Nasarawa State Governor Abdullahi Sule has stated that the Progressives Governors’ Forum (PGF) cannot intervene in former Kaduna State governor Nasir El-Rufai’s ministerial nomination predicament.
Sule, a PGF member representing governors from the All Progressives Congress (APC), also noted that El-Rufai had not left the ruling party despite the National Assembly’s rejection of him as a ministerial nominee in August 2023.
“El-Rufai has not departed from our party; he remains a member,” Sule said during an appearance on Wednesday on Channels Television’s Politics Today programme.
“What led to his (El-Rufai’s) nomination and subsequent rejection by the Senate or the security agencies, to be frank, are not matters we have discussed at the Progressives Governors’ Forum or even the Nigeria Governors’ Forum. They are not issues we can address because what does not concern us is beyond our purview.
“It is the prerogative of Mr President to nominate whoever he wishes as his minister, and he did so. Furthermore, there are agencies, including the National Assembly, that either confirm or reject those nominations and in this case, they rejected him,” said the governor of Nasarawa.
El-Rufai was one of the influential northern figures who insisted that the APC presidential ticket for the 2023 general elections should be awarded to a southern candidate, adhering to the unwritten principle of rotating power between Nigeria’s southern and northern regions. This followed President Muhammadu Buhari’s eight-year tenure from the North-West geopolitical zone.
Having served as governor of Kaduna from May 2015 to May 2023, El-Rufai was vocal in his support for former Lagos governor Bola Tinubu as the party’s candidate in the last general elections.
The then Kaduna governor, alongside his northern colleagues, backed Tinubu over two other prominent northern aspirants—then Senate President Ahmad Lawan and former Jigawa governor Mohammed Badaru..
Tinubu ultimately secured the APC ticket and was elected Nigeria’s president during the February 2023 presidential election.
In Nigeria’s political arena, where compensation politics has almost become the norm, Tinubu nominated El-Rufai as one of his ministers three months after taking office.
However, El-Rufai subsequently fell out with key figures in the current government and was rejected by the Senate during the ministerial screening process. The upper legislative chamber cited security concerns from the Department of State Services as a reason for his rejection.
Since the incident in August 2023, El-Rufai has not been seen at gatherings of APC leaders. The former governor has also been absent from the Aso Villa, the seat of power, and from the president he vigorously campaigned for in the last election.
Conversely, El-Rufai has been spotted with members of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), fuelling defection speculation, which he denied. His relationship with his successor, Sani Uba, in Kaduna, has soured, with the state assembly investigating his eight-year administration for alleged corruption, an allegation the former governor has refuted.