The acting national chairman of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), Abba Kawu Alli, has berated those who claimed to have suspended the national leader of the party and its flagbearer in the February 25 presidential election, Senator Rabiu Musa Kwakwanso, saying they lack the power to do so.
Kawu Alli stated this during a press briefing by the National Working Committee (NWC) at the party’s national secretariat in Abuja on Wednesday, which was attended by some state chairmen. He said Kwakwanso’s expulsion was a joke taken too far while insisting that NNPP was not factionalised and remained one an indivisible party.
According to the acting national chairman, the press conference was to set the record straight so that Nigerians could understand how the present NWC came into being in 2022. He said as a law-abiding party, the NNPP did everything within the law before suspending and eventually expelling the former chairman of the Board of Trustees (BoT), Chief Boniface Aniebonam, and erstwhile national publicity secretary, Dr Agbo Major, and others at its NEC which was held at the Bolingo Hotel, Abuja on Tuesday.
He stated that those who had been suspended lacked the power to suspend Kwakwanso or any other party member, insisting that they could not sit in Lagos and suspend the party’s presidential candidate.
“Those who suspended our presidential candidate are not members of our party.
NNPP does not have factions. NNPP is one of those who sat in Lagos are jokers. We are not a faction, we are the real NNPP, “Kawu Alli said.
He said the party was registered in 2002 but did not appeal to Nigerians until Kwakwanso and his Kwakwansiya Movement, The National Movement (TNM), came into the fray. Kawu Alli added that until the Kwankwaso group joined the party, the party had no properly constituted NWC, and only Aniebonam and Major were running the party.
“This party was registered in the year 2002. Nothing much was heard about the party. As a matter of fact, the majority of Nigerians did not know anything about the party, NNPP.
However, on 28 February, 2022, the TNM entered into discussions with the party, and by the 1st of March of that same year, the two groups started a new journey in preparation for the 2023 general elections.
“As at the time this new journey started, NNPP had no single person in any elective position or appointment in government. The only person who won the election on the platform of the party in the 2019 elections was in Bauchi and had defected to the PDP.
For this reason, the leaders of the party, as at the time the TNM came to join them, wanted to escape the hammers of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) by winning some seats in the 2023 general elections.
“As a matter of fact, there was no board in place. There was no proper NWC. The party was being run by an imaginary NWC of the then national secretary, Dr Gilbert Major Agbo, and national chairman, Dr Boniface Aniebonam, who is in Lagos.
The national secretary was the all-in-all, doing everything in Abuja, even inserting the signature of the national chairman, Dr Boniface Okechukwu Aniebonam, into documents because the man was in Lagos. That was the structure the TNM met on the ground,” the NNPP presidential campaign spokesman, Mr Ladipo Johnson, said.
“Is it not funny that all those people either suspended or expelled would gather somewhere and claim to have suspended His Excellency, Sen Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, and also dissolve the NWC? The jokers also appointed a Caretaker Committee (CTC) made up of those who have ceased to be party members by virtue of our constitution. Was INEC at the meeting? Did they write INEC? Who and who signed the letter? Is it not laughable that Major Agbo, who announced the suspension of the former chairmen, the expulsion of two of them, and the dissolution of some of the states, is now purportedly “heading” their caretaker committee?”
Johnson stated while democracy does not give any room for anyone to arrogate certain power to himself, he said Kwakwanso remains “the face of the party, has not been suspended, and the NWC under Mallam Abba Kawu Alli remains intact.
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