SENATOR Shehu Sani, chairman, Senate Committee on Local and Foreign Debt, has accused Governor El-Rufai of Kaduna State of putting journalists in his state under siege.

Reacting to a report on allegation of corruption and nepotism in Kaduna under El-Rufai by an online medium, Sani alleged that journalists in Kaduna could not report factually because of the governor, whom alleged jails journalists like (Augusto) Pinochet (a former president of Chile) or (Joseph) Stalin (a former premier of defunct Soviet Union).

In a statement signed by Suleiman Ahmed, his adviser on Politics and Ideology, Sani said: “Journalists in Kaduna state are under siege; blackmailed, arrested, pocketed or threatened with arrest and as such could not have written such a story.

“El-Rufai jails journalists like Pinochet or Stalin. He is a man with a mouth for criticism but without a stomach for criticism. In his two years in office he has jailed not less than seven journalists in Kaduna of which many are in court.

“Kaduna State is run like a personal family and friends estate without any meaningful physical achievement other than sponsored media propaganda.”

He alleged that El-Rufai had no money to pay traditional rulers he recently sacked but has money to dispense as contracts to family, friends and political cronies.

“El-Rufai has enough money to pay Herdsmen but no money to pay district heads. Kaduna is today littered with abandoned drainages to the point that the rainy season has turned Kaduna into a ‘coastal state with creeks’. He is auctioning over two thousand Government houses he inherited but he is yet to build a hut.

“The Kaduna state Governor who in his memo accused President Muhammadu Buhari of running a failed Government, has failed also woefully. He thinks PMB failed but he never invited PMB to even commission a completed toilet in his state. Under El-Rufai Kaduna has become a hub of kidnappers and a sanctuary for herdsmen.

“The very governor who once condemned the National Assembly for lack of transparency has proven to be worse. El-Rufai wants to be seen as an apostle of Buhari’s change but he is actually the Judas of change,” he said.

—  Jun 21, 2017 @ 12:10 GMT