Elrufai Blasts Tinubu’s
Elrufai Blasts Tinubu’s Newspaper ‘The
Nation’
The Nation’s despicable fiction on State Police
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 The Nation newspaper.
On Friday, 21 June 2019, The Nation reported that Nigeria’s
Governors have reached agreement on state police. In its usual
style of attributing its lies to anonymous sources, The Nation
alleged that Malam Nasir El-Rufai expressed opposition to state
police during the meeting.
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 Nation’s comedic reportage of Malam Nasir El-Rufai’s lecture
to the Bridge Club is still fresh in the memory. The Nation 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, The Nation was the major
mouthpiece for every lie that some persons wanted to disseminate
about El-Rufai.
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.
Signed
Samuel Aruwan
Senior Special Assistant to the Governor (Media &
Publicity)