My daughter urged me to work with Obi in 2023, says Kwankwaso

Northern political heavyweight, Rabiu Kwankwaso, has revealed that his daughter lobbied him to align with Peter Obi as far back as the 2023 general election.

This was years before the two men eventually joined forces under the Nigeria Democratic Congress.

Kwankwaso made the disclosure in an interview on Arise TV on Monday, using the anecdote to illustrate what he described as a widening gap between Nigeria’s ageing political elite and a younger generation with fundamentally different political instincts.

“Even in the 2023 election, in my own house, my own daughter was telling me to go and work with Peter Obi. She didn’t say she was Obidient, but she wanted me to work together with him,” he said.

The former Kano State governor said the episode was not an isolated one, suggesting that the cross-regional appeal of both his Kwankwasiyya movement and Obi’s support base ran far deeper than conventional political analysis acknowledged.

“You will be surprised, even in your house or anybody’s house in the south, there may be Kwankwasiyya people there, maybe a watchman is Kwankwasiyya, maybe a house boy that cooks for you is Kwankwasiyya.

“Unless he knows you are interested, he will not tell you because he doesn’t want to offend you,” he said.

Kwankwaso said the divide between older and younger Nigerians on political questions was now impossible to ignore, arguing that the country’s established leaders had largely failed to grasp the scale of the shift.

“People of their age, my age, or especially the age of Atiku, are very few in this country comparatively with the younger people. The younger people have their own way of thinking,” he said.

He said the political class remained trapped in conversations about ethnicity and religion that no longer reflected how young Nigerians were making voting decisions.

“People at that level we are talking about don’t even understand. People are talking of religion, people are talking of ethnicity. But the younger people are looking for the right leadership for this country, and I think they are absolutely right,” he said.

Kwankwaso and Obi formally joined the NDC on May 3, defecting from the African Democratic Congress amid internal disputes.