- Kwankwaso and Obi dumped the PDP in March and May 2022 —months before the 2023 presidential election.
- In the buildup to the election, the PDP was embroiled in an internal crisis with five governors in the party refusing to back Abubakar at the time.
The Deputy National Spokesman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Ibrahim Abdullahi, has said the three leading opposition figures in Nigeria are discussing the possibility of a merger to salvage Nigerians from hunger and widespread insecurity ahead of the 2027 presidential election.
Abdullahi made this statement on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily programme on Monday.
According to him, the three opposition candidates in the last elections—PDP’s Atiku Abubakar, Labour Party’s Peter Obi, and Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP)—would put personal interests aside and form a formidable alliance to defeat the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2027 and salvage Nigerians from hunger.
He said that had the party’s past leadership managed differences and party conflicts well, high-ranking chieftains like former Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike, Kwankwaso, and Obi would still be full-blooded members of the PDP, and the party would have defeated Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the last election.
“We’ve lost Kwankwaso, we’ve lost Peter Obi, all of these people; imagine if they were in the party, we would have won the elections.
“This APC said they defeated us with one million plus (votes); just one of these names that I mentioned would have covered that gap for us, and we would have been in power today, and certainly Nigerians would not have been confronted with this despair and despondency in the land,” he said.