
Why do you want to govern a volatile state like Kaduna? If Kwankwaso wants to win election, he will have to fraternise with others. Nobody will close his door and sit in his house and become an island, not under this polity, not under the 2023 elections. It is a complex reversible arithmetic you can’t attempt to answer. If there is likely to be a run-off, the strongest may require the support of the weakest or vice versa. So the average politician leaves his window open because he talks to every citizen, because every citizen is entitled to a vote. So go to the East and plot the graph, do the same in the North. If you take a hundred votes in Lagos, if I asked you to allocate the votes the way you think they will come, maybe two or three parties may not get 25 percent or the required number of votes. But now you have APC, you have PDP, Labour Party (LP), NNPP and other smaller parties. Look around before, we were talking of only PDP and APC. Nigeria is so big a polity, a pot, when it is boiling, you can never say what will happen, because its politics is erratic. He cannot arrogate to himself, either can the All Progressives Congress (APC) or the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) arrogate to themselves that they must win the required number of votes. So the responsibility of Kwankwaso and NNPP is to put a credible platform to form the next government in Nigeria. Try and plot the graph and do it dispassionately, out of the 36 states, you need to win in minimum of 25 states. You see APC and PDP as the biggest of them. So, for somebody to say NNPP will not make it, then, which of the parties will make it? I am talking from the facts on ground. And that’s why the law of every election permits a re-run. Because the law requires a candidate to score a minimum vote in a number of states, apart from simple majority of votes scored, no one party, no one candidate may be able to make it. It does not appear that any of the parties, including NNPP, may make it in the first ballot. Is that true?įirst of all, I am not Kwankwaso. It is said there are moves to lure Kwankwaso into supporting Senator Bola Tinubu. We lost Shekarau, but in that transaction, NNPP is counting profits. Prominent people from the state joined the NNPP, when Shekarau left, unfortunately for him and fortunately for NNPP, he left these key and prominent people behind in NNPP. When Shekarau came into the fold, he came with key people in Kano State. However, if at the end of the day I lose one person, as a politician I tried to see quickly how I will replace the person that left me with one, two and possibly three people. As a politician, I count it as a big profit if I wake up in the morning and I gain one person. But, again, we are operating a multi-party democracy. I believe if my big brother, Shekarau, is being offered a ministerial appointment by African Democratic Congress (ADC) you will not hear the exit of Shekarau. I don’t think we have heard his last exit. But I can’t remember whether we have discussed the entry of Shekarau. Well here we are talking about the exit of Shekarau. Don’t you think it will affect the fortune of your party? How did you see the exit of Senator Ibrahim Shekarau. He shares his thoughts with our Northern Bureau Chief, MUHAMMAD SABIU, on the 2023 elections, predicting that there might be a re-run as well as other surprises. He is currently the gubernatorial candidate of New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) in Kaduna State. Senator Suleiman Hunkuyi was a member of the 8th Senate.
