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Kano at the Heart of Nigeria’s Innovation Revolution: Why Sub-National Resource Mapping Matters Now

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3 months ago

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Kano state Map of Nigeria

 

By Najeeb Nasir Ibrahim DG, Unifier Project 19 April 2026

There is a moment in the life of every great city when history and opportunity arrive at the same address, at the same time, and demand an answer. For Kano, that moment is April 23, 2026. On that day, Her Excellency Senator Oluremi Tinubu, CON, First Lady of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, will stand in the commercial heartbeat of Northern Nigeria to flag off the Energise Commercialisation Now initiative, a federal programme that carries within it the most ambitious and consequential blueprint for decentralised industrial transformation that this country has attempted in a generation.
For decades, Nigeria’s development architecture has been built on a fundamentally flawed assumption: that economic transformation can be designed, directed, and delivered exclusively from the federal centre. The result of that assumption is visible in every part of the country. Universities full of brilliant graduates producing research that never leaves the laboratory. Agricultural communities harvesting commodities that travel hundreds of kilometres to be processed elsewhere, returning as finished goods at prices that bear no relationship to the value that local hands created. Industrial estates, once productive and purposeful, standing as monuments to the gap between policy intention and economic reality.
Nigeria is not a poor country. It is a country that has consistently failed to convert its wealth into wellbeing, its potential into production, and its knowledge into commercial power. The distance between what Nigeria has and what Nigeria does with what it has is the central economic problem of our time. And the answer to that problem, as the Energise Commercialisation Now initiative correctly identifies, does not lie in Abuja alone. It lies in Kano, in Kaduna, in Sokoto, in Kebbi, in Jigawa, in Katsina, and in Zamfara. It lies in the 774 local government areas of this federation, where the real economic activity of 220 million people actually happens.
The concept of sub-national economic and resource mapping sits at the intellectual core of the ECoN initiative, and it deserves a more precise explanation than it typically receives in policy documents and press releases.
Resource mapping, in this context, is not simply a geological survey or an agricultural inventory. It is a comprehensive strategic framework designed to identify, organise, and connect every category of productive asset within a state or local government area, including indigenous technologies developed in informal workshops, academic research sitting unpublished in university repositories, skilled human capital that has never been matched to an appropriate industry, natural endowments that have never been processed beyond their raw state, and entrepreneurial energy that has never been channelled into structured enterprise.
The goal is to create what the Federal Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology describes as a National Innovation Asset Register, an integrated, living database that maps local strengths against national industrial priorities and identifies the specific interventions, whether financing, technology transfer, standards certification, or market access, required to convert each asset from potential into production.
For a state like Kano, whose economic assets span ancient leather craft traditions, a dense network of small and medium enterprises across 44 local government areas, three major universities conducting active research, a N1.477 trillion state budget with 68 percent allocated to capital projects, and an agricultural hinterland producing groundnuts, sorghum, millet, and cowpea across millions of hectares, the creation of such a register is not an administrative exercise. It is an economic revolution in its earliest and most critical stage.
Kano does not come to this conversation as a passive participant or a grateful recipient of federal attention. It comes as a city with a 500-year commercial pedigree, a proven capacity for enterprise, and a state government that has already been doing the foundational work that makes innovation-driven industrialisation possible.
Consider the evidence. Under Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf’s administration, Kano ranked first in Nigeria’s 2025 NECO results, a milestone that signals a transformation in the quality of human capital the state is producing for its economy. The administration has recruited 400 Mathematics teachers, established Kano State Polytechnic in Gaya to expand technical and vocational education in the state’s southern corridor, and invested N405.3 billion in education within its 2026 budget alone. It has planted over 5.5 million trees under its Climate Change Policy, approved 11 mini-dams to support year-round agricultural production, and procured 199,000 bags of fertiliser for distribution to farmers. It has cleared N32 billion in pension backlogs, trained 2,000 Neighbourhood Watch operatives for community security, and disbursed over N334 million directly to 6,680 women entrepreneurs across all 44 local government areas.
These are not disconnected welfare gestures. They are the deliberate construction of an enabling environment for exactly the kind of innovation-driven industrialisation that ECoN is designed to accelerate. A sub-national resource mapping exercise arriving in a state with functional schools, improved security, empowered women entrepreneurs, and a government committed to agricultural productivity is a mapping exercise that will find real assets, not empty promises.
One of the most economically consequential arguments embedded in the ECoN framework is its emphasis on regional value addition, and it is an argument that Kano’s history makes more powerfully than any policy document can.
For generations, the economic tragedy of Northern Nigeria has been the export of raw materials and the import of finished goods. Kano’s groundnut farmers have watched their harvest leave the state as unprocessed commodity and return as refined oil at prices that enrich processors elsewhere. Its leather craftsmen have seen raw hides travel to tanneries in other cities and come back as finished goods that command international prices the original producers never see. Its cotton farmers have supplied raw fibre to textile mills that, when they were still operating, captured the majority of the value chain’s economic benefit.
The ECoN framework’s insistence on processing and manufacturing at the source represents a direct challenge to that extractive economic model. By connecting Kano’s raw material producers with the technologies, the financing, and the market linkages required to process their outputs locally, the programme creates the conditions for a fundamental redistribution of economic value within the North West. More jobs created locally. More revenue retained within the state. More enterprises built around Kano’s natural and agricultural endowments. More young people employed in productive industries rather than idle in urban centres.
The ripple effects of that redistribution, sustained over a period of years, are the difference between a city that hosts commerce and a city that drives it.
The ECoN initiative’s ambition does not stop at the borders of the North West. One of its explicitly stated objectives is to prepare Nigerian innovators, startups, and SMEs for international trade platforms, including the Intra-African Trade Fair scheduled for 2027. That objective places Kano’s entrepreneurs, quite literally, on a pathway to continental and global markets.
The African Continental Free Trade Area, which came into force in 2021 and represents a combined market of 1.3 billion people and a GDP of approximately three trillion dollars, remains, for most Nigerian SMEs, an abstract aspiration rather than a practical opportunity. The gap between aspiration and opportunity is filled by exactly the kind of structured support that ECoN provides: standards certification, intellectual property protection, export readiness training, investment facilitation, and access to the institutional networks that make international trade possible for enterprises that would otherwise navigate it alone.
For Kano, whose merchants have been trading across international boundaries for five centuries, the prospect of reconnecting that commercial tradition to a structured, government-backed, and internationally recognised framework for African trade is not merely exciting. It is historically resonant.
It would be intellectually dishonest to discuss Kano’s hosting of the ECoN national launch without acknowledging the political context that made it possible. Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf’s decision to align Kano State with the Federal Government under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was, and remains, a subject of vigorous political debate. But beneath the political noise lies a developmental logic that this moment validates with striking clarity.
A state in productive alignment with the federal centre is a state that can nominate its priority innovations for national programmes, mobilise its stakeholders for federal platforms, host engagements that connect its entrepreneurs to national and international investors, and position its industrial clusters for the federal attention and investment that can reverse decades of decline. That is precisely what Kano is doing on April 23. And the people who will benefit most from it are not politicians. They are the innovator in Fagge, the female entrepreneur in Nasarawa, the agricultural processor in Gezawa, and the young graduate in Ungogo who has spent years waiting for a structured opportunity to match his talent.
What Kano is demonstrating, through the hosting of this initiative, is something that every state government in Nigeria needs to study and internalise: that the future of Nigeria’s prosperity is not a centralised project. It is a distributed one. It is built state by state, local government by local government, enterprise by enterprise, and innovation by innovation. The federal government can provide the framework, the financing, and the convening power. But the actual work of converting Nigeria’s extraordinary natural and human endowments into commercial and industrial wealth must happen at the sub-national level, driven by state governments with the vision, the capacity, and the political will to lead.
Kano has that vision. It has demonstrated that capacity. And under Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf, it is exercising that political will with a consistency and a purposefulness that is already producing measurable results.
Nigeria’s innovation revolution will not be won in a single federal ministry or announced in a single presidential executive order. It will be won in the markets of Kano, the workshops of Aba, the farms of Benue, the fishing communities of Bayelsa, and the technology hubs of Lagos. It will be won by the collective energy of a nation that has finally, through initiatives like ECoN, begun to recognise and systematically harness the extraordinary economic intelligence embedded within its states and local communities.
Kano’s moment is here. And if properly harnessed, with the state government’s commitment to enabling infrastructure, human capital investment, and federal partnership providing the foundation, this moment will not be remembered merely as a successful event. It will be remembered as the day Kano reclaimed its place at the centre of Nigeria’s economic story, and began writing the next chapter with the confidence, the competence, and the conviction that the chapter deserves.

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Kano Governor Yusuf Shortlisted for Africa’s SANKOFA Award of Excellence in Infrastructural Development

Published

1 week ago

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July 25, 2026

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By Abba Anwar

Kano State Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf makes a list of potential Awardees across West African sub-region, observed and screened by an African association named Réseau des Jeunes du Sahel pour le Progrès, le Développement et la Démocratie (Network of Sahel Youth for Progress, Development and Democracy), on infrastructural development in their respective states.

The top most Award from the association, called Sankofa Award of Excellence across various sectors, is given to people or leaders who excel in their respective areas of work or responsibilities.

With the recent disclosure made by the Commissioner of Public Procurement, Projects Monitoring and Evaluation, Nura Ma’aji Sumaila, on the state of infrastructural development and payments of contracts in the state, the association included Kano to be part of the states across Nigeria and West African countries, screened for an Award of Excellence.

Source close to the association reveals that, Governor Yusuf’s achievements in the area of infrastructural development, could not be neglected and the Governor stands a better position to be seen and amplified across the globe. As a result of his commitment and service to humanity.

Parts of the major reasons that informed the association’s decision to include Governor Yusuf for Sankofa Award of Excellence for Infrastructural Development in West Africa is his genuine inclusion of infrastructures that are human centred, modern, location specified and standardization process and procedures.

According to the source, the Screening Committee saddled with the responsibility of selecting qualified personalities across West Africa are in their final stage of releasing the result. Assuring that, under infrastructural development, Kano excels. Though not officially announced.

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When Governor Yusuf gets this Award, he will be the second person from Nigeria who bags the Award. Last year the Deputy Senate President Barau I Jibrin, PhD, CFR, got the SANKOFA Award for Legislative Excellence in Africa. Coincidentally, Governor Yusuf who is also from Kano state, would be the second Nigerian in this category.

The President of the association Mr Fassoko Doumbia, from Mali, confirmed to my source that, from all indication, “Kano State Governor, from Nigeria, Mr Abba Kabir Yusuf is in the forefront of those screened for the Award.”

With this recognition of excellence, the Award places Governor Yusuf to be one of the best Nigerian governors. And the best across West Africa on infrastructural development. One good thing about the Award is, it will as well serve as an engine oil for state commitment and unwavering service delivery.

Mr Doumbia reveals further that “… it is amazing looking at the unmatched number of completed and ongoing projects as Kano has 799 completed projects and 709 projects at various stages of completion. It is encouraging to see that Governor Yusuf is executing over 1,508 developmental projects across all 44 LGAs.”

What keeps hope and commitment alive are the transparent monitoring, evaluation and effective payment to contractors. Of which out of N928 Billion of the total contract sum, the state has already paid over N600 Billion, that’s 64.7% payment rate.
Unlike in many states in Nigeria and West Africa. The association believes that Kano institutionalized transparency through the Ministry of Public Procurement, Projects Monitoring and Evaluation.

The screening committee appreciated Kano’s strategic and balanced infrastructure spread, between urban and rural areas plus improved security. For urban renewal it has the sum of N169 Billion. While there are 5km roads in 38 LGAs with the sum of N118 Billion. They appreciated the rural infrastructure across 44 LGAs with the sum of N397 Billion for roads, education, healthcare, and social services.

While under security infrastructure the total sum of N6.863 Billion for Neighborhood Security Watch offices in 36 LGAs. This assured deliberate, balanced development with value for money, quality delivery, and measurable impact on the lives of the people. All courtesy Governor Yusuf.

It serves also as indices of how Governor Yusuf makes the list for such Award, that his infrastructures are signals for the delivery of landmark, human-centered projects as Kano completed tangible projects that directly improve lives of the citizenry, with 40 metropolitan roads, 44 PHCs, 120 schools, 5 water plants, with the ongoing Dan Agundi and Tal’udu flyovers at over 80% completion.

It has also been discovered that, Kano enjoys proven technical leadership and political will. Which glaringly displays the political will and technical competence required to drive massive infrastructure without corruption or delays. This is part of the major engagements being identified, which eventually resulted into the popular Sankofa Award of Excellence.

Anwar writes from Kano
Saturday, 25th July, 2026

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Opinion

Beyond the Numbers: What the Ekiti 2026 Governorship Results Reveal About Coalition Politics and Path to 2027

Published

2 weeks ago

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July 20, 2026

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By Abass Sherifat Taiwo

Returning Officer Adenike Oladiji, a professor and Vice-Chancellor of the Federal University of Technology, announced the results in the early hours of Sunday, at roughly 3:13 a.m. Incumbent Governor Biodun Oyebanji of the APC won comfortably, polling 319,224 votes across the state’s 16 local government areas. His closest challenger, the PDP’s Oluwole Oluyede, trailed far behind with 40,543 votes, while the ADC’s Dare Bejide came in third with 12,872 votes.

Of the 384,940 voters accredited for the election, 375,777 cast valid votes, a validity rate of about 97.6%, suggesting relatively few spoiled or rejected ballots.

Oyebanji’s win carries added weight as the first consecutive re-election in Ekiti’s history, a state known for unseating incumbents since 1999. His dominance was also total: he won all sixteen LGAs, and even his closest contest, in Ikere, was still a comfortable margin. His five strongest councils alone delivered nearly half his statewide votes, showing concentrated rather than thin support.

Elite alignment mattered too. For the first time, every living former Ekiti governor backed his re-election, leaving the opposition without any prominent defectors to rally behind. This unified backing functioned as a coordinated endorsement strategy, a visible signal of consensus that opposition parties had no comparable message to counter.

Between the opposition parties, PDP’s showing is more telling than ADC’s. ADC placing third as a newer platform isn’t surprising, but PDP, a long-established national party, barely crossed 3,000 votes in most councils, pointing to weak grassroots structure rather than just a bad cycle. The deeper question is whether this reflects a structural failure or a failure to sustain visibility and message presence at the ward level between election cycles.

Party | Votes | % of Valid Votes
APC | 319,224 | 84.95%
PDP | 40,543 | 10.79%
ADC | 12,872 | 3.43%
ADP | ~1,289 | 0.34%
Accord | 564 | 0.15%
LP | ~263 | 0.07%
AAC | ~188 | 0.05%

When the vote totals of every opposition party are combined, they amount to roughly 55,719 votes, or about 14.83% of all valid votes cast, a stark contrast to the APC’s dominant 84.95% share on its own. Even in a hypothetical scenario where every opposition party ran on a single, fully united ticket, their combined total would still fall short of the APC’s by approximately 263,505 votes. This gap illustrates just how commanding Oyebanji’s victory was: it was not simply a matter of a divided opposition splitting votes among several parties, but a result that would have withstood even total opposition unity.

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Following the Ekiti result, APC framed it as proof of growing national support ahead of 2027, pointing to the rise in its vote totals in the state from about 187,000 in 2022 to roughly 318,000 in 2026, and projecting even higher numbers for Tinubu in 2027. Opposition parties, including the ADC and SDP, pushed back, arguing that Ekiti’s off-cycle, low-turnout nature makes it a poor predictor of a national contest.

Both claims need scrutiny. APC’s growth trend is real, but it happened in a state the party already governs, where incumbency and federal attention worked in its favour, so it says more about consolidating an existing stronghold than expanding into contested territory. The opposition’s caution is fair, but understates that APC’s structural advantages, incumbency and federal resources, aren’t unique to Ekiti and could repeat elsewhere. The more accurate takeaway is that Ekiti confirms APC’s strength where it already holds power, without proving it can replicate that in genuinely competitive states by 2027.

ADC’s third-place finish in Ekiti, just 3.43% of the vote, looks unremarkable on its own, but it only makes sense next to the party’s national story. A year earlier, ADC had positioned itself as the face of a new opposition coalition, pulling in heavyweight names like Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi with the promise of a unified front against the APC. That promise hasn’t held: Obi and Kwankwaso have since defected to a rival platform, the NDC, while ADC battles leadership disputes and court cases that put its own 2027 participation in doubt.

That is the real lesson here for coalition politics as a communication problem, not just a structural one. ADC did not fail for lack of big names, it had plenty. What it could not do was hold one coherent message together once multiple egos and regional bases began pulling in different directions. Whether it can still become the platform it promised by 2027 is uncertain, but Ekiti is an early sign of a bigger unraveling.

Beyond Ekiti, the result speaks to a deeper pattern in Nigerian opposition politics: alliances are far easier to announce than to sustain. This suggests APC’s greatest advantage going into the next general election may not be its own performance, but the opposition’s continued inability to stay united. The near-total validity rate and one-sided outcome in Ekiti also raise questions about how genuinely competitive Nigeria’s state elections currently are, and whether low-turnout, off-cycle polls like this one can reliably signal national voter sentiment.

The Ekiti result is less a story about Oyebanji’s popularity alone than about the opposition’s structural fragility. Even a fully united opposition ticket would not have closed the gap, which means the problem isn’t vote-splitting, it’s organisational weakness, unstable coalitions, and the absence of a party capable of matching APC’s machinery and incumbency advantages. What Nigeria’s opposition needs before 2027 isn’t just structural unity, but a coherent, disciplined communication strategy capable of sustaining one message across factions, something no coalition has yet demonstrated. Until Nigeria’s opposition can build a coalition that survives contact with real electoral pressure, results like Ekiti’s are likely to repeat themselves in APC strongholds heading into 2027.

By Abass Sherifat Taiwo
Department of Development and Strategic communication University of Abuja
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Opinion

Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf Has Earned a Vote of Confidence on Education

Published

2 weeks ago

on

July 19, 2026

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By Hon. Muhammad Sanusi S. Kiru, FCIA
(Former Commissioner of Education, Kano State)

There comes a time in public discourse when fairness must prevail over partisanship and facts must take precedence over preconceived opinions. That moment has come in my assessment of the educational reforms being implemented by the administration of His Excellency, Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf.

As a former Commissioner of Education and someone who has consistently evaluated government performance with candour, I owe the people of Kano State an honest appraisal of the Governor’s performance in the education sector. After objectively reviewing the administration’s interventions from 2024 to 2026, particularly its determined efforts to address the acute shortage of teachers, I have reached an inescapable conclusion: Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf deserves a vote of confidence for his outstanding commitment to the development of education in Kano State.

One of the greatest challenges confronting our educational system has been the persistent shortage of teachers, resulting in unfavourable teacher-pupil and teacher-student ratios across many public schools. This problem has adversely affected the quality of teaching and learning for many years.

The present administration has confronted this challenge with courage and determination. Between 2024 and 2026, the government recruited or absorbed 8,715 permanent teachers and engaged 3,688 temporary BESDA Cohort V teachers, bringing the documented total to 12,403 education personnel. With recruitments by other education agencies, the overall figure is widely estimated at approximately 13,000 teachers.

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This represents one of the largest teacher recruitment exercises in the history of Kano State. More importantly, it is a strategic investment in the future of our children and in the long-term development of the state. By substantially reducing the teacher deficit, the administration has strengthened both the basic and post-basic education subsectors and created a stronger foundation for improved educational outcomes. The new recruitment not only means making our classrooms more vibrant and ensuring that teaching is consistently taking place, but it also signifies a positive shift in the narrative reflected in monitoring reports, the annual school census, and national personnel data.

Looking at the tangible achievements now before us, particularly in education, it is clear that the administration has made significant and commendable progress. Leadership should always be judged by measurable accomplishments, and in this regard, the Governor has acquitted himself admirably.

One area where the administration must, however, improve is public communication. Many of its remarkable achievements have not received the publicity they deserve. A well-coordinated and effective publicity strategy would ensure that citizens fully appreciate the scope and impact of these landmark interventions.

As His Excellency prepares to personally attend the special ceremony for the presentation of appointment letters to the newly employed teachers on Tuesday, 21st July 2026, I consider it appropriate to congratulate him on this historic milestone. The ceremony is more than a presentation of appointment letters; it is a celebration of renewed hope for thousands of families, a reaffirmation of government’s commitment to quality education, and a significant step towards building a stronger educational system for future generations.

I wish His Excellency a successful and hitch-free ceremony and pray that Almighty Allah grants him wisdom, good health, and continued strength to sustain the ongoing transformation of the education sector. May this programme mark the beginning of even greater achievements in the quest to provide every child in Kano State with access to quality education delivered by competent and dedicated teachers.

Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf deserves sincere commendation for these giant strides. If this policy of continuous recruitment and investment in teachers is sustained, it will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the defining legacies of his administration. Future generations will look back on this period as a turning point in the educational history of Kano State.

I therefore extend my heartfelt congratulations to His Excellency and offer him a well-deserved vote of confidence. I also wish him every success as he formally presents appointment letters to these newly recruited teachers on Tuesday. May the occasion be memorable, successful, and another milestone in the march towards educational excellence in Kano State.

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