New Naira: “People Criticising Us Are Unfair” – El-Rufai
Nasir El-Rufai, the governor of Kaduna State, has claimed that any criticism of him or other governors who oppose the New Naira Swap policy is unfair to them.
He and ten other APC governors came under fire from Nigerians for suing the federal government over the naira redesign policy.
Governor El-Rufai has passionately opposed the program and claimed that the government is using it to unfairly burden many Nigerians and to smear the APC presidential candidate ahead of the presidential election on February 25.
In an interview with Radio France International (RFI), Hausa, El-Rufai defended their actions, claiming that people who have criticized them lack knowledge of the roles and obligations of a governor.
In his words: “How many times did I comment on security, for three years I have been advising them not to reconcile with these bandits, let’s kill them, so now people have forgotten what I said and start saying I didn’t comment until this policy?
“Secondly, on ASUU, people have forgotten that federal universities are different from state-owned, go and check Kaduna State University, they didn’t go on strike because we told them that the disagreement was between the federal government and its universities. We had done our part, it was the federal government that didn’t fulfil its promises but we didn’t have a problem with state universities, and that’s why they didn’t go on strike.
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“People want us to interfere in everything but according to the constitution federal and state governments have their peculiar responsibilities and we do our own at the state level. For Security issues, they (the federal government) are with the military and police, we know the security problems better than them because we are close to it, we told them what to do, and they did so and he some and leave the rest.
“For example, in Kaduna State, months before the Abuja-Kaduna train was attacked, we sent letters advising to stop night travel but they ignored us. So, those saying we didn’t act don’t know who a governor is and his responsibilities; they don’t know what we do behind the scene.
“Even on this naira redesign policy, we sat several times with the president and the CBN governor, all our requests and advice to no avail, we didn’t have any other options than to go to court.
“This is what people don’t know, it is not everything you discuss with the president or federal government you will tell the public. So anyone who says governors didn’t show concern for people’s sufferings until this policy is not fair to us.”
