Murtala muhammed Rijiyar Zaki
Democracy, at its most essential, is 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.
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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 prioritised personal ownership over democratic accountability and godfather authority over 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 resorganisationorganization, 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 Kwankwaso has 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.
Kwankwaso declared war on him. 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.
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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.
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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 tha