El-Rufai to Atiku: You are a liar

The unrest within the camp of the All Progressives Congress (APC) seems not to be nearing its end as two top members of the party are at loggerheads.

Nigeria’s ex-vice president, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, had in an exclusive interview with Premium Times, stated that he was betrayed by Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna state and the former chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mallam Nuhu Ribadu.

But in a statement signed by El-Rufai, the governor described Atiku as a liar and that the Adamawa strong man only brought out those allegations to malign his person.

“As we struggle to build a law-abiding society and secure progressive outcomes for our people, we cannot allow the triumph on these shores of those who will have us move to a post-factual world,” El-Rufai’s statement read in part.

The statement read further that not even Abubakar’s expertise in the dark arts of damaging other people through a campaign of lies from him and his media machine can return the country to its past.

“Those that established that company and fronted it like Festus Odimegwu, Tony Elumelu, Otunba Lawal Solarin and Ndi Okereke-Onyiuke are still around and alive. “As such I could not have and did not offer Alhaji Atiku any shares in Transcorp.

I declined the shares that were offered to me. Having done that, how could I have offered anyone shares?

“My counsel to them was based on the grounds that they would face conflicts of interest when Transcorp bids for privatization assets.

“At the time Alhaji Atiku and Ngozi were chair and vice-chair of the National Council on Privatization, and were particularly directly involved in approving the sales of state-owned enterprises and assets.

“It is too late in the day to try to pretend that the fiasco concerning the attempt by then Senators Ibrahim Mantu and Jonathan Zwingina to extort money from me for Senate clearance never happened. “All Alhaji Atiku has just done is confirm that he paid the Senators, as I revealed in Page 139 of my book.”