Murtala Muhammad Rijiyar Zaki

Democracy is, at its most essential, an act of trust. Citizens go to the polls, cast their votes, and place in the hands of an elected individual the authority to govern on their behalf. That authority is borrowed, not given. It is conditional, not absolute. It belongs, in the final and irreducible sense, to the people who granted it, and it must be exercised in their interest, not in the interest of whoever helped engineer its acquisition. This elementary principle, the very foundation upon which every credible democracy in the world is constructed, is the principle that Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso has spent the better part of three decades systematically, deliberately, and quite unapologetically violating. His violation of it is not accidental. It is not the product of ignorance or misunderstanding. It is the logical expression of a political philosophy that has always placed personal ownership above democratic accountability, and godfather authority above the sovereign will of the people.
To understand the full weight of this charge, one must first understand what godfatherism actually means in the Nigerian political context, and why it is not merely an inconvenient feature of our democracy but a fundamental corruption of it. A political godfather, in the Nigerian tradition, is a figure who uses his resources, his organization, and his influence to install candidates in elective office, with the explicit or implicit understanding that those candidates, once elected, will govern not primarily in the interest of the electorate but in the interest of the godfather. The elected official becomes, in this arrangement, less a representative of the people and more a proxy for the man who put him there. The voters, in this model, are not principals whose mandate the elected official is obligated to honor. They are a mechanism, a crowd to be mobilized and demobilized at the godfather’s discretion, a necessary inconvenience in the process of acquiring and exercising power.
This is the model that has been perfected, refined, and deployed with extraordinary effectiveness across the entire arc of his political career. He did not invent godfatherism in Nigerian politics, and it would be unfair to suggest otherwise. But he has practiced it at a scale, with a sophistication, and with a degree of institutional embedding that sets him apart from the ordinary political patron. Kwankwasiyya is not simply a network of political supporters. It is a parallel governance structure, a shadow administration that has, for years, operated alongside whatever formal government happened to be in power in Kano, always with the understanding that the real decisions, the real appointments, the real directions of policy would be filtered through one man’s judgment and one man’s calculations.
The most instructive way to appreciate the depth of this ownership model is to examine what happened each time a political associate of Kwankwaso dared to exercise the kind of independent judgment that democracy not only permits but actively demands. The case of Governor Abdullahi Ganduje is the first and perhaps most telling exhibit. Ganduje was Kwankwaso’s deputy governor, his chosen running mate, and eventually his personally endorsed successor. He was, by every public indication, a Kwankwasiyya man to the core. When he won the governorship and proceeded to govern Kano as an elected official accountable to Kano’s people rather than as a Kwankwasiyya proxy accountable to its founder, the consequences were swift, bitter, and enormously damaging to Kano’s political stability. war enraged. The two men, former partners and political brothers, became bitter enemies whose conflict consumed years of Kano’s political energy, distorted the state’s governance, and created divisions whose effects are still visible in the state’s political landscape today.
Now, with a precision that suggests not merely repetition but pathology, the same drama is performing itself with Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf. Abba was Kwankwaso’s political son in the most complete sense of that phrase. He rose through the Kwankwasiyya structure, received the movement’s full organizational support in the 2023 governorship election, and arrived in office as the standard bearer of a movement that had just achieved its most significant electoral victory in years. By the Kwankwasiyya ownership model, Abba was supposed to govern as an instrument of the movement’s will, making appointments that the movement approved, pursuing policies that the movement sanctioned, and maintaining, above all, the fiction that the man in Government House in Kano was the governor while the man who really governed Kano lived elsewhere and wore a red cap.
Abba refused. And in refusing, he did something that deserves to be named clearly and celebrated without reservation: he honored the democratic mandate that the people of Kano had given him. The people of Kano did not vote for Kwankwasiyya’s agenda on the ballot paper they cast in 2023. They voted for Abba Kabir Yusuf. They did not elect a movement to govern them. They elected a man. And that man, exercising the authority that democratic election confers, made decisions that his judgment and his reading of Kano’s interests demanded, including the strategically essential decision to align his government with the federal administration in order to ensure that Kano’s development was not held hostage to one man’s unresolved political grievances.
Kwankwaso’s response to this exercise of democratic independence has been to cry betrayal, to mobilize his movement’s considerable media machinery against the government, and to position himself as a martyr of political ingratitude. But let us be precise about what he is actually saying when he uses the language of betrayal in this context. He is saying that an elected governor who makes decisions without his approval has broken faith with him. He is saying that the democratic mandate of millions of Kano voters is subordinate to his personal expectations. He is saying, with a candor that his language barely conceals, that he considers the governorship of Kano to be, in some meaningful sense, his property, and that its occupant’s primary obligation is not to the electorate but to the man who arranged for his installation. This is not a democratic position. It is the position of a feudal lord who has temporarily misplaced his deed of ownership and wants it returned.
The scholarship program, so frequently invoked as the centerpiece of Kwankwaso’s benevolence, must also be examined in this context of ownership and obligation. It is a program of genuine educational impact, and that impact must be acknowledged. But it was also, by the testimony of its own structure and its own cultural expectations, a mechanism for creating politically indebted citizens. Young men who received Kwankwaso’s scholarships understood, without being told explicitly, that their education came with a political price tag attached. They were expected to be Kwankwasiyya soldiers, to wear the red cap, to attend the rallies, to defend the movement on social media, and to vote, organize, and mobilize as the movement directed. The scholarship was real. The debt it created was equally real. And a democracy in which citizens are politically indebted to a patron for their education is not a functioning democracy. It is a patronage system wearing democracy’s clothing.
There is a further dimension to this ownership model that deserves careful attention, and that is its impact on the quality of governance that Kano has received across the years of Kwankwasiyya’s dominance. When a governor knows that his political survival depends not on satisfying his electorate but on satisfying his godfather, his incentives are fundamentally distorted. He makes appointments that the godfather approves rather than appointments that competence recommends. He pursues policies that maintain the movement’s patronage networks rather than policies that address the state’s developmental needs. He manages information to protect the movement’s image rather than managing resources to improve the people’s lives. The distortion is systematic, and its costs, while difficult to quantify in any single instance, accumulate across years of governance into a development deficit of enormous proportions. Kano’s persistent structural challenges, its unemployment crisis, its struggling industrial base, its dependence on federal allocations, these are not merely the products of bad luck or difficult circumstances. They are, in significant part, the products of a governance model that has been answerable to the wrong principal for far too long.
It is worth pausing here to consider what genuine political mentorship, as opposed to godfatherism, actually looks like. A true political mentor invests in the development of younger leaders because he believes that stronger leaders produce better governance for the people he loves. He gives his mentees the tools, the networks, and the confidence to govern independently and excellently. He celebrates their independence as evidence that his investment has matured. He measures his own legacy not by how many proxies he controls but by how many excellent leaders he has released into public service. By every one of these measures, Kwankwaso’s relationship with his political sons fails the test comprehensively. He has not produced independent leaders. He has produced dependents, and when they outgrow their dependence, he has declared war on them. The pattern is too consistent, too repetitive, and too damaging to be explained as personal disappointment. It is the structural consequence of a political philosophy that was always about ownership rather than mentorship.
The people of Kano have a right, a democratic and a moral right, to a government that is accountable to them and only to them. They have a right to a governor whose first, last, and only political obligation is to the mandate they granted him at the ballot box. They have a right to a political culture in which their votes are the ultimate source of political authority, not a preliminary ceremony that a godfather subsequently ratifies or overrides according to his own judgment. Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf’s refusal to govern as Kwankwaso’s proxy is not a betrayal of democracy. It is democracy’s vindication. It is the system working precisely as its architects intended, returning authority to the people by insisting that their elected representative answers to them and not to the man who helped elect him.
Kwankwaso has spent decades building a movement and decades mistaking that movement for a mandate. He has confused organizational power with democratic legitimacy, confusing the ability to mobilize crowds with the right to govern through proxies, confusing the gratitude of scholarship beneficiaries with the sovereign consent of an electorate. These are not small confusions. They are the fundamental errors of a man who has been at the center of Nigerian democracy long enough to know better, and who has chosen, repeatedly and consequentially, not to.
Nigeria’s democracy is young, imperfect, and perpetually under pressure from precisely the forces that Kwankwaso represents: the forces that would reduce elections to expensive ceremonies legitimizing predetermined outcomes, that would convert public office into private property, and that would transform the people’s sovereign authority into a godfather’s personal asset. Every time a governor like Abba Kabir Yusuf insists on governing for his people rather than for his patron, he pushes back against those forces. Every time Kwankwaso responds to that insistence with outrage and accusations of betrayal, he reveals, with an honesty that his political communications never intend, exactly what he believed he owned and exactly why he was always wrong to believe it.
Kano does not belong to Kwankwaso. It never did. And the sooner his political calculations are made to reckon with that elementary democratic truth, the sooner the state can complete the transition from a political culture of patronage and ownership to one of accountability and genuine service. That transition is already underway. Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf, by the simple act of governing for the people who elected him, has done more to advance it than any political speech or manifesto could have achieved. That is not betrayal. That is, at long last, democracy beginning to mean what it was always supposed to mean in Kano.

By Abba Anwar

As National Convention for the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) kickstarts at the famous Eagle Square, Abuja, in the presence of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, all APC who is who in the country, as well as all delegates from across all the 36 states of the federation, including federal capital territory, Abuja, it was designed that the Deputy Senate President, Barau I Jibrin, CFR, would be amongst the very few, who were selected to move motions for party operations, administration and continuity, during the convention.

The motions moved by big shots like, His Excellency, the Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, GCON and the Right Honorable Speaker, House of Representatives, Tajuddeen Abbas, GCON, ranging from the dissolution of the current national leadership of the party to many other issues surrounding the administrative continuity of the party and so on and so forth.

Under this great recognition and assigned national responsibility, His Excellency Deputy Senate President, was mandated to move an all-important motion for the extension of the tenure of the Caretaker Executive Committees of the party in Ekiti and Osun states.

Our Distinguished Senator, started with the lovely self-introduction, stating and being proud of his root, with passion and feeling of greatness, he said, “My name is Barau I. Jibrin, the member of APC, in Kabo ward in Kabo local government area of Kano state.” With all sense of humility and root-first approach.

The substance of his brief motion statement, hinted to all, how deeply rooted he is in democracy and democratization process. The wordings illuminated, to many, his clear and valued understanding of the ruling party, the APC and its organizational capability within the context of party continuity, at all levels.

He said, “My motion is as follows : I move this motion of urgent administrative and organizational necessity, concerning the leadership structure of our party in Ekiti and Osun states.

The party now operates through duly constituted Caretaker Executive Committees, at the wards, local governments and state levels, in both Ekiti and Osun states. The tenure of the Committees are due to expire at the end of March, 2026.”

“The Caretaker Committees are within the period of their mandate of maintaining party structure, ensuring operational continuity and stabilizing party affairs in the affected states,” he highlighted.

To tell you that, our dear DSP fully understands the workings and demands of politics and political operations, he stated reasons, as to why the call for the extension of the tenure of the caretaker committees became necessary, he clarified that, “Ongoing development in Ekiti and Osun states, particularly the heightened and tensed environment for the forthcoming gubernatorial elections have created conditions that are presently not conducive for the peaceful and orderly conduct of the wards, local governments and state congresses in the affected states.”

He further maintained the grip of the political realities in those states when he highlighted that, “It is expedient in the overall interest of the party to extend the tenure of the caretaker committees to allow for proper coordination, consolidation and preparation for the conduct of the congresses.”

He cited the provision of the APC Constitution, Article 13(1), which gives that mandate and power for the action.

His motion(s) was four-in-one, unlike other motions moved by other movers. This could be seen when he said, “I hereby move that, this National Convention (i) approve the extension of the tenure of the Caretaker Executive Committees of wards, local governments and states in Ekiti and Osun states, (ii) the said extension shall be for the period of 6 months, commencing from the expiration of their current tenure at the end of the March, 2026, uptill the end of September, 2026, (iii) mandate the relevant organs of the party to utilize the period of their extension to conclude all necessary arrangements for the conduct of wards, local governments and state congresses and (iv) enjoy all members of the party to cooperate with the caretaker committees. This motion is moved in the interest of party unity, administrative continuity and orderly conduct of party process.”

Being one of the critical stakeholders of the ruling party in the country, DSP’s national outings are waxing stronger day in day out. The composure, dexterity and depth in his speech, say a lot as a Distinguished Senator, who believes in democracy and democratic principles. The speech was with all vigor and substance of deeper understanding of party politics.

Kudos to His Excellency, the Deputy Senate President, our pride our focus!

Anwar writes from Kano
Friday, 27th March, 2026

By: Amir Abdulazeez

Several decades into the global modern era, Africans, Asians and Latin Americans are continued to be held hostage by their colonially indoctrinated inferior mindsets engineered by the blackmail and mythology of western moral supremacy. This error is not in observing western virtues; many of which are real. The error is in the uncritical veneration that renders their vices invisible and their judgements unchallengeable. It is evident from the events of the last three decades alone, that the so-called saner climes of Western Europe and North America are the primary architects of global chaos and instability of nations, all in the name of injecting sanity into ‘less sane’ societies.

The ongoing US-Israel war on Iran, launched in the midst of Ramadan is a typical doctrine of the saner climes, exhibited in its most naked form. Iran’s Foreign Minister had three days before the war declared that a nuclear agreement was ‘within reach’, after a third round of indirect talks had taken place in Geneva. The IAEA itself confirmed there was no evidence of a structured Iranian nuclear weapons programme at the time of the attack. Yet, the surprise assault assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, killed his family members and damaged schools, hospitals and even UNESCO-recognized cultural heritage sites. This is a typical catalogue of barbaric war crimes for which the West has condemned others across generations.

The Donald Trump administration whose seemingly rude, dishonest and arrogant officials, has offered a menu of rationalizations and a handful conflicting justifications for the war. However, when Amnesty International confirmed that the United States was responsible for a strike that killed at least 160 primary school girls, the US officials chose more arrogance through denials instead of remorse. In fact, the Head of the Federal Communications Commission simultaneously intimidated his own press, threatening the withdrawal of broadcast licenses of American news outlets whose war coverage he deemed unfavourable. Another trademark saner-climes mythology, muzzled in a way only a few non-saner climes can imagine.

Meanwhile, in all these, it is the ‘lunatic’ Iran that is supposed to apologize and do nothing while it is been attacked. The Iranian Regime, branded autocrats on the premise that it compels women to cover their hairs in public are being lectured by leaders of societies whose women go out naked in the name of civilization and whose governments topple, kill and abduct Heads of States of other countries for recklessly greedy reasons. Now imagine if the erratically behaving Donald Trump was the leader of any African Country, the West would’ve since declared him incoherent and unstable to deal with or labelled his citizens stupid for voting him. Worse still, imagine if the Epstein scandal happened in Asia or Latin America. All these contradictions reveal with crystal clarity that Western principles are instruments of convenience.

To understand the foundations to all these, let us revisit some history. Britain’s Industrial Revolution was fertilised by the profits of the transatlantic slave trade and the systematic plunder of India, a country whose share of global GDP fell from about 25% at the onset of colonial rule to barely 4% at independence. France financed much of its republican grandeur on the forced labour of West Africa and the Caribbean. Belgium’s King Leopold II transformed the Congo into a private abattoir, severing the hands of Africans who failed to meet rubber quotas, leaving behind a traumatized country that still bleeds today. To speak of the sanity of these climes without acknowledging that they were partly built from organised insanity inflicted elsewhere is to ignore the background to what we are witnessing today.

In the last fifty years alone, the so-called saner climes have unleashed a level of violence and destabilisation that would shame any regime they have ever deemed fit to condemn. The United States, the self-acclaimed sentinel of the free world, has engineered irrational regime changes in Chile (1973), Iran (1953 and subsequently), Guatemala (1954), Nicaragua, Panama, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, among others. The 1973 CIA-backed coup against a democratically elected socialist president of Chile Salvador Allende, installed Augusto Pinochet, under whose reign thousands were tortured, disappeared, or executed. Henry Kissinger, the American architect of that atrocity, received the Nobel Peace Prize from his fellow saner clime comrades. The French Government, through its notorious Françafrique policy, maintained a neocolonial empire across West and Central Africa long after the 1960s, propping up murderous dictators and conducting military interventions to protect economic interests, with a consistency that made a mockery of every democratic principle France professed to uphold.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 by Western Governments is perhaps the most consequential act of manufactured catastrophe of the modern era. The war resulted in the deaths of an estimated 200,000 to one million Iraqi civilians, the obliteration of the country’s infrastructure, the rise of ISIS from the ashes of a disbanded Iraqi army and the triggering of a refugee crisis that continues to destabilise the Middle East. No one was held accountable. George W. Bush and Tony Blair are living happy lives in their saner countries. The International Criminal Court, which has indicted multiple African heads of state on much lesser crimes with considerable alacrity, found no jurisdiction to examine any of them. Meanwhile, the people of Iraq, Syria and Libya who were dismantled in the name of liberation still live in the ruins and pains of what the saner climes call democracy.

While the West was busy bombing the Middle East, Africa, the so-called backward continent, was largely attending to its own affairs of conflict resolution with a remarkable degree of maturity. The African Union mediated crises in Burundi, the Gambia and Lesotho without firing a single bullet. ECOWAS brokered peace agreements in Sierra Leone and Liberia, deployed peacekeeping forces with genuine multilateral mandates without the casual trigger-happiness of Western powers.

Western attitude towards violence is shamelessly selective. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Saner Clime’s response was swift, comprehensive and morally unambiguous: sanctions, weapons, diplomatic isolation and a media chorus of civilizational solidarity. This response was appropriate anyway. But the problem is its stark contrast with the Western posture toward other invasions. When Saudi Arabia launched its war on Yemen in 2015, the United States and the United Kingdom did not merely decline to intervene; they allegedly supplied the bombs, refuelled the warplanes and provided intelligence for strikes that killed thousands of Yemeni civilians and engineered one of the worst humanitarian crises on earth.

Many argue that the actions of Western Governments isn’t a true reflection of what their citizens stand for. This is debatable especially when one examines certain incidences. During the Obama presidency, Edward Snowden revealed that the US National Security Agency was conducting mass, warrantless surveillance of American citizens and foreign governments, including the personal telephone of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel in flagrant violation of constitutional protections and international diplomatic norms. The response was not accountability but exile for Snowden and a classification of his revelations as treason. The United States, has the largest prison population on earth both in absolute numbers and per capita administered under a system in which Black Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of their white counterparts, in conditions that the United Nations has described as cruel. Since 1968, gun violence has claimed more American lives than all of America’s foreign wars combined. One can certainlybe inclined to believe that these are controversies that ordinary western citizens may not approve of.

Climate change is another damning indictment of Western moral authority in the twenty-first century. The Industrial activities enriching Europe and North America still depends on burning carbon at a scale the planet had never experienced. The United States, historically the world’s largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases, withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement under Donald Trump. Australia, another clime reputed to be considerably saner than most, has built its prosperity on coal exports and resisted meaningful emissions reduction. Some Pacific Island nations face sea submersions within this century as a consequence of decisions made in saner capitals. When these nations’ leaders speak at the United Nations with tears in their voices, the saner climes offer symbolic but empty sympathy before later returning to preserving their industrial prerogatives.

The Western Media’s tactical twisting of narratives regarding other climes is another issue. For example, CNN may not run primetime documentaries on the Swiss banking system’s complicity in laundering the proceeds of African kleptocracy, but will rather concentrate on the primary kleptocrats. The BBC does not lead with investigations into the role of British arms dealers in sustaining African conflicts. The New York Times does not dedicate its front page to the tax avoidance schemes through which Western corporations drain billions of dollars annually from African economies (more than the continent receives in foreign aid).

Beside all these, there is something more worrisome. The bulk of support received by these saner climes come from their victims in the third world. In Nigeria for instance, the blind sympathy for religious affiliations drives people to support the brazen oppression and cruel injustices perpetrated by the West. Our solidarities should be among ourselves, not with those who see and treat us as worthless humans and more like animals because of their superior moral hypocrisy. Additionally, our bootlicking governments who are considered close to valueless in the International arena or even insane just like us, must stop intimidating its own citizens who decide to speak up against western double standards. Let’s remember, the phrase “saner climes” is a moral verdict and a devastating condemnation of everywhere else expect Europe and North America. Africans and all peoples of the marginalised world are owed the intellectual inheritance of critical discernment.

The world does not need more or fewer saner climes; it needs a more honest accounting of what sanity actually requires. It requires consistency: the same rules applied to the powerful and the powerless alike. It requires humility: the acknowledgement that no civilisation holds a monopoly on wisdom. And it requires accountability: not the selective justice of indicting the weak and glorifying the mighty, but the universal application of standards that do not bend in the presence of a Security Council veto or the impulse of a self-serving Super power. Until that accounting arrives, the presumption of Western moral authority deserves not deference, but fearless interrogation; the kind that the so-called saner climes have always claimed to celebrate and so rarely been prepared to receive.

23-03-2026