Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, on Thursday in Abuja
said he was not nursing any ambition in 2023 but would support any candidate
who emerged from the zoning arrangement, be it from the South.
El-Rufai said this during the weekly ministerial press
briefing organised by the Presidential Communications Team at the Presidential
Villa, Abuja.
The governor lamented that kidnapping had become a business
and called for an all-out simultaneous land and air assault on terrorists and
their enclaves.
According to him, the Kaduna State Government has invested about N21bn in security since 2015 and has acquired enough technology to listen-in on the bandits’ phone conversations, but lacks the force to launch coordinated attacks on them.
Fielding questions from State House correspondents, he said,
“I have zero ambition. I just want to finish this job, get on with my private
life, write another book and make tonnes of money. The largest amount of money
I ever got in my life was from writing the book, ‘Accidental Public Servant’. I
have no ambition; I’ve never had any ambition. And if I die today, I am quite
accomplished and happy, because I never in my life, based on my humble
background, ever thought I would even enter this building.
“God has been very kind to me. And my outings in the public
service have all been satisfactory? Why push my luck and go for a job with a 90
per cent chance of failure? So, I’m not an ambitious person. I’m just a person
that gets things done when given the opportunity. I’ve never desired to run
even for this governorship. It was President Buhari who literally forced me to
run. He insisted that some of us run for governorship just in case he did not
get elected again. He felt that we needed some ‘strong governance’. Those were
the words he used. So, I have no aspirations.”
Asked about the zoning of political positions within the All
Progressives Congress, the governor clarified his position made on Tuesday when
he joined the Progressive Governors’ Forum on a visit to the President, Major
General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), to discuss the party’s convention, among
other matters.
He said, “I want to clarify that the APC zoning arrangement
that we announced is the zoning arrangement for the party. And we’ve always
done that in the last three elections we’ve had. When we elected John Oyegun as
chairman, we had this zoning arrangement; each zone will have these positions
and so on. And we carried that to the time when Adams Oshiomhole assumed office
as chairman.
“All we did now is to flip it. Since the chairman is going
to be from the North-Central, it means that the North-Central will take all the
positions of the South-South. If you check, you will see all the positions
allocated to the North-Central were positions held by the South-South under
Oyegun and Oshiomhole.
“All the positions held by the North-West went to the
South-East and vice versa. All the positions held by the North-East went to the
South-West and vice versa. That’s why the South-West will now produce the
national secretary; the national secretary under Oyegun and Oshiomhole was Mai
Mala Buni. So, that’s all we did.
“We are not talking about the Presidency yet. When we do
this convention, we’ll elect national officers; then, we will start preparing
for the primaries that will produce our candidates for the House of Reps,
Senate and the Presidency. That’s when this conversation will take place.”
He said the zoning arrangement presented to Buhari on
Tuesday, which he approved, was “only sending a signal about the party’s
direction.”
“It is not zoning any presidency to anyone yet. But we’ve
sent a signal,” he said.
Asked if he would support a candidate from the South-West,
the former Federal Capital Territory minister said, “I will support any APC
candidate if I’m satisfied that he will do the best for Nigeria. It doesn’t
matter whether he’s from the South-West, South-East or South-South; the APC is
what matters and the quality of the person.
“The discussion we are having is that the Presidency is
zoned to the South. It’s not zoned to any particular place in the South. The
South will have the first go at it. But we’re waiting to see who the aspirants
are.”
On the security of Kaduna State and the entire North-West
region, El-Rufai said banditry had lingered because the contiguous states had
not launched a simultaneous assault on the bandits.
He added that the surrender of terrorists recorded in the
past few months resulted from hunger and frustration due to severed supply
lines, not necessarily because the terrorists were repentant, arguing that the
only repentant terrorist was a dead one.
El-Rufai stated, “So, despite the military operations and
everything, this banditry has become a business. It’s an industry. The money
these guys are making is so much that they will not stop. If we continue the
piecemeal approach to this banditry, it will continue to grow. We need to
pursue the financing and logistics chain of the banditry as well because the
amount of money these bandits are making is enough to destabilise this country.
It is a lot of money.
“What needs to be done is, at the same time, bomb the
forests, camps and have ground troops as a blocking force consisting of the
Army, the police, Air Force and Navy Special Forces and just wipe them out once
and for all.
“But it has to be done across the five states and Niger
State at the same time. What we’ve been doing over the years is, they go to
Zamfara, we chase them out; they go to Sokoto, we chase them out; then they
move to Kebbi, Katsina or Kaduna. And they move seamlessly because of the
forest ranges. We know where the camps are, have the maps and know everything.
We have their phone numbers. We listen to their conversations sometimes.”
On the risk of killing innocent captives of the bandits,
El-rufai said, “This is a war. In war, we always have collateral damage,
unfortunately.”
Speaking about his efforts in improving education in Kaduna
State, the governor said aside from firing 22,000 primary school teachers and
hiring 25,000 as replacement, he was set to fire more under-qualified secondary
school teachers to make room for another 7,700 qualified hands.
According to him, the goal is to make Kaduna schools capable
enough to host children of government officials, adding, however, that he
pulled his son out of a public school due to kidnapping threats.
“I took my child to a public school because we wanted to
show that we believe in the quality of public education, which we all got. But
I had to pull my son out because some people were planning a special operation
to kidnap him. I don’t think they will succeed, but it will put other children
at risk. So, I pulled him out. He’s getting homeschooling until the situation
improves,” the governor added.
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