I never wanted Tinubu’s cabinet appointment – El-Rufai

Former Kaduna State governor Nasir El-Rufai said on Thursday that he never wanted an appointment in President Bola Tinubu's government, insisting he made that position clear long before Tinubu won the 2023 presidential election. He expressed frustration at what he described as "the pathetic manner in which latter-day converts to the Tinubu government make an issue of something I never wanted in the first place."

The exchange traces back to Tinubu's cabinet formation, when he nominated El-Rufai for a ministerial appointment that the National Assembly rejected, reportedly over security concerns. El-Rufai raised the issue again this week on X, responding to Daniel Bwala, Tinubu's Special Adviser on Policy Communication, who had challenged him for criticising the government and the ruling All Progressives Congress. Speaking earlier this week in Abuja at a democracy conference, El-Rufai had described the state of governance and opposition in Nigeria as a "national emergency" and called for opposition parties to unite into a broad coalition against the ruling party.

Bwala pushed back directly, asking on X: "My senior brother, if you were in the government and cabinet, would you have held and expressed the same position? History is replete with examples. It is a government you participated in its formation that you now want to unseat." El-Rufai replied that he had told Tinubu directly, years before any of this, that he had no interest in a position in his administration: "I was cabinet minister 22 years ago and was clear to Asiwaju that I was not interested in any position in his future government." He maintained that he would have voiced the same criticisms even from inside the cabinet, first privately and then publicly if nothing changed, and pointed to his public service record going back to 1998 as evidence of that consistency.

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The disagreement is also a reminder of where the relationship started — in October 2022, while still APC's presidential candidate, Tinubu had publicly asked El-Rufai at the Kaduna Economic and Investment Summit to commit to joining his future government, and El-Rufai had agreed to delay his retirement plans at the time. Bwala, for his part, suggested El-Rufai's recent comments were driven less by principle than by personal grievance.