The New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) chieftain Agbo Major has insisted that Rabiu Kwankwaso, the party’s 2023 presidential candidate, has been expelled. Kwankwaso’s group joined the party last year after an agreement was signed to give them the chance to run in the 2023 elections, Major claims.
Major, who declared that he is now the party’s chairman, stated that Kwankwaso’s expulsion was brought about by an attempt by the former governor of Kano State and his supporters to seize control of the organisation from its founding members, even as the NNPP has been in crisis since the 2023 elections, with factions within the party suspending and ejecting one another.
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The Agbo Major group is primarily composed of senior party members, while the other faction is made up of supporters of Kwankwaso, the party’s presidential candidate.
Agbo stated that: “The whole idea was ‘okay this man (founder) is a good man, he is somebody who listens and so on and so forth, so let us dominate him and take over the party’, that was what they wanted but they found in us the commitment to ensure that that never happened,” Major said on Channels Television’s Politics Today programme on Wednesday.
“They joined us last year for the purpose of the election. They joined us on the strength of an instrument, a MoU which gave them an opportunity to run for various elective positions for the 2023 general election.
“That MoU is explicitly stated that at the end of the election they could go their way or we come back again to redesign that marriage and see if we will be able to continue or not, but when we saw their activities we discovered that there is no way the marriage is going to continue, we had to ask them to go and that is the situation now.”