mallam Nasir El-Rufai and injure his political viability. Uba Sani and his enablers are straining for validation through the filing of criminal charges. The mission seems to be to hang something on their targets, even if they cannot sustain their missing N423bn claim.
Jimi Lawal’s ICPC charge alleged that he wrongly received N64m, which he had explained under interrogation was refund for international training fees he paid for some senior state government officials. That of Bashir Saidu accuses him of laundering N155m despite his clear explanations as to the facts of the case. Apart from the ICPC charge, the Uba Sani government has arraigned Bashir Saidu before a state High court on charges of causing economic harm to the state and for the sale of to members of the public of 11 government houses in Marafa Estate. His statement, which was leaked by his traducers, clearly asserted that the best rates were always chosen for dollar to Naira exchanges, hence the ability of the state government to earn N40bn as exchange gain on those transactions between 2019 and 2022. It does not take much for anyone with an appreciation for process to understand that payments for the sale of government asserts are paid by the buyers to the treasury, not to the official who supervised the process.
We condemn the intolerance being demonstrated against persons who have not shown any desire to worship the master. Bashir Saidu was suspended from the APC less than five months after the new government took office in 2023. He had served the party as pioneer secretary of its Kaduna State chapter, and was previously a CPC zonal leader. Journalist Aminu Gusau was picked up from his home and beaten. Strange as it may sound, officials of the Uba Sani government do not even wish to respect the fundamental right of Mallam El-Rufai to visit Kaduna. We are aware of the officials who tried to deny him access to Murtala Square as well as their mobilisation of goons to instigate violent clashes whenever he visits Kaduna State.
We will continue to defend the record of the El-Rufai administration which achieved many strides for Kaduna State. Those who are on a mission to destroy cannot erase the achievements in ease of doing business, the unprecedented positioning of Kaduna State as an investment destination, quadrupling its IGR from less than N13bn in 2015 to N58bn in 2022, the investments in advancing its education, health and infrastructure, its governance, including the first ever digital land registry in the state, the residency registration that enabled 6.5m residents to get NIN-linked formal identification, its elevation of young people and women into governance and its many innovations including electronic voting, the treasury single account (TSA), tax reforms, public service reforms and cohesive cabinet governance.
Signed: Members of the Kaduna State Executive Council, 2015-2023.
