Ecological fund: Jonathan blasts El-Rufai, says every state benefited

THE last may not have been heard of the disbursement of Ecological Fund in the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan, as the ex-President berated Kaduna State governor, Nasir El-Rufai  for accusing him of denying the 19 Northern states access to the fund.

Jonathan, who was irked by an interim report, submitted by an 11-man Committee headed by El-Rufai said every state benefitted.

He said his decision to accommodate states that had difficulty meeting the criteria for accessing the fund, made it possible for every state to benefit.

A statement by the ex-President’s Media Aide, Mr. Ikechukwu Eze lamented that presidential interventions to tackle emergencies were being interrogated in a rather facile manner, adding that former President Olusegun Obasanjo could attest to what he termed El-Rufai’s penchant for lying.

The statement reads “That Malam Nasir El-Rufai governor of Kaduna state has an incurable knack for lying has been proven by his own boss, former President Olusegun Obasanjo who described El-Rufai in his book-My Watch Volume 2 as follows: ‘Nasir’s penchant for reputation savaging is almost pathological. Why does he do it? He is brilliant and smart. I grant him that also. Very early in my interaction with him, I appreciated his talent and brilliance. At the same time, I recognised his weaknesses. The worst being his inability to be loyal to anybody or any issue consistently for long, but only to Nasir el-Rufai. He barefacedly lied which he did to me against his colleagues and so-called friends. I have heard of how he ruthlessly savaged the reputation of his uncle, a man who was like, in the African setting, his foster father. I shuddered when I heard the story of what he did to his half-brother in the air force who is senior to him in age.

“With such a description, we are not surprised at his recent comments after the just concluded national economic council meeting where he accused former President Jonathan of only sharing the national ecological fund to PDP states.

“It is so easy to expose Malam Nasir El-Rufai as a liar being that Akwa-Ibom, a PDP state governed by the then chairman of the PDP Governors Forum and a close confidante and major supporter of the then president, Senator Godswill Obot Akpabio, did not get the monies alluded to by Malam El-Rufai from the ecological fund as did multiple other PDP states including Ekiti state, a state governed by a thoroughbred patriot and Jonathan supporter, Ayo Fayose.

“Also, it is false that non-PDP states did not get monies from the fund. Nemesis catches up faster with liars than any other agent of evil.  El-Rufai was probably led by the gods against his own sinister plot to confess in another breath that states under non-PDP parties like APGA and Labour Party also benefitted.

“The fact remains that the ecological fund is a specialised fund with certain constitutional requirements which must be met before a state can access the funds. Every state benefitted from the fund under President Jonathan who bent over backward to accommodate states that had difficulty meeting the criteria for accessing the fund. El-Rufai’s sinister narrative was intentionally silent on the over N10 billion specially deployed to fund the Great Green Wall (GGW) project in some northern states, in view of the need to work with the rest of Africa on the African initiative to check desert encroachment in the Sahelian states. These states included Zamfara, Jigawa, Kebbi, Sokoto, Katsina and Adamawa. Others are Yobe, Borno, and Kano which belong to Mallam El-Rufai’s class of ‘non-friendly’ states that he alleged never benefitted from any discretionary fund.”