Sen Rabiu Kwankwaso has made claims that northern political leaders carefully considered prospective alliances before selecting Peter Obi as the most capable partner to carry out the 2027 presidential campaign.
He downplayed fears of a covert power struggle between his team and Obi’s.
Kwankwaso revealed the information in an interview with Arise TV on Monday, providing one of his most thorough accounts yet of how the North-Southeast political alliance inside the NDC was established.
“I looked around together with our leadership in the north to say, okay, who do we think is capable? Who can come and work together with us honestly so that we can move this country? Along the line, we realized that Peter Obi is at the forefront of it. That’s why we all accepted working together,” he said.
Kwankwaso, a two-term former governor of Kano State and the New Nigeria Peoples Party’s presidential candidate in 2023, leads the Kwankwasiyya movement, a grassroots political organization with strong ties to Kano and northern Nigeria.
He quit the NNPP because of internal conflicts before joining the NDC with Obi earlier this month.
Obi, a former governor of Anambra State, stood on the labor party platform in 2023 and received enormous youth support throughout the South and metropolitan areas, but he did not win.
On Sunday, May 3, both men formally joined the NDC after leaving the African Democratic Congress, which was in trouble.
At the party’s national convention in Abuja on Saturday, Kwankwaso supported the NDC’s decision to zone its 2027 presidential ticket to the South, characterizing it as a step toward fairness, reconciliation, and national togetherness.
Responding to a query regarding whether the alliance hid a subtle rivalry between the two groups, Kwankwaso stated that friction between principals and their deputies was caused by greed rather than structural strain.
“The problem people are having, especially leaders, is that they are too greedy to the extent that they begin to have issues. There is so much to do. You don’t have to fight your deputy,” he said.
He stated that his record as a former deputy speaker of the House of Representatives and later as governor of Kano State showed that political partnerships could hold under pressure.
“I had an opportunity to work with my speaker, and we worked very well. I was in Kano for eight years despite the difficulty of my then-deputy governor. We were able to work for eight years amicably to the extent that I handed over to him,” he said.
Kwankwaso carried the argument beyond his personal experience, claiming that the same logic applied at the federal level.
“In the Senate and other places, in the NDDC, we worked amicably with people. There is so much to be done, and that’s why you have even ministers, other executives, advisors, and so on. I don’t see from my experiences of the past why deputies or vice presidents would fight with the president or governor,” he said.
He rooted the alliance in Nigerian political history, tracing a lineage of successful North-Southeast collaborations from the first republic to the present.
“Right from the beginning, this sort of alliance has been in existence. Now we are going back to what Tafawa Balewa did during their time,” he said.
He also mentioned the collaboration between former Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa and NCNC leaders, as well as that of former President Shehu Shagari and his vice president, Alex Ekwueme, during the second republic.
“So also in the second republic, immediately after the war, our leaders, Shagari and others, worked very closely with the southeast, with Alex Ekwueme as its vice president. They are our friends. We want to work together with them,” he said.
Kwankwaso also mentioned that subsequent administrations had shifted power-sharing away from the South-East, a pattern he suggested the current alliance was correcting.
“There was a change during the Third Republic where, for many obvious reasons, an election was annulled and the government under the military decided to bring in Shonekan from the South-West.
“Even after that, the military and other leaders worked together and brought in Chief Olusegun Obasanjo from the South-West again. Even Bola Tinubu probably is a beneficiary of all that,” he said.
He was unequivocal that the choice of Obi was not solely based on regional feeling.
“It wasn’t just because we are going to the Southwest; just because of the Southwest. No. We realized that Peter Obi is at the forefront of it, and that’s why we all accepted to work together,” he said.
The inclusion of both men in the NDC has sparked a wave of defections, with senators, House of Representatives members, and political blocs connected with their previous coalition flocking to the new party, drastically changing calculations ahead of the 2027 elections.
The alliance combines Kwankwaso’s northern grassroots structure and disciplined voter mobilization with Obi’s national youth engagement and urban electoral momentum, establishing the NDC as one of the primary opposition platforms poised to challenge President Bola Tinubu and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2027.
