Speaking during an interview on Arise TV on Monday, monitored by Apples Bite Magazine, El-Rufai revealed that after serving as governor for eight years, he had his own plans, but the President publicly appealed to him to put those plans on hold.
“Through two months of negotiations, we finally agreed that he would nominate me as minister, and there were certain conditions I attached to that,” El-Rufai explained. “I think along the line, either the President changed his mind or something else.”
El-Rufai emphatically refuted the narrative that his nomination was blocked by lawmakers: “Please don’t believe the story that the National Assembly rejected me. The National Assembly had nothing to do with this. The President didn’t want me in his cabinet, he changed his mind.”