El-Rufai in pain because he’s not in govt — Presidency

The Presidency on Saturday said 70 per cent of members of the newly registered All Progressives Congress were those the Peoples Democratic Party had rejected. Read more

The, APC, it added  was destined to fail because the emergence  was based on  personal hatred  for President Goodluck Jonathan even when the President was yet to make up his mind for the 2015 race.

Senior Special Assistant to the President on Public Affairs, Dr. Doyin  Okupe, stated this in an interview on Liberty FM, Kaduna,  which  was monitored by our correspondent on Saturday.

“They just go around gallivanting and parading themselves. Who are they? Seventy per cent of their members are former PDP people. So, what new thing are they coming up with?” he said.

He also said the crisis rocking Rivers State was the over dramatisation of the preparation towards the 2015 presidency, claiming that Governor Rotimi Amaechi “is a willing tool, very rich, wealthy, so he is very useful to the opposition.”

Besides, he alleged that Amaechi’s inability to use the police to harass, intimidate and punish people unjustly also aggravated the situation leading to his hostile relationship with the state Commissioner of Police, Mr. Joseph Mbu.

“Because Mbu has refused to be a tool in the hands of Amaechi and has refused to bend to the unjustified high handedness of Amaechi, now because he is supported by the opposition, he now presents Mbu as a villain. It is not true. Mbu is a professional man, he is a man of dignity who has remained steadfast,” Okupe said.

He  insisted that the APC would collapse because it was built on a faulty foundation which could never stand the test of time.

Okupe said, “They are people that PDP had thrown away. When I said in the newspapers that APC is full of expired politicians, I didn’t  mean they are old, no. You can be a young man and be expired.

“They are people whose ideas are no longer relevant to where Nigeria intends to go in the nearest future. They are people who cannot contribute or redirect the ship of state; people who have no fundamentals within them; people who have no ideology except hatred or ethnic chauvinism or personal aggrandisement.

“This is not the change Nigeria wants, these people can definitely not be called messiahs. This is mega nonsense, period.”

He took a swipe at former Lagos State Governor and leader of the APC, Bola Tinubu, saying Tinubu had conquered the South-West and was out to expand his empire.

“Like Napoleon and others who were on expedition, they want to expand their frontiers. He wants to come to the national stage and expand his business empire,” Okupe said.

On the 2011 presidential candidate of the defunct, Congress for Progressive Change, Major-Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, the president’s aide said, “Buhari believes that since (former president Olusegun) Obasanjo was a military head of state and was later elected civilian President, he should also be able to get power under a democratic set up.

On former Minister of the FCT, Nasir El-Rufai’s castigation of the President, Okupe said, Nigerians should not take him serious because “he is under excruciating pain that he is not in government.”

“If I castigate him, I am doubly qualified to do so. I am his brother and we have very strong family ties that dates back over 21 years. When we were in Lagos, if we were eating inside with his senior brother Bashir, El-Rufai will sit outside.

“So I am not his friend, he is my younger brother and I am in a position, going by the African way, I have the moral right, I have the age, I have the knowledge, I have the experience, I have the position to tell El-Rufai that he is wrong and I am saying it on this medium that El-Rufai must check his ways,” he added.

  by GODWIN ISENYO
Culled from Punch newspaper