SAN FRANCISCO, May 30, (THEWILL) – The Kaduna state governor, Nasir El-Rufai on Tuesday berated former president Goodluck Jonathan over his recent comment on the N2billion Ecological Fund made available to states controlled by the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, during his tenure.
In a statement issued in Kaduna by his Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Samuel Aruwan, the governor said the immediate past president has failed to justify why he released the fund only to his cronies instead of all the states.
He regretted that rather than addressing the moral issues raised in the interim report of the investigation instituted by the National Economic Council, NEC, Jonathan chose to resort to personal attacks.
THEWILL recalls that Jonathan had while dismissing the claims by El-Rufai that his administration gave N2bn to each PDP-controlled state from the Ecological Fund as spurious, stated that it shows the extent the Kaduna governor can go to malign him.
But in the statement issued by his media aide, El-Rufai said of Jonathan thus: “He is not a man that can take responsibility for anything.
“In March 2015, not long after making concession call to President Buhari, he summoned his pecks and asked them to reject the result of an election whose winner he had congratulated in private.
“That effort and publicity failed spectacularly and the will of people prevailed.
“So no one should be surprised that he is denying presiding over the discrete distribution of the ecological funds.
“His denial begs the question, what special circumstance ensured that only states that were controlled by the PDP and its allied parties qualified for the N2 billion each.”
The governor further accused Jonathan of running Nigeria while in power for his party and family.
According to him, “Jonathan cannot argue with fact that the payment are in the record of ecological fund.
“He knowingly engaged in discriminatory disbursement of federal fund; the legality of that is open to question.”
He dismissed the former president’s argument that money was also disbursed for the Green Wall Project in some northern states as disingenuous.
The governor also stated that Jonathan had failed in his response to show where he lied regarding the disbursement of N2 billion to each of the affected states as contained in the NEC interim report on the utilisation of the Ecological Fund.
He went on to remind the former president that the investigation being carried out was at the instance of the National Economic Council and not a personal initiative.
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