During the 2015 presidential election, Senator Rabiu Kwankwaso, in his capacity as governor of Kano State, delivered 1.9 million votes to the All Progressives Congress, APC, to seal the victory of Muhammadu Buhari over the incumbent Nigerian president, Dr Goodluck Jonathan.
The number of electoral votes declared by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, raised eyebrows and got many wondering how Buhari amassed that number of votes from just one state in the north.
However, supporters of Buhari argued at the time that this was made possible by Kwankwaso and his formidable Kwankwasiyya Movement in Kano, which had decamped from the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, to the APC a year earlier.
Surprisingly, Kwankwaso was later to fall out with Buhari, his successor in office, Abdullahi Ganduje, and the APC, forcing him to return to the PDP where he tried unsuccessfully to clinch the presidential ticket of the party to contest the 2019 election.
In the 2019 Kano State governorship election, his attempt to install Abba Kabir Yusuf of the PDP as the next governor was also shockingly truncated when INEC stopped the counting of votes that showed Yusuf with a clear lead over Ganduje, and declared the election inconclusive.
A supplementary election conducted two weeks later enabled Ganduje to recoup and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by a narrow margin of 8,982 votes.
Ever since, Kwankwaso has cooled his political heels and has been engaged in several philanthropic activities targeted at poverty alleviation and the education of indigent children in his home state.
Kwankwaso joined the Morning Show on Friday to discuss his next political move, the bickering over power shift, the Kwankwasiyya Movement and its influence on Kano politics, the crisis within the PDP, and the party’s national convention scheduled to take place this weekend…
Watch the interview for more…
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