I’m not against creation of state police — El-Rufai

Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State has denied a newspaper’s report claiming he was against the creation of state police, as he said his position on the matter was misrepresented.

Reacting through a release issued and signed by his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Mr. Samuel Aruwan, on Friday, Governor el-Rufai described the report as false and misleading.

According to him, the attention of Malam Nasir El-Rufai has been drawn to the blatant misrepresentation of his position on state police in a false report published in a national daily.

He said, on Friday, 21 June 2019,  the said newspaper reported that Nigeria’s Governors have reached agreement on state police, and “in its usual style of attributing its lies to anonymous sources,” he said the newspaper alleged that Malam Nasir El-Rufai expressed opposition to state police during the meeting.

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“This falsehood is incongruous to the publicly articulated position of Malam Nasir El-Rufai on state police. How can a man who chaired a committee that recommended the adoption of state police in 2017 credibly be alleged to be against it? Even the sheer logic of his own lived experience as governor of a state confronting security challenges suggests a pragmatic embrace of state and community policing. In an under-policed country crying out for more police officers, new technology and modern paradigms of securing communities, adopting state police is imperative.

“Since the submission of the report of the APC Committee on True Federalism, Malam Nasir El-Rufai has been engaged in advocacy for its recommendations. At its last meeting, the Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF) accepted a proposal to set up a bi-partisan committee of Governors to pursue the implementation of the recommendations of the APC True Federalism committee. But that NGF committee is yet to be set up.,” the statement read.

He said the newspaper’s “comedic reportage of Malam Nasir El-Rufai’s lecture to the Bridge Club is still fresh in the memory,” but the newspaper “went overboard in its obsequious worship of personality rather than principle. The paper went further to report fiction on the election of the new chair of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum. This is a continuation of the paper’s long history of traducing Malam Nasir El-Rufai. In the Yar’Adua years,” adding that the newspaper “was the major mouthpiece for every lie that some persons wanted to disseminate about El-Rufai.”

He said: “The paper may not take itself seriously as a newspaper any longer, given its wanton propensity to trivialise matters when it is not reporting fiction. But Malam Nasir El-Rufai reserves his legal options to seek redress for this deliberate and practised pattern of dressing fables as reportage.”