El-Rufai: Clique around Buhari wanted Emefiele or Lawan as president, now working towards interim govt

Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State says President Muhammadu Buhari will always support the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Bola Tinubu, and other candidates of the party.

Even as the governor described the President as a committed party man, he declared that the same could not be said of a powerful clique around Buhari now determined to frustrate the election of the APC flag bearer because their preferred persons, Godwin Emefiele (central bank governor) and Ahmed Lawan (senate president) lost the APC presidential ticket.

He also alleged that the clique was working towards the emergence of an interim national government at the exit of Buhari, describing them as elements whose patterns and conducts are consistent with plans to subvert or topple a civilian-to-civilian transition after the next presidential election.

El-Rufai spoke on this issue in his latest interview with an online-based newspaper, Premium Times.

“It turned out that some of the wildest stories of conspiracy to derail the transition at best for APC to lose, preferably for the whole system to result in no election leading to an interim arrangement began to rare their heads,” El-Rufai told PREMIUM TIMES.

When asked about the mixed signal perceived from the president’s lukewarm attitude to Mr Tinubu’s campaigns, he insisted there were no mixed signals.

“President Buhari considers the APC like a child he conceived and held in pregnancy for 18 months and gave birth to. He will never, I am ready to stake my neck and my life, President Buhari will never work against the APC. He will never work against the candidate of the APC even if the candidate is the devil himself,” El-Rufai said.

He added Buhari is “a party man and an establishment person whose support for Mr Tinubu is sure.”

He went further to paint a picture and illustrate the operational mode of some disgruntled power-hungry clique within the party that he admitted was hurting the party.

“What is happening is that there are people around the President that had their presidential candidates. They had two candidates that they preferred to succeed Buhari – Godwin Emefiele from the South and Ahmad Lawan from the North – and they got neither.”