Immediate past governor of Kaduna State, Nasir el-Rufai, has, again, come under fire for “uncomplimentary” comments against the people of Southern Kaduna.
  
El-Rufai reportedly made disparaging remarks on Southern Kaduna people, Atyap natives in particular, during his address at the book launch/retirement event of Prof. Ishaq Akintola in Lagos.
  
Reaction of Southern Kaduna people was contained in a statement issued by a group, Lap Abin Atyap (Amour of Atyap Land), signed by its Chairman and Secretary, Tabakwot Shimkyang and Kajang Gona respectively.
  
The statement is entitled ‘El-Rufai’s mischievous and deliberate inconsistency: The Atyap response to El-Rufai’s thoughts’. Lap Abin Atyap, after congratulating Akintola on his retirement from the classroom and wished him good health and happy retirement, lamented that El-Rufai deliberately and mischievously manipulated facts to deceive his audience.
  
“The address delivered by El-Rufai at the event was a deliberate and mischievous manipulation of the facts to deceive his audience. His disparaging remarks on Southern Kaduna people, and the Atyap in particular, was an attempt to get undeserved sympathy and understanding over his battered public image, which his discriminatory and unpopular governance in Kaduna brought out.”

 “His shocking realisation and frustration that the political power he so much loved and enjoyed has slipped out of his hands forever accounted for his outburst. 
  
“It is mischievous for El-Rufai to allege that ‘it was in the decade of military rule, after the 1983 Buhari-Idiagbon junta that religion and ethnic identity took on a new resonance’; it is on record that no government in Nigeria has prominently projected religion and nepotism like the El-Rufai’s so call democratic governance,” Shimkyang said.