{"id":62683,"date":"2025-03-13T09:13:28","date_gmt":"2025-03-13T09:13:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/?p=62683"},"modified":"2025-03-13T09:13:28","modified_gmt":"2025-03-13T09:13:28","slug":"buhari-backed-my-defection-to-sdp-el-rufai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/2025\/03\/13\/buhari-backed-my-defection-to-sdp-el-rufai\/","title":{"rendered":"Buhari Backed My Defection to SDP \u2013 El-Rufai"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Patrick Idowu<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Former Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, has revealed that his defection from the All Progressives Congress (APC) to the Social Democratic Party (SDP) had the full blessing of former President Muhammadu Buhari.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking in an interview with BBC Hausa on Thursday, El-Rufai disclosed that he met with Buhari on March 7 to inform him of his decision to leave the APC, a party he once declared would be his last political affiliation.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI sought his blessing and prayers before moving to SDP, and he wished me success,\u201d El-Rufai said. \u201cBuhari told me he is now a statesman while we remain the politicians.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Taking a swipe at his former party, El-Rufai said, \u201cI didn\u2019t leave the APC; the APC left me. If they had expelled me, it would have saved me the trouble of explaining my departure.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Dismissing claims that he quit due to not being appointed a minister, El-Rufai said he never lobbied for the position, adding that President Bola Tinubu personally appealed to him to help resolve Nigeria\u2019s power crisis.<\/p>\n<p>Asked if Tinubu betrayed him, he responded, \u201cNo, he betrayed himself.\u201d While he stopped short of expressing regret for supporting Tinubu\u2019s presidency, El-Rufai admitted, \u201cI am disappointed.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Patrick Idowu Former Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, has revealed that his defection from the All Progressives Congress (APC) to the Social Democratic Party (SDP) had the full blessing of former President Muhammadu Buhari. Speaking in an interview with BBC Hausa on Thursday, El-Rufai disclosed that he met with Buhari on March 7 to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":62684,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[172],"tags":[59],"class_list":["post-62683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-featured"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62683"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62685,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62683\/revisions\/62685"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}