Jonathan - 'El-Rufai Is A Notorious Liar, Ask Obasanjo'

A former Nigerian President, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, has referred to the Governor of Kaduna State as someone with an "incurable knack for lying".

Jonathan backed his claims, citing a reference made about the Governor by another former President, Olusegun Obasanjo, whom he said described El-Rufai in his book- My Watch Volume 2 as someone whose “penchant for reputation savaging is almost pathological”.

In a post on Jonathan’s Facebook page written by his spokesman, Ikechukwu Eze, the former president said that “with such a description, we are not surprised at his recent comments after the just concluded National Economic Council meeting where he accused former President Jonathan of only sharing the National Ecological Fund to PDP States. Mr. El-Rufai lied as follows:

"What President Goodluck Jonathan did was to take N2bn each from the Ecological Fund and gave to some PDP states. Any PDP state that was not his friend, like Kano and Kwara, didn’t get."
“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 confidante and major supporter of the then President, Senator Godswill Obot Akpabio, did not get the monies alluded to by Malam 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,” he wrote.

Giving his side of the story about how the Ecological fund was spent, Jonathan said the fact remained that it was a specialised fund with certain constitutional requirements which must be met before a state could 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 10 billion Naira 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.

“These states included Zamfara, Jigawa, Kebbi, Sokoto, Katsina and Adamawa. Others are Yobe, Borno and Kano which belong to Mallam El-Rufai’s class of ‘non-friendly’ states that he alleged never benefitted from any discretionary fund,” Dr Jonathan explained.

He then requested that Nigerians should "be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath" whenever this notorious liar opens his mouth”.