Abdu Lawan
When the curtain of Nigerian democracy rose for the first time in 1999, after years of suffocating military rule, the people of Kano greeted the new era with the particular enthusiasm of a population that had waited long, suffered much, and hoped deeply. They had names they trusted, faces they recognized, and voices they believed would finally speak for their interests in the corridors of a civilian government. Among those voices, none rang louder, none carried further, and none was received with greater expectation than that of Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso.
Twenty-six years later, as Kano counts the true cost of the faith it placed in that voice, the accounting makes for uncomfortable reading. It is not the reading of a man who failed Kano all at once, in some single spectacular collapse of integrity. It is the reading of a man who failed Kano gradually, consistently, and in ways that were always carefully dressed in the language of love and service.
Kwankwaso’s first term as governor, which ran from 1999 to 2003, established the template that would define every subsequent phase of his political career. He built things. He commissioned projects. He inaugurated roads and public buildings with the theatrical flair of a man who understood, with considerable instinct, that visibility is the most politically valuable currency in Nigeria’s democratic marketplace. And the people of Kano, starved of visible governance after years of military administration, received these deliveries with gratitude that was genuine and deserved. Roads that were built deserved to be celebrated. Schools that were rehabilitated deserved acknowledgment. But even in those early years, for those willing to look past the ribbon-cutting ceremonies and the flattering press coverage, there were signs that the deeper questions of Kano’s future were receiving considerably less attention than the politically convenient ones.
Kano in 1999 was a state at an economic crossroads. Its once-magnificent manufacturing and trading economy, built over centuries of trans-Saharan commerce and accelerated by the groundnut pyramid era, had been hollowing out for decades. The industries that had made Kano the undisputed commercial capital of Northern Nigeria were dying, slowly but unmistakably, under the combined pressures of policy neglect, infrastructure failure, and the broader economic mismanagement of the military years. A governor with a genuine developmental vision, one whose eyes were fixed on Kano’s future rather than his own political calculations, would have recognized this crisis for what it was and devoted the full weight of his administration’s energy to reversing it. Kwankwaso built roads. The roads were necessary. But roads alone do not rebuild an industrial economy, and an industrial economy was precisely what Kano needed most.
His first term ended in defeat in 2003, when Ibrahim Shekarau defeated him at the polls. Political commentators have often noted that this defeat, painful as it was, paradoxically served Kwankwaso well by giving him the opposition experience that sharpened his political skills and deepened his grassroots organization.
This is true, as far as it goes. What is less frequently noted is what the period of his absence from the governorship revealed about the nature of what he had built. A genuinely transformative administration leaves behind institutions, systems, and development trajectories that outlast the individual governor. What Kano found, in the years following Kwankwaso’s first term, was that much of what he had built was more personal than institutional, more his than Kano’s, more a monument to his political brand than a foundation for the state’s sustained development. The roads remained. The deeper structural challenges remained as well, largely untouched.
When Kwankwaso returned to the governorship in 2011, he came back with greater organization, deeper popular support, and, one might have hoped, a clearer sense of the scale of Kano’s unfinished developmental business. His second term from 2011 to 2015 produced more infrastructure, more scholarships, more of the visible, photographable, celebratable outputs that his political brand had been built upon. And yet, measured against the actual developmental needs of a state whose population was growing rapidly, whose youth unemployment was devastating, whose industrial base continued its long retreat, and whose dependence on federal allocations remained structurally unchanged, the second term’s achievements, however real in their own terms, were insufficient to the scale of the challenge. Kano needed transformation. It received renovation. There is a difference, and that difference matters enormously when you are trying to understand why, after two full terms of Kwankwaso’s governance, Kano’s fundamental economic vulnerabilities remained essentially intact.
But the failures of governance, significant as they are, do not constitute the full indictment. What makes Kwankwaso the original betrayer of Kano is not merely what he failed to build during his years in office. It is what he actively destroyed, disrupted, and destabilized in the years that followed, when his personal ambitions demanded that Kano’s political stability be subordinated to his national calculations.
Consider the Kano Emirate, that ancient and revered institution around which the cultural identity, social cohesion, and moral authority of Kano have been organized for generations. The crisis that engulfed it, culminating in the deeply controversial removal of Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II, did not emerge from a neutral political environment. It emerged from a political environment that Kwankwaso’s rivalries, his maneuverings, and the toxic combination of his personal ambitions and his godfather instincts had helped to create and sustain. The emirate crisis divided Kano along lines that cut deeper than ordinary political disagreement. It wounded the state’s sense of itself, damaged its image nationally and internationally, and created social fractures whose full cost is difficult to quantify but impossible to deny. This is what Kwankwaso’s political legacy includes, alongside the roads and the scholarships, the destabilization of the institution that Kano people hold most sacred.
Consider also the godfather system that he constructed with such deliberate care over the years of his political dominance. The Kwankwasiyya movement, whatever its genuine achievements in political organization and scholarship provision, was never designed primarily as a vehicle for Kano’s development. It was designed as a vehicle for Kwankwaso’s political survival and advancement. Its structures, its loyalties, its resources, and its considerable organizational energy were all ultimately answerable to one man and one man’s calculations. In a healthy democracy, political movements exist to give citizens a collective voice. In Kwankwaso’s model, the movement existed to amplify one voice and to ensure that all other voices, however legitimate, however representative, remained subordinate to it. This is not democracy. It is the simulation of democracy, and it has cost Kano dearly in terms of the genuine political pluralism and competitive governance that might have produced better outcomes for ordinary citizens.
The scholarship program, which his supporters cite most frequently as the crown jewel of his legacy, deserves particular examination in this context. Let it be stated clearly: the scholarships changed lives. Thousands of young Kano men received educational opportunities that would otherwise have been beyond their reach, and that is a genuine and lasting good. But the program was never purely philanthropic. It was designed, with considerable political intelligence, as a loyalty-creation mechanism of extraordinary effectiveness. Beneficiaries understood, with the clarity that comes from living inside a patronage system, that their education came with expectations attached, that the movement that paid for their degrees expected the investment to be repaid in political service, in mobilization, in the kind of unconditional loyalty that a leader cultivates not because he loves his followers but because he needs them. To build a political movement on the foundations of young men’s gratitude for their own education is not generosity.
It is a particularly sophisticated form of political debt bondage, and Kano has been living with its consequences for years.
Since 2015, when he departed the governorship for the Senate and the national stage, Kwankwaso’s relationship with Kano has been defined by a single overwhelming priority, which is his determination to use the state’s political weight in service of his presidential ambitions. He moved his followers from the PDP to the APC when that suited him.
He moved them again from the APC to the NNPP when that suited him better. Each move imposed costs on the people who followed him, costs in terms of disrupted political careers, broken alliances, wasted organizational investments, and the cumulative erosion of Kano’s political coherence that comes from being led by a man who treats the state as a chess piece rather than a home.
The 2023 election cycle brought this pattern to its logical and most damaging conclusion. Having installed Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf on the NNPP platform, Kwankwaso found himself governing Kano by proxy from a position of federal opposition, a position that guaranteed, as surely as political gravity operates, that the state would struggle to access the federal resources and partnerships that its development required. When Governor Abba made the strategic decision to correct this positioning by aligning with the federal government, Kwankwaso reacted not as a statesman who understood the governor’s developmental reasoning, but as a godfather whose control had been challenged. The narrative of betrayal that his movement has since promoted is, at its core, the reaction of a man who confused his political ownership of a process with the people’s democratic ownership of their government.
Twenty-six years is a long time to wait for a politician to deliver on the full promise of his potential. Kano has waited with extraordinary patience, has celebrated Kwankwaso’s genuine achievements with genuine enthusiasm, and has absorbed the costs of his failures and his ambitions with a resilience that speaks well of its people if not of the leader who imposed those costs upon them. But patience is not a permanent condition, and the people of Kano are arriving, with the quiet certainty of a population that has finally done its accounting, at a conclusion that the evidence has been building toward for years.
Kwankwaso did not fail Kano in a single moment of weakness or a single act of betrayal. He failed it across a generation, in the accumulated weight of presidential ambitions placed above developmental priorities, of godfather instincts placed above democratic principles, of personal pride placed above the state’s peace and stability. He is not a villain in the cartoonish sense. He is something more complicated and, in political terms, more dangerous: a talented man whose love for power has always been fractionally stronger than his love for the people he claims to serve. That fractional difference, sustained across twenty-six years, has cost Kano more than any single act of corruption or incompetence could have.
The original betrayer is not the governor who chose Kano’s development over Kwankwaso’s ego. The original betrayer is the man who, since 1999, has asked Kano to love him unconditionally while reserving the right to love himself just a little bit more. Kano has finally begun to notice. And that noticing, long overdue and now impossible to reverse, is perhaps the most consequential political development in the state’s recent history.
