By Tijjani Isa
After reading the treatise he presented at the birthday celebrations of MURIC chieftain a little over a month ago, I knew the Northern Christian bigots would come after El Rufai. And they got Sunday Karimi, a Senator and APC member to rake in the muck.
What did he say out of the ordinary?
He exposed the sour relationship between Northern Muslims and their Christian neighbors. He said the cordiality should have been better if only Christian leaders were accommodative of, for example, his deputy for 4 years, the late Barnabas Bala. He, a Northern Christian like them who wanted nothing but development for Southern Kaduna.
He was a victim of their evil machinations, hounded to the end and, who refused to be like them.
What were Bantex sins? Bantex, El Rufai said, broke the ranks in being cozy with a Muslim in not a PDP government but an APC administration. He said his deputy was pained to death for that rejection.
They didn’t also like how he dared to reveal how he beat them to their own game by choosing a fellow Muslim, Hadiza Sabuwa Balaraba to replace Bantex. Or, how he shattered the myth that their voting strength genuinely determined the outcome of past elections in Kaduna State.
He tested the waters in 2015 and it revealed that the whole of Southern Kaduna was only close to half a million and not the two million votes they often “awarded” their darling party, the PDP.
Typical of their rejection of the truth, the Northern Christian bigots would always stand truth on its head and play the victim card.
El Rufai told the gathering at the birthday lecture of which he was the keynote speaker that if only the Southern Kaduna cultural(?) organization, SOKAPU had not sabotaged various peace efforts Kaduna would have been peaceful by now.
To Sunday Karimi and his sponsors, that is an awful thing to say even when they know it to be the truth.
They didn’t like it either in how he ended his address with an appeal to the celebrant to continue to protect Muslims rights even in retirement.
Searching for why El Rufai’s confirmation as a minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria was deferred to another day, and wish it never happens?
It is because he stood up to SOKAPU, the Northern CAN and their spin doctors in the south west media axis who always painted him as the villain.
