Jonathan blasts el-Rufai over ecological funds

Former President Goodluck Jonathan has lashed out at the governor of Kaduna State,  Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, over his claims that he (Jonathan) shared ecological funds among only Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) states,  declaring that the governor lied.

Jonathan,  in a statement by his Media Adviser,  Ikechukwu Eze, said he was not surprised at el-Rufai’s latest lie as according to him, the governor has often displayed his penchant to tell lies.

Jonathan said the governor’s attack on him was not surprising because he “has an incurable knack for lying.”

He added that  former President  Olusegun Obasanjo had described el-Rufai as a “proven liar” in  the Volume 2 of  his book, My Watch.

He quoted Obasanjo as describing the governor thus: “Nasir’s penchant for reputation savaging is almost pathological. Why  does he do it? He is brilliant and smart. I grant him that also. Very early in my interaction with him, I appreciated his talent and  brilliance. At the same time, I recognised his weaknesses; the worst  being his inability to be loyal to anybody or any issue consistently  for long, but only to Nasir el-Rufai. “He barefacedly lied which he did  to me against his colleagues and so-called friends. I have heard of  how he ruthlessly savaged the reputation of his uncle, a man who was  like, in the African setting, his foster father. I shuddered when I  heard the story of what he did to his half-brother in the Air Force  who is senior to him in age.”

Jonathan stated that the Kaduna State governor muddled up facts and failed to realise that ecological funds must be administered according to laid out rules.

The statement read:

“It is so easy to expose Malam Nasir el-Rufai as a liar being that  Akwa Ibom, a PDP state governed by the then Chairman of the PDP  Governors Forum and a close confidant and major supporter of the then  President, Senator Godswill Obot Akpabio, did not get the monies  alluded to by Mallam el-Rufai from the Ecological Fund as did multiple other PDP states including Ekiti State, a state governed by a  thoroughbred patriot and Jonathan supporter, Ayo Fayose.

“Also, it is false that non-PDP states did not get monies from the  fund. Nemesis catches up faster with liars than any other agent of  evil.  El-Rufai was probably led by the gods against his own sinister  plot to confess in another breathe that states under non-PDP parties like APGA and Labour party also benefitted.

“The fact remains that the Ecological Fund is a specialized fund with  certain constitutional requirements which must be met before a state  can access the funds. Every state benefitted from the fund under  President Jonathan who bent over backwards to accommodate states that  had difficulty meeting the criteria for accessing the fund.

“El-Rufai’s sinister narrative was intentionally silent on the over N10  billion specially deployed to fund  the Great Green Wall (GGW) project  in some northern states, in view of the need to work with the rest of  Africa on the African initiative to check desert encroachment in the  Sahelian states,” he said.