“I think that is the least you can call it; betrayal and outright disregard, outright manipulation,” he said Thursday on a Channels TV programme when asked whether he felt Kwankwaso betrayed him.
“Our guiding principles is the protection of our image, the protection of our integrity and you cannot have the protection of our integrity if there is no going to be integrity, if there is not going to be sincerity,” he added.
The serving Senator representing Kano Central District and former Minister of Education said he threw away his re-election to the red chamber by joining the Peoples Democratic Party.
“PDP will clear the votes in Kano,” he noted.
Shekarau joined Kwankwaso's NNPP in May after leaving the All Progressives Congress, but quit the group in August after developing differences with the presidential candidate.
Shekarau stated, "We joined the party on the 18th of May. A crisis forced me to leave the NNPP and join the PDP. Through our conversation, we came up with our ideas almost two weeks prior to it. It was then the time when candidates were being developed for the different political positions, including those for the state assembly, national assembly, governorship, and senate seats, that would be up for election in the general elections of 2023.
“We sat down with Rabiu Kwankwaso. I submitted this proposal, he accepted it and he said in about one or two, three days, he’s going to prepare his proposal. And then I together with him will sit down to sort ourselves out and harmonise and see what we can do to produce electable people in our various constituencies”.
He said that the NNPP presidential candidate gave him a senatorial form when he joined the party but said Kwankwaso released a list that shut out his political associates who aspired elective offices.
“The same 18th of May by the night, midnight, we saw a list released by the party leadership in the state, handwritten list of candidates by their constituencies and indicating as having solved the entire constituencies’ candidate.
“In fact, in the list released on the 18th by the night, even some constituencies had no name. The following morning I met him (Kwankwaso) and I challenged the list released, we said this is unacceptable because in the entire list, except my name, no any other name from our own movement from our own political association was reflected on the list”.
Shekarau claimed that he and Kwankwaso decided to form a nine-person committee to synchronise the lists so that both camps would have representative tickets, but the committee, which was given three days to complete the task, spent three months past the Independent National Electoral Commission's deadline before running out of time.
“We convened a meeting, I had to call a meeting of my political associates, to brief them as to what we went through for three months. And we set up a committee of 30 to go and review the situation, we still did not make it public.
“But to our surprise, few days later, my brother Rabiu Kwankwaso was on air on the Hausa service of the BBC, saying that there was no way we could be attended to, because we joined the party when it was too late,” he said.
Shekarau said Kwankwaso was wrong that he joined the NNPP late and shouldn’t had agreed to setting up a committee to harmonise the lists.