Umar Idris Shuaibu – Kano
National Chairman of All Progressives Congress (APC), Abdullahi Ganduje, has explained why he believes the presidential candidate of New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), Rabi’u Kwankwaso, may never clinch the country’s exalted seat.
Speaking in Abuja, yesterday, when the Bauchi State NNPP governorship candidate in the 2023 poll, Senator Haliru Jika, defected to the APC, he identified the pursuit of selfish interest as the impediment in Kwankwaso’s presidential ambition.
Ganduje, a two-term governor of Kano after Kwankwaso, argued that the situation was compounded by Kwankwaso’s inability to maintain a principled stand in party politics over the years.
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Labeling the Kwankwasiyya-backed NNPP as “deceitful and exploitative”, he applauded Jika’s return to APC as a step in the right direction.
He said: “When I got the news that you were coming to see me in my house to discuss the way forward, I knew I was meeting a very formidable politician in person and a household name in Bauchi. He is returning to a party that is very progressive and focused. He is coming from a party that used to be decent and highly respected until it was hijacked and polluted by the Kwankwasiyya group.”
Lamenting the setbacks suffered by APC in Bauchi, Ganduje promised to ensure inclusiveness of party stalwarts in the state as part of ongoing effort to reposition the party ahead of the 2027 poll.
Jika, who dumped the NNPP alongside some lawmakers at the state and federal levels, explained that his decision was based on the wishes of his teeming supporters in Bauchi.
Meanwhile, Nigerian-American Professor, Author, media scholar, Farook Kperogi, has joined critics of the ongoing political confusion in Kano caused by the tribunal’s judgment.
The Columbia-based don said the judgment, which declared APC’s Yusuf Gawuna winner of 2023 governorship election to the detriment of Governor Abba Yusuf would be as dead as fried plantain at the Court of Appeal.
He argued that the Kano election petition tribunal would collapse like a pack of cards at the appellate court.
“APC appears intent to get back through judicial manipulation what it lost through the ballot box. It is a higher-order, more sophisticated and less primitive version of the broad-day electoral heist they perpetrated in 2019 after Ganduje lost to the same Yusuf and INEC was manipulated to declare the election as ‘inconclusive’,” he said.
