Again, El-Rufai Faults Rotational Presidency

Posted by African Examiner Featured, Latest Headlines, News, News Across Nigeria, News From The State, Uncategorized Wednesday, November 25th, 2020

(AFRICAN EXAMINER) – Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna state, the zoning of political leaders as he says that no country can move forward with such a political arrangement.

El-Rufai made this known on Wednesday when he spoke at the at the Nigerian Economic Summit (#NES26) in Abuja saying that every qualified person should be allowed equal opportunity to contest for political positions.

However, El-Rufai is of the view that the country has failed to make serious progress over the years due to the culture of rotating leaders.

He stated that leaders should not be picked from zones or political parties as this “will lead to inefficiency”, saying that what should be done is “to give every society a framework of equal opportunity to take advantage of and prosper”.

He said: “I do not believe that we should be driven in our politics and economics by distribution whether or not there is a logic behind it.”

“In my honest view, Nigeria went wrong when we focused on distribution rather than production. We like to distribute and it has gone as far as saying that in a state, governorship should rotate; that is absurd.

“There is no country in the world that has made progress in the last 50 years that rotates its leaders. I think if we move away from this fixation about distribution to selecting or picking the best person to get the job done… when the job is done, everybody benefits.

“Right now, we are distributing this and we are not making any progress because the focus is on distribution.”

The former FCT minister also stated the need to have more youth in political offices, saying that faulting a system where the majority young population is governed by “old people like me”.

He added: “We can’t have a country with 90 percent of our population below the age of 40 all ruled by old people like me.

“We must have young people in government being trained to take over from us.”