WIKILEAKS PUNCTURES ELRUFAI'S CLAIMS OF INCORRUPTIBILITY 

On a television interview Programme '60 minutes with Angela'  aired on MITV yesterday, controversial former minister of the FCT, Malam Nasir Elrufai, boasted about his incorruptibility.

Malam Elrufai after condemning the present administration as a corrupt government which is responsible for much of the problems in Nigeria then went on to portray himself as a squeaky clean saint. There have been media reports that Elrufai who is nursing a Presidential election hopes to succeed Muhammadu Buhari as the presidential candidate of the Congress for Progressive Change.

But the whistle blowing site, wiki leaks has punctured Elrufai's claims to incorruptibility.

 In one of several cables mentioning Elrufai wiki leaks revealed how Elrufai then Director General of the BPE attempted to award a contract to a company in which he and his brother had substantial interests until he was stopped by the then vice President, Atiku Abubakar.

By his own admission Malam El-Rufai was brought into government by Atiku Abubakar, as a protege, to head the BPE in 1999 yet within the first few years of the Obasanjo first term he had already began backstabbing Atiku to President Obasanjo and the American ambassador by claiming that he was pressured by Atiku Abubakar to award a major telecommunications contract to Ericsson rather than Motorola. When the U.S. Ambassador to whom Nasir El-rufai had told this tale met with the then Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, as well as Stephen Orasanye, the Principal Secretary to President Obasanjo, both men revealed that the contract was not awarded to Motorola not because of underhand dealings as alleged by El-rufai but because El-rufai had been suspected of manipulating the process to favor Motorola after Ericsson wrote a petition to the government alleging that El-Rufai suppressed the information that his elder brother allegedly owned 10% shares in Motorola and that he himself (El-rufai) once worked for Motorola. Upon investigation by the U.S. embassy directly with Motorola,  it was established that it was true that El-Rufai had worked for Motorola only two years before he took on the BPE job and that indeed his elder brother was a distributor for Motorola. But even  while he was telling the President and the Americans that Atiku was manipulating the NITEL contract award to suit Erricson, he was unaware that both the President and the Americans knew of his interests in Motorola.  The details of the contract are contained in this wikikeaks cable  http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=01ABUJA1679&q=el-rufai%20nasir and http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=01ABUJA1957&q=el-rufai%20nasir

Also, it is on record that Malam Nasir Elrufai as Director of the BPE awarded a consultancy contract to a "Dutch" firm known as Pentascope to manage the affairs of the nations flagship telecommunications firm called NITEL. But pentascope, a scandalized nation would learn later, was a hastily formed asset-grabbing front whose central address was traced to an empty warehouse in the Netherlands! We would also learn to our horror when the deal unraveled that the contract papers for the sale was written in Dutch!! All told, Nigeria lost close to N40 Billion on that transaction. Some argue with good reason that the failed transaction, which saw NITEL stripped of its valuable assets by the PENTASCOPE predators, doomed the company to date. NITEL is still a cesspool. Because PENTASCOPE and subsequent private managers stripped the company bare, it now has few, if any, suitors willing to pay reasonable money for it. It was for this reason that the House of Representatives banned Ekrufai from holding political office for life.

And for Elrufai who now nurses Presidential ambition, perhaps the words of Simon Kolawole in his back page column will suffice "I have strong reservations about his (Elrufai) ability to lead a country like Nigeria, especially in a democratic setting. He will make an excellent military administrator because of his soft spot for arbitrariness. He was once said to threatening to revoke some Cs of O. Reminded that the Cs of O were obtained legally, he allegedly retorted, what does it take to cancel a C of O? Is it not for the minister to just say so?"