Titanic War: Senator Shehu Sanni Sets to Battle El-Rufai as Kaduna .As Kaduna APC Endorsed the Governor for 2nd term:
There is a looming titanic war in Kaduna State, no thanks to the green light given to Governor Nasir El-Rufai to run for second term in office by the state’s All Progressives Congress (APC). But Shehu Sani, a senator representing Kaduna central district, has told his allies that the battle line has just been drawn.The animosity between the camps of El-Rufai and Sani has been on for some years now, and the latter would stop at nothing to express his feelings and grievances when such need arises. A close aide of the senator told this magazine that “oga is very pissed right now over the endorsement of El-Rufai’s second term. It is not something he (Sani) intends to take with levity. He definitely has his plans too.”
Political analysts and stakeholders have also been predicting a mother of all face-offs between the two gladiators, as it is evident that Sani will give El-Rufai a run for his money.
Earlier this year, when speculations were rife that El-Rufai is nurturing the ambition of contesting as President in 2019, Sani was the first to castigate the midget governor as he rapped that having failed woefully as the governor of Kaduna State, El-Rufai lacks the credibility to replace President Muhammadu Buhari.
In a statement he released on Wednesday, 21 June, Sani slammed El-Rufai for sitting as governor and allowing insecurity take the toll of the state. The statement reads in part:
“He (El-Rufai) thinks President Muhammadu Buhari failed but he never invited PMB to even commission a completed toilet in his state. Under El-Rufai, Kaduna has become a hub of kidnappers and a sanctuary for herdsmen. The very governor who once condemned the National Assembly for lack of transparency has proven to be worse. El-Rufai wants to be seen as an apostle of Buhari’s change but he is actually the Judas of change. It is hypocritical to promise Nigerians change and end up only ‘putting change in our pockets’. There’s nothing progressive about many people who claim to be Buharists; they are reactionaries and career opportunists who can fit into any government in power.
“I call on El-Rufai to suspend his presidential or vice presidential ambitions and concentrate on proper governance of the state. Journalists in Kaduna State are under siege; blackmailed, arrested, pocketed or threatened with arrest and, as such, could not have written such a story. El-Rufai jails journalists like Pinochet or Stalin. El-Rufai is a man with a mouth for criticism but without a stomach for criticism. In his two years in office, he has jailed not less than seven journalists in Kaduna, of which many are in court. Kaduna state is run like a personal ‘family and friends estate’ without any meaningful physical achievement other than sponsored media propaganda.
“El-Rufai has no money to pay traditional rulers he recently sacked but has money to dispense as contracts to family, friends and political cronies. El-Rufai has enough money to pay herdsmen but no money to pay district heads. Kaduna is today littered with abandoned drainages to the point that the rainy season has turned Kaduna into a ‘coastal state with creeks’. He is auctioning over 2,000 government houses he inherited but he has yet to build a hut.”
