LEADERS of the All Progressives Congress in Kwara State on Monday chided the minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed for denigrating the state Governor, AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq.

The elders under the aegis of Kwara APC Elders Caucus were reacting to the disparaging comments made by the minister about the governor in a recent newspaper interview.

Spokesperson of the group, a former Nigerian Ambassador to Malaysia, Nurudeen Mohammed, who addressed a news conference, in Ilorin, said, “For Lai Mohammed to denigrate on Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq’s political status in Kwara State and his role in the funding of the 2019 electioneering campaigns and election proper is most unfortunate.”

Mohammed, who was flanked by some leaders of the group, including Kunle Sulyman, Senator Mohammed Ahmed, Chief Wole Oke and Chief James Ayeni, noted that the minister was being immature by closing the door for reconciliation among members of the party.

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The former ambassador claimed that next to nothing was known about the minister in Kwara politics prior to 2002 when he surfaced in Kwara State “apparently exported to the state from Lagos to come and take over governance just as his colleagues in other Yoruba states, who have, before then spent all their years in Lagos where they cut their political teeth and had held one political office or the other.”

He recalled that Mohammed was the chief of staff to the first Lagos state governor in the current fourth Republic, the APC elder’s spokesman noted that, “Of all his (minister) Lagos colleagues hitherto sent out from Lagos to contest governorship election in the current Republic, it’s only Lai Mohammed who has failed to win in his state where he contested in 2003.

“The question one would like to ask is why he failed in the election. The answer should be obvious. Lai Mohammed was never seen in Kwara in the Second Republic politics nor was he ever heard of in the political landscape of Kwara state politics of the Third Republic.

“He was an unknown quantity in those days. He has all along been a de facto Lagosian rather than being a Kwaran.”