Although the New Nigeria Peoples Party, NNPP is not new in the political firmament of Nigeria, it got lifeline the moment Rabiu Kwankwaso defected from the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP to join the party and was made the Presidential flag bearer, since then he has become a hurricane politically as described in some quarters
By Miracle Egbo
It was 8.am on August 17, 2022; serenity of the premises of Sheraton Hotel crawled with people from all walks of life. Reason? The meeting of the presidential candidate of New Nigeria Peoples Party, NNPP, Dr. Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso with maritime stakeholders who at the meeting made a concerted commitment to deliver 15 million votes to him in the February 25, 2023 presidential poll. The agenda setting as witnessed at the hall of the prestigious Sheraton Hotel appears to be the signature of most electorate especially in the northern part of the country. The commitment as extracted from the maritime sector could not have been possible without the concerted efforts of the NNPP to assure the sector of making it a point of duty if elected as the president of the country to, sanitize the sector with enduring reforms that would not only provide jobs for the teeming youths but make ways and means of doing business in the ports across the nation very easy.
The consistent acceptance of the candidature of Kwankwaso in all the nooks and crannies of the country by the electorate, according to the spin doctors of the NNPP candidate, is an indication that the former governor of Kano State is set to win the forthcoming presidential election. His spin doctors dismissed the insinuation in some political quarters that the NNPP presidential candidate is contemplating jettisoning his ambition for another presidential candidate from another party. According to them, Kwankwaso is very much in the race and is poised to take over from President Mohammadu Buhari in May 29, 2023, and there is no going back. Ladipo Johnson, the spokesperson for the NNPP presidential candidate said that his principal is still much in the race and is doing everything politically possible to win the election. He said that questions are being bandied about by the supporters of those who have failed this country for years and who are still pretenders to the office of the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
According to Johnson, “the campaign of calumny is well orchestrated and comes from more than one political block. Ab-initio, they initiated and carried rumours about kwankwaso purportedly stepping down for their weak candidate. I pity these political jobbers as there probably is no easy way for them to sell their weak and ailing candidates who have passed their sell-by dates to Nigerians. I make bold to say that the so-called candidates should be taken off the supermarket shelf. They have cost us enough.
“These political jobbers are attempting to push their narratives by using pecuniary means to entice solitary NNPP or the Kwankwasiyya members who then stage defecting shows, where they parade a few hired hands adorned with new red Kwankwasiyya caps which they symbolically remove or throw away”, offered Johnson.
Information at the disposal of this medium revealed that the Kwankwasiyya movement is criss-crossing all the nooks and crannies of the nation with the mantra of revolutionizing the educational sector, pulling majority of poor Nigerians from the pit of poverty and its concomitant hunger, adding that he is the presidential candidate that has the compassion to listen to the yearnings of the electorate that have been impoverished for the past eight years that the President Buhari held sway. According to the information, the dregs of the society in the northern part of the country appear to have caught the bug of Kwankwasiyya movement, and are deliberate in making sure that he emerged the winner of the 2023 presidential election. It was gathered that the strength of NNPP in the north is growing in leaps and bounds despite gale of defection that hit the party recently. An informed source told Tentacle that the success that Kwankwaso recorded when he was governor of Kano State has been doing wonders in his bid to sell his candidature to the electorate across the nation, even places he hitherto was not known.
Investigation orchestrated by Tentacle revealed that NNPP is the only political party in the 2023 general election that has devised a novelty way to campaign, reaching out to people by roads and making sure that the electorate are consulted on the best way they want the country to be run. According to Johnson , the party had in this novelty campaign reached all the 774 local council areas across the nation, and at each local council all the natives are engaged to be able to extract from them how they want their country to be administered, assuring them that their input would be seriously considered if Kwankwaso wins the election. The strategy, according to the spin doctors of the NNPP presidential candidate is producing an encouraging result as many of the electorate have bought into the kwankwasiyya movement across the nation, and are ready to vote for him in the forthcoming presidential election.
Another thing that is going for the NNPP is the fact that his name has not been mentioned in any corruptive tendencies in his trajectory in the corridors of power. He is not involved in any corruption even as the governor of Kano State for eight years. He is not under the watch of any anti corruption agencies and that has been good credentials for him in his bid to rule the country.
The national Chairman of NNPP, Professor Rufai Alkali said that the rumour of PDP-NNPP alliance is baseless because there is no cause for that. He said that his principal is the candidate to beat in the race, adding that his party is the only party that is reaching out to the dregs of the society in the course of the party’s electioneering. In one of his interaction with journalists the National Chairman of the party said that his party would shock Nigerians with victory at the poll across the nation. He insisted that his principal is not going to step down for any presidential candidate in the course of the electioneering.
However, facts made available to this medium appear to have put a question mark on some of the claims of the party on its national spread. Its critics are of the opinion that in some political regions across the nation, the party is not well known and as such may not galvanize support to assure victory for the presidential candidate of the party in the regions. Some of the political polls conducted by non partisan and independent polls never gave the party chance especially in the southern part of the country. The poll only recognize the party’s feeble presence in the North Western part of the country , which is not enough to guarantee his victory at the polls because the party’s presence, according to the polls, is at zero point in most of the regions that the polls covered. Some political pundits have argued that NNPP being relatively new in the political calculation of the country is faced with the daunting task of convincing the electorate with the success he claimed to have recorded in Kano State where he ruled for eight years as governor.
According to political pundits, the bungling of the merger talks between the party and the Labour Party, LP at the outset may have impacted negatively on the chances of the party especially in the regions that the LP has strongholds. The alleged political marriage that ended in divorce is said to be impugning on whatever political capital NNPP has garnered in the past months, the reason some people are suspecting that he might have secretly entered into alliance with the main opposition party with the intention of stepping down at the eleventh hour of the presidential election. The pundits on the condition of anonymity said that failed political marriage between LP and the NNPP has adversely affected the political fortunes of the party, adding that the party should not have entered into such meeting of merger if it knew that it was not going to sustain it to the end.
Whatever is the case, it should be noted that Kwankwaso the NNPP presidential candidate in the forthcoming presidential election has the potentials to emerge victorious at the polls but a lot of work has to be done in the region where his presence is not felt at all despite claim that the party is present in all the 774 local council areas across the nation. Findings fact-checked by this medium revealed that the party is not visible even in some northern states that are supposedly the stronghold of the Kwankwasiyya movement, a situation that is inimical to the ambition of the principal of the movement , which has its base in the north.
