TUESDAY February 25, 2025 |TheNewsDESK
www.thenewsdesk.ng
By Our REPORTER
Former Kaduna State governor, Nasir El-Rufai, has expressed his preference for another Nigerian from the South to succeed President Bola Tinubu in the 2027 election.
Speaking on Arise News Channel’s *PrimeTime* show, El-Rufai also hinted at uncertainty regarding his continued membership in the All Progressives Congress (APC) by 2027.
Addressing concerns over President Tinubu’s alleged bias in political appointments favoring the South-West, El-Rufai clarified that the President was prioritizing his loyalists rather than the Yoruba ethnic group as a whole.
El-Rufai claimed that President Tinubu did not want him in his cabinet, exonerating members of the National Assembly, who actually screened him out.
It could be recalled that in August 2023, the Senate withheld the confirmation of the former governor as Tinubu’s ministerial nominee, citing security reports from the State Security Service for the action.
But El-rufai said the “security thing was a good excuse they used. Since then, has anyone released that report telling us the security issue?”
Similarly, the former governor alleged that the National Security Adviser, NSA, to the president, Nuhu Ribadu was behind a plot to tarnish his reputation.
According to El-rufai, Ribadu is nursing presidential ambition to succeed President Tinubu in 2031, stressing that the decision of the NSA is to eliminate any potential competition from the North.
The NSA has since denied the claims.