A chieftain of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), Agbo Major, has insisted that the 2023 presidential candidate of the party, Rabiu Kwankwaso, has been expelled.
Major, who claims to be the party’s new chairman, claims Kwankwaso’s expulsion was forced by an attempt by the former Kano State governor and his allies to take over the party from its founding members.
“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.
According to him, Kwankwaso’s group joined the party last year after an agreement was signed to give them opportunity to contest the 2023 elections.
“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,” he said.
Crisis has been rocking the NNPP after the 2023 elections with groups within the party suspending and expelling one other.
The Agbo Major group is mostly made up of older members of the party and the other camp is those loyal to Kwankwaso, who was the presidential candidate of the party.