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Some loyal members of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) in Oyo State to Dr Rabiu Kwankwaso have denied involvement in a group that recently declared support for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s re-election.

The members, in a joint statement made available to journalists, described as mischievous a report claiming that some individuals purportedly representing the Southwest Kwankwasiyya faction had joined the JDS Movement and declared support for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Senator Sharafadeen Alli and other All Progressives Congress (APC) candidates.

They said the Oyo State Kwankwasiyya Movement had never aligned with the APC or any of its candidates and would not do so.

The statement reads: ‘The individuals claiming to represent our group acted entirely on their own volition without the knowledge, consent, or authority of the party and the movement in Oyo State.

‘Let it be stated in the strongest possible terms: that we are collapsing the NNPP and the Kwankwasiyya Movement in Oyo State into the OK Movement and the Kwankwaso National Mobilization (KNM).

‘This is our collective decision, and it is irreversible. We shall not be distracted by the antics of political jobbers who are desperately seeking relevance by auctioning the mandate of the people to the highest bidder.

‘We call on all our members, supporters, and the good people of Oyo State to disregard any information saying we have shifted our support to President Tinubu. We continue to stand firm with Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso and the Kwankwasiyya Movement.’

The loyalists said they had deliberately withheld their mandate and endorsement due to the possibility of an impending alliance involving political parties across Nigeria in support of their principal.

The Labour Party (LP) Directorate of Mobilisation and Integration (DMI), led by its Director-General, Marcel Ngogbehei, has commenced consultations on possible new political and institutional alliances ahead of the 2027 general elections.

The move followed a national strategy session held virtually on Friday, 18 September 2026, where the DMI reviewed the lingering crisis within the Labour Party, ongoing leadership litigation and the organisation’s strategic direction ahead of the elections.

The meeting, themed ‘DMI Updates, State of the Nation and Strategies for 2027,’ was attended by more than 150 state coordinators from the 36 states through Google Meet, while another 55 participants joined via the organisation’s WhatsApp platform.

Ngogbehei, a pioneer organiser of the Obidient Movement and former chairman of the Coalition for Peter Obi (CPO), presided over the session.

In a communiqué issued after the meeting, the DMI reaffirmed its identity as a citizen-led governance initiative established to promote public engagement, civic participation, grassroots mobilisation and accountability.

The directorate said its mission was to bridge the gap between citizens and the decisions, institutions and political leaders that affect their lives, stressing that participation in governance should extend beyond elections.

The organisation also clarified its relationship with the Labour Party, describing it as a strategic partnership aimed at strengthening governance and electoral impact rather than an organisational merger.

According to the DMI, the partnership was brokered by the party’s National Chairman, Julius Abure, and developed from the relationship between the Labour Party and the Obidient Movement following the 2023 elections.

It recalled that the collaboration was facilitated in 2022, when Ngogbehei served as chairman of the Coalition for Peter Obi, culminating in the Labour Party/CPO Leadership Summit held at the International Conference Centre, Abuja, on 11 August 2022.

The summit brought together Peter Obi, Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, the late Doyin Okupe, Abure, Labour Party candidates, presidential campaign officials and support groups.

The DMI said the engagement represented an important stage in the development of cooperation between the Labour Party, under Bar Julius Abure’s leadership, and the Obidient Movement, led by Ngogbehei, ahead of the 2023 general elections.

It stressed, however, that its identity, membership, structures and mission remained distinct from the internal affairs of the party.

The strategy session also examined the prolonged leadership crisis within the Labour Party involving Abure, Senator Nenadi Usman, Peter Obi and Abia State Governor Alex Otti.

Participants reviewed disagreements surrounding party leadership, internal processes and zoning, as well as the implications of the dispute for grassroots members and volunteers who supported the party during the 2023 elections.

The DMI argued that the crisis had weakened a political platform into which ordinary Nigerians had invested time, resources and expectations.

It also examined Obi’s subsequent move to the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), questioning how the zoning arguments advanced during the Labour Party dispute should be viewed against the political arrangement that subsequently emerged within the NDC.

The directorate noted that while zoning had been cited as one of the factors contributing to the Labour Party crisis, the NDC had also departed from the same principle, alleging that its National Leader, National Chairman and presidential candidate were all from the southern part of the country.

The DMI described the situation as a matter requiring further discussion, particularly in relation to the principles advanced during the Labour Party dispute.

On the ongoing litigation over the Labour Party leadership, the DMI identified three possible scenarios.

These include a Supreme Court decision restoring Abure to the party leadership, a decision affirming Usman’s leadership, or a ruling reaffirming the limits of judicial intervention in internal party affairs and leaving outstanding issues to party processes or further proceedings before the appropriate courts, leading to another merry-go-round of judicial confrontation.

According to the directorate, each scenario could have implications for party administration, competing structures, candidate nominations and preparations for the 2027 elections.

It expressed concern that prolonged uncertainty could affect the Labour Party’s preparations but said its nationwide structure should not remain suspended while awaiting the resolution of litigation involving the leadership of a party with which it had a strategic partnership.

The DMI therefore resolved to maintain organisational continuity and prepare for different lawful outcomes while respecting binding court decisions and applicable electoral laws.

Against the backdrop of the developments, the strategy session unanimously mandated Ngogbehei and his leadership team to explore new political and institutional alliances ahead of 2027.

The DMI also expressed readiness to sustain its strategic relationship with the Julius Abure-led Labour Party National Executive Committee (NEC), while inviting the party leadership to participate in consultations on broader partnerships involving other political parties and institutions.

It stressed that the invitation did not amount to a declaration of a new alliance.

Rather, the proposed consultations are intended to identify possible areas of cooperation in response to changing political circumstances and the interests of DMI members and volunteers.

The directorate said it remained willing to work with the Abure-led Labour Party where their objectives align, while simultaneously exploring relationships with other political and institutional stakeholders.

The meeting also received an update on the DMI’s nationwide organisational structure.

According to a report presented at the session, the directorate has more than 500 state and FCT coordinators, averaging about 15 coordinators per state and the Federal Capital Territory, as well as more than 11,000 coordinators across Nigeria’s 774 Local Government Areas.

Each coordinator has been mandated to recruit at least 10 core operational team members.

The DMI said the framework represented a potential nationwide mobilisation and recruitment network of approximately 120,000 coordinators and core team members, with verification of the expanded structure ongoing.

The organisation stressed that the network was built through the commitment of citizens and volunteers and should therefore remain a citizen-participation resource rather than the property of any political party, faction or individual.

The directorate said the sacrifices and contributions of its coordinators and volunteers would remain central to decisions on its future direction.

It also thanked Abure for his support and described him as a party chairman who had remained committed to the Labour Party project despite the internal challenges facing the organisation.

It added that the experience of the Labour Party crisis had reinforced the importance of building citizen institutions capable of preserving their mission even when political parties and individual leaders change direction.

The directorate noted that its mission was broader than any single party partnership and pledged to preserve its nationwide network, promote citizen participation in governance and ensure that the efforts of its coordinators and volunteers continue to serve the public interest.

Getting shortlisted for a scholarship interview is already proof your application worked. For competitive awards like Chevening, Fulbright, and Commonwealth, only a small fraction of applicants ever reach this stage, which means the panel has already decided you’re plausibly a winner on paper.

What the interview actually tests is whether your story holds up under direct questioning, whether you can think on your feet, and whether you’d represent the funding body well once the scholarship is awarded.

Most candidates who stumble here aren’t underqualified; they’re simply unprepared for the specific structure panels use to evaluate answers.

Use the STAR method for every behavioral question

Nearly every major scholarship panel, from Chevening to Fulbright to Rhodes, builds a portion of the interview around behavioral questions: tell us about a time you demonstrated leadership, describe a challenge you overcame, walk us through a failure and what you learned.

The consistent, well-documented way to answer these is the STAR method: Situation, Task, Action, Result. Briefly set up the context, explain what your specific responsibility was, describe exactly what you did, and close with a concrete, ideally measurable outcome.

This structure matters because panels hear a large number of vague answers built around adjectives like ‘hardworking’ or ‘resilient’ without any actual evidence behind them, and STAR forces the evidence to the surface instead of leaving it implied.

The failure question deserves particular care, since it’s one of the most commonly asked and most commonly botched. A weak answer picks a fake flaw disguised as a strength, something like ‘I work too hard.’

A strong answer picks a genuine setback, walks through it honestly using the STAR structure, and spends real time on the Result section explaining specifically what changed in how you approach similar situations afterward.

Panels are listening for genuine reflection, not a rehearsed-sounding confession that conveniently makes you look good.

It also helps to prepare three or four STAR stories in advance rather than one, since a single well-rehearsed anecdote can end up stretched awkwardly to answer questions about leadership, failure, and teamwork alike, and a panel that’s heard the same story reused twice within one interview will notice.

Research the panel, not just the programme

Most applicants research the scholarship itself thoroughly: its mission, its values, its past recipients. Far fewer research the specific people sitting across the table, and this is a meaningful missed opportunity.

Where panelist names or academic backgrounds are published in advance, or can reasonably be found through the university or programme’s public staff pages, looking into their research interests lets you naturally steer relevant answers toward language and framing that resonates with what that panelist actually studies or values professionally.

This isn’t about flattery or name-dropping a panelist’s own papers; it’s about noticing, for example, that a panelist with a public health research background will likely engage more with an answer that frames your career plan in terms of systemic impact rather than individual achievement, and adjusting your natural emphasis accordingly rather than delivering an identical answer regardless of who’s listening.

This same principle extends to understanding what a specific scholarship’s panel is actually screening for beneath the surface of its questions.

Chevening panels probe leadership, networking ability, and a credible return-to-home-country plan; Fulbright panels weigh cultural exchange value as heavily as academic strength and often ask what your host country’s students would learn from you; research-focused awards drill much further into your specific methodology and proposed supervisor.

A generically strong answer prepared without this context often lands flat precisely because it doesn’t speak to what that particular panel is listening for.

Handle eye contact naturally, not as a performance metric

It’s true that steady, comfortable eye contact generally reads as confident and engaged, and multiple studies on interview evaluation have found that interviewees who maintain natural eye contact are rated more favorably than those who look away or down consistently. But it’s worth being precise about what this actually means, because the common advice to ‘maximise eye contact’ oversimplifies a more culturally nuanced picture.

Cross-cultural research on gaze perception has found that sustained, direct eye contact reads differently depending on the cultural background of the person receiving it: participants from some East Asian cultural contexts have rated direct gaze as less approachable or more confrontational compared to participants from Western European backgrounds, who tend to rate the same gaze as more engaging.

Since panels for programmes like Chevening, Fulbright, and DAAD are frequently international or mixed-nationality, treating eye contact as a fixed psychological lever you can crank up for guaranteed points overstates what the evidence actually supports.

The more reliable version of this advice is simpler: maintain the same natural, comfortable eye contact you’d use in a genuine conversation with someone you respect, breaking it periodically the way anyone naturally does while thinking through an answer, rather than either avoiding it out of nervousness or forcing an unbroken stare in an attempt to project confidence.

Natural beats performed, and an unnaturally intense, unblinking gaze can read as unsettling rather than assured, regardless of who’s on the panel.

Close with a genuine, specific question

Nearly every panel interview ends with some version of ‘do you have any questions for us?’ Declining this opportunity, or asking something generic and easily answered by the programme’s own website, wastes one of the few moments left to make an impression.

The stronger move is a specific, informed question that demonstrates you’ve engaged deeply with the programme and, ideally, with something particular about that panel or institution, such as a recent initiative, a specific research direction, or a genuine uncertainty about how the programme structures a particular opportunity.

This should be a real question you actually want answered, not a performance designed purely to look curious, since panelists can generally tell the difference between authentic engagement and a rehearsed closing line.

A good test before the interview is to write down two or three candidate questions and check honestly whether you’d still be interested in the answer if no one were watching; if the honest answer is no, it’s a prop question, not a genuine one, and it’s worth replacing.

FAQs

What should a candidate do if they do not know the answer to a highly technical academic question? Say so honestly and immediately, rather than bluffing or guessing confidently. The stronger move is to acknowledge the gap cleanly, then walk the panel through how you would approach finding the answer, drawing on whatever adjacent knowledge or reasoning you do have. Panels are generally more impressed by honest intellectual humility paired with a clear thinking process than by a confident-sounding answer that turns out to be wrong.

How does maintaining direct eye contact influence the psychological grading of a scholarship panel? Natural, comfortable eye contact generally reads as confident and engaged, and several studies on interview evaluation support this. However, the effect is not a simple, universal ‘more is better’ rule; cross-cultural research shows that sustained, intense direct gaze can read as confrontational rather than confident to evaluators from some cultural backgrounds, while reading as more engaging to others. Since many scholarship panels are internationally mixed, natural, relaxed eye contact that breaks periodically, as it would in any genuine conversation, is a more reliable approach than deliberately maximizing it.

Should an applicant bring physical copies of their published research papers to a scholarship interview? For research-focused scholarships where your proposed work or academic background is likely to come up in detail, bringing a clean, organized physical or digital copy of relevant published work can be genuinely useful, particularly if a panelist wants to look at a specific figure or result while you’re discussing it. It’s not necessary for every scholarship interview, and it shouldn’t be treated as a prop to demonstrate productivity; only bring it if you’d naturally reference it in answering a question the panel is likely to ask, and keep it out of sight otherwise.