Politics
You were broke, Wike bankrolled your election, Dogara tells Bauchi gov
Former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, has expressed surprise at the Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed’s verbal attacks on the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike.
According to Dogara, Mohammed’s attack on Wike is surprising because Wike financed Mohammed’s campaign to become governor.
In a long statement on Tuesday, Dogara said he and others supporting Mohammed to become governor were shocked that despite being a former minister he had no money to fund his governorship bid.
Dogara said apart from Wike taking control of the PDP primary to ensure Mohammed’s emergence as the PDP flag-bearer, he went on to provide Mohammed with money and logistics, which enabled him to win the election and become a governor.
In the last couple of weeks, Wike and Mohammed have been locked in a media war, with Mohammed describing Wike as a transactional politician who is propelled by personal gains.
Mohammed, who is the Chairman of the PDP Governors’ Forum, also described Wike as a serial betrayer and a threat to the PDP, urging him to resign from the PDP and join the ruling All Progressives Congress, which appointed him the FCT minister.
However, wading in on Tuesday in his statement titled, “Let the truth be told,” Dogara said that given how Wike helped Mohammed in the past, the Bauchi governor’s attack on Wike smacked of ingratitude and betrayal.
Dogara wrote, “As someone who knows so much because I was the provocateur of the events between the two that I will speak to, I consider my silence not just cowardice but complicity. Therefore, I am not afraid to stand alone or risk conflict. I should not be misunderstood to be defending Wike but simply stating the raw truth that I know, and I don’t give a damn if the truth makes Wike look good. I have learnt to tell the truth as I enjoy my freedom from being a slave to human opinion.
“For starters, need I remind Governor Bala Mohammed that in the 2018 PDP gubernatorial primaries when we were not too sure he would win because his then major opponent, Senator Abdul Ningi, was the one who constituted the state party structure and had a bosom friend as party chairman, it was Wike we turned to for help.
“I had called Wike to plead with him to help us in Bauchi without necessarily disclosing to him that it was Bala Mohammed that we wanted to be delivered. His response to me, was that ‘Are you sure you are in control of the process 100 per cent?’ I said, I wasn’t too sure and he said to me, ‘Leave it to me, I will help you sort it out.’
“To do it, Wike, first of all, made his bosom friend and close ally, Chief Dan Orbih, the chairman of the panel for the primaries and said I should discuss whatever I wanted with Chief Dan. We got talking, and on the eve of the primaries, Chief Dan was in Benin City, and we needed to get him to Bauchi for the assignment.
“It was Wike that I turned to again, and his response to me was, ‘My brother, I have told you not to bother about this. Tell Chief Dan to come to meet me in Port Harcourt’. I did just that, and amazingly, Wike provided the private jet that flew Chief Dan to Bauchi and out of Bauchi for the assignment. I can say without fear of any contradiction that Wike bore all expenses for the exercise. It’s, therefore, shocking that this so-called transactional character called Wike did not place any condition whatsoever for his support.”
The former Speaker said Wike did not stop there, stressing that the former Rivers State governor assisted Mohammed during the main election as the latter had no money of his own to fund his campaign.
“After the emergence of Bala Mohammed as the party flag-bearer and having promised to sponsor all the party candidates if he gets the ticket, we were rudely awoken to the reality that Bala Mohammed had no money for his campaigns, let alone for other candidates of the party.
“As predicted, we had the fundraiser, and to cut the long story short, all we raised from the fundraiser was a paltry N48m and If you deduct the N20m invested in organising it, that leaves you with a net of N28m. I have the records and our stakeholders are there to bear witness to this.
“When it was obvious the masquerade would soon turn to a human being, I told our then two serving senators who are alive and can testify that the only option we had was to go to a friend and brother, then Governor Wike for assistance. We got tickets and flew to Port Harcourt with Bala Mohammed without informing Wike that we were coming with him.
“On arrival, we were ushered into the Government House and asked to take our seats and wait for the governor, who was still upstairs, to join us shortly. As soon as Wike walked down the stairs to join us and saw Bala Mohammed, his visage changed and I noticed he was cold to me for the very first time. He asked us to join him at the dining room for breakfast but excused me while those on my delegation waited. What happened next was nerve-racking and humbling, I must say!
“He was like, ‘Speaker, why did you bring Bala to my house without even caring to find out what our mission was?’ I said to him, ‘I thought he was your friend since both of you served in the same cabinet under President Jonathan’. He said, ‘Let me tell you what you don’t know. When we were ministers, Bala Mohammed allocated plots of land to all ministers except me’. He also recalled how he humiliated him when he went to see him in his office as a colleague minister just to get approval to increase the number of floors on a building he had in Abuja, not to beg for the plot, which he refused to allocate to him.
“He said Bala Mohammed kept him in his waiting room for hours and later sneaked out of the office. From that day, he (Wike) made up his mind never to have anything to do with him again. He added, ‘I wish you had told me it’s Bala you were rooting for but whatever you want, I will assist you guys because I don’t say no to a brother, but I assure you, you will regret your decision if Bala Mohammed becomes governor’. The rest is history,” Dogara recalled.
The former Speaker also added that Wike confronted Bal,a who admitted to his wrongdoing and pleaded for forgiveness.
“He said to me ‘Let’s join them at the dining so that I can confront him with these issues for you to know that I am not making things up. We joined them at the dining and Wike confronted Bala with these issues in the open and in our very presence, Bala admitted and pleaded for forgiveness, assuring that he was now a changed man. The two senators with me that day can confirm this to anyone who wants to establish the veracity of these narratives.’
“We spent the night at the Government House and the next morning, Wike called and directed that his cash assistance be handed over to me to pass to Bala. I said, ‘Your Excellency, it’s better I call him so that he can collect the assistance himself lest he thinks you are still angry with him’. I sent for Bala and when he came, Wike’s aide handed over the package to him and he collected it while almost kissing the ground. Wike, therefore, gave us the lifeline we needed to kick-start Bala’s campaigns.
“If Bala has forgotten how much we left with that day, I will remind him. Wike didn’t stop there, he gave us a private jet to ferry us back to Abuja. And I must add that was not the only time Wike helped Bala with resources and logistics. What is baffling is that the so-called transactional Wike did not demand anything in return nor place any condition for all that he did.”
Concluding, Dogara stressed that “When Wike was his benefactor, he (Bala) said he knew Wike had done better than him and referred to him as ‘someone courageous, focused and determined, a person qualified and competent to help salvage Nigeria’. ”
Dogara said the Bauchi governor’s record of betrayal is common knowledge.
“Time will not permit me to list those Bala has betrayed, which includes his known godfather and our father, Baba Waziri, Alhaji Bello Kirfi, elder statesman and former Minister under President Shehu Shagari in the Second Republic.”
By Okey Maduforo Awka
The former member that represented Anambra East and West Federal Constituency Chief Chinedu Obidigwe has denied a social media handle where he was said to have made Prof Charles Soludo the Governor of Anambra state.
Obidigwe further stated that the report did neither emanate from him or from his Media Aides urging the party not to believe what he called attempt at setting a negative agenda in the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA).
Obidigwe who is an Aspirant of the party for the Anambra East and West Federal Constituency accused enemies of the party being sponsored by opposition parties to creat problems .
According to the Media Assistant to Obidigwe Mr Dominic Okagbue in a statement;
“The attention of Hon. Chinedu Benjamin Obidigwe has been drawn to misleading and unfounded claims/propaganda being circulated on various social media platforms through a pseudo account, alleging that Obidigwe said he installed the Governor of Anambra State, Prof. Charles Chukwuma Soludo, CFR, as Governor in 2021”
“We wish to state, without any iota of equivocation, that such a statement never emanated from Hon. Chinedu Obidigwe. It is a desperate move by his political enemies who are bent on tarnishing his image as a tool and technique to advance their unmerited aspirations”
“Obidigwe, in 2021, was merely an electorate with just one vote. Even though he voted for the Governor and APGA, the question remains: can one man’s vote make a Governor?”
“Governor Soludo was elected and made Governor through the collective votes of Ndi Anambra, both in his first and second terms. We therefore call on the reading public to disregard such rumours and treat them as faceless and unfounded allegations geared towards the character assassination of an innocent man” he said.
A former Kano State Governor and leader of the Kwankwasiyya Movement, Rabiu Kwankwaso, says northern political leaders conducted a deliberate assessment of potential allies before settling on Peter Obi as the most capable partner to prosecute the 2027 presidential campaign.
He dismissed concerns about a hidden power struggle between his camp and Obi’s.Politics
Kwankwaso made the disclosure in an interview on Arise TV on Monday, offering one of his most detailed accounts yet of how the North-Southeast political alliance within the NDC was formed.
“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 realised that Peter Obi is at the forefront of it. That’s why we all accepted to work together,” he said.Political candidate profile
Kwankwaso, a two-term former governor of Kano State and the presidential candidate of the New Nigeria Peoples Party in 2023, leads the Kwankwasiyya movement, a grassroots political force with deep loyalty across Kano and parts of northern Nigeria.Nigeria travel guide
He left the NNPP amid internal disputes before joining the NDC alongside Obi earlier this month.
Obi, a former governor of Anambra State, ran on the Labour Party platform in 2023 and drew massive youth-driven support across the South and urban centres, though he did not win.
Both men formally joined the NDC on Sunday, May 3, defecting from the crisis-hit African Democratic Congress.Politics
At the party’s national convention on Saturday in Abuja, Kwankwaso backed the NDC’s decision to zone its 2027 presidential ticket to the South, describing it as a step toward fairness, healing and national cohesion.
Responding to a question about whether the alliance concealed a quiet rivalry between both camps, Kwankwaso argued that friction between principals and their deputies was a product of greed, not structural tension.
“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 said 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 extended the argument beyond his personal experience, saying the same principle 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 would fight with the president or governor,” he said.
He grounded the alliance in Nigerian political history, tracing a lineage of productive North-Southeast partnerships from the first republic to the present.Nigeria travel guide
“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 referenced the collaboration between former Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa and leaders of the NCNC, as well as that of former President Shehu Shagari and his vice president, Alex Ekwueme, in 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 his vice president. They are our friends. We want to work together with them,” he said.Politics
Kwankwaso also noted 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 emphatic that the choice of Obi was not driven by regional sentiment alone.
“It wasn’t just because we are going to the South-West just because of the South-West. No. We realised that Peter Obi is at the forefront of it and that’s why we all accepted to work together,” he said.Political candidate profile
The movement of both men into the NDC has triggered a wave of defections, with senators, House of Representatives members and political blocs aligned with their former coalition gravitating toward the new party, rapidly reshaping calculations ahead of the 2027 elections.
The alliance pairs Kwankwaso’s northern grassroots structure and disciplined voter mobilisation with Obi’s national youth engagement and urban electoral momentum, positioning the NDC as one of the main opposition platforms set to challenge President Bola Tinubu and the ruling All Progressives Congress in 2027
Former Kano State Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso has dismissed suggestions that his exit from the African Democratic Congress has created a damaging split in the opposition.
He said he and Atiku Abubakar may yet work together before the 2027 general election.
Kwankwaso spoke in an interview on Arise TV on Monday, responding to concerns that his move to the Nigeria Democratic Congress alongside Peter Obi had effectively divided the opposition into two competing blocs ahead of the polls.
“Now, we may still work together before the election. I personally, and I think even Obi himself, decided to leave ADC not because we are fighting with Atiku or anybody there. We decided to leave that party because we realised that there are some issues,” he said
He said the ADC was contending with three major unresolved problems that he believed would make it difficult for the party to field candidates, without specifying what those issues were.
“Whether they will be able to field candidates in that party or not is just a matter of time. It’s not like we had a primary election,” he said
The remarks come after Atiku recently claimed on Arise TV that Kwankwaso’s popularity was confined to Kano State and further divided there by Governor Abba Yusuf.
Atiku, who is seeking the presidency on the ADC platform, also described himself as the most popular politician of northern extraction, saying none of his contemporaries, including Kwankwaso, Aminu Tambuwal and Nasir El-Rufai, commanded a voter base across the North as wide as his.
Kwankwaso did not engage the slight directly, but made clear he bore no grudge.
“Politics is just like a game. I’m not fighting anybody and I’m not expecting anybody to fight me. I have no issue with that. I think we are past that level now,” he said.
He challenged those predicting a vote split in Kano to wait for the election result before drawing conclusions.
“Let’s wait for the election and see whether votes are split in Kano or not,” he said.
Kwankwaso also acknowledged a history of working with Atiku, recalling that he served as the former vice president’s northern coordinator during the 2019 presidential election.
“There was an election in 2019 in Port Harcourt. He won the election. I was his coordinator for the north. We worked for him,” he said.
He traced his broader relationship with Atiku to the 2015 APC presidential primary in Lagos, where he placed second behind Muhammadu Buhari, with Atiku third.
By Okey Maduforo, Awka
The Anambra State chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) has expelled 30 members of the party for instituting legal actions against the party.
The affected members include some aspirants for the National Assembly, and their expulsion may disqualify them from participating in the party’s primary elections.
Disclosing this shortly after the meeting of the State Executive Committee (SEC) of the party, the State Publicity Secretary, Dr. Sir Valentine Iyiegbu, told reporters that the decision was in line with Section 21, Subsection 5 of the party’s constitution.
“The party discussed those who took the party to court, and many of them are contesting for the House of Representatives tickets of the party,” he said.
“The matter comes up tomorrow, and the SEC stated that what the party constitution stipulates would be followed, which is outright expulsion from the party under Article 21, Subsection 5.”
“The SEC actually ratified their expulsion because they did not exhaust all the internal avenues provided by the party to resolve their grievances,” he added.
Iyiegbu noted that the only reprieve available to the expelled members would be for them to withdraw their court cases.
“It is only when the matters are withdrawn from the court that the party can consider listening to them,” he said.
Speaking on the party’s primary elections, he explained:
“In the case of those contesting for the tickets of the Federal House of Representatives, all the eleven positions have aspirants, while for the Senate, the three positions are also being contested. The screening committees were here to perform their duties,” he noted.
The party also ratified the appointment of a five-man Primary Elections Committee headed by Sir Izuchukwu Okeke, the State Organising Secretary of the party.
By PETRUS OBI
Frontline aspirant for the Aninri/Awgu/Oji-River Federal Constituency seat, Anayo Onwuegbu, has successfully completed the screening exercise conducted by the All Progressives Congress House of Representatives screening panel in Abuja ahead of the party primaries scheduled for Friday, May 15, 2026.
Speaking after the exercise, Onwuegbu expressed satisfaction with the screening process, describing it as a reflection of the party’s commitment to internal democracy, transparency, and credible leadership selection ahead of the 2027 general elections.
The aspirant, who is seeking to represent Aninri/Awgu/Oji-River Federal Constituency under the platform of the APC, stated that he remains focused and prepared to continue to offer quality representation to the people of the constituency.
According to him, “The process once again highlights our party’s commitment to internal democracy, transparency, and the emergence of credible leadership as we prepare for the 2027 general elections.”
He reaffirmed his dedication to the development of the constituency, pledging to serve the people with commitment and purpose if elected.
The APC House of Representatives primaries are expected to hold nationwide on Friday as aspirants battle for the party’s tickets ahead of the 2027 elections.
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