Is Kwankwaso working for President Tinubu to divide the North?

The question is deliberately provocative. But after examining the former Kano governor’s political trajectory, his serial defections, his refusal to unite with fellow northerners, and his relentless pursuit of a presidential ambition that he — if he is honest with himself — knows he cannot achieve, the evidence becomes uncomfortably compelling. Whether by design or […]

The question is deliberately provocative. But after examining the former Kano governor’s political trajectory, his serial defections, his refusal to unite with fellow northerners, and his relentless pursuit of a presidential ambition that he — if he is honest with himself — knows he cannot achieve, the evidence becomes uncomfortably compelling. Whether by design or by vanity, Kwankwaso is emerging as the single most destabilising political force in Northern Nigeria, and the North may never forgive him if 2027 mirrors the fractured tragedy of 2023.

Let us recall the cold, unforgiving arithmetic of the 2023 presidential election. Bola Tinubu of the APC won with 8,794,726 votes. Atiku Abubakar of the PDP scored 6,984,520. Peter Obi of the Labour Party polled 6,101,533. And Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso of the NNPP came a distant fourth with just 1,496,687 votes — a mere 6.23 per cent of the total votes cast.

Now consider the devastating implication. The combined opposition votes totalled over 14.5 million — dwarfing Tinubu’s figure by nearly six million votes. Together, they represented 65.9 per cent of the electorate, enough to sweep the APC out of Aso Rock. Yet, because Kwankwaso refused to step aside or subordinate his ambition to a united northern coalition, Tinubu walked into the presidency.

Within the PDP itself, a party chieftain, Murtala Adamu Kimba, publicly blamed Kwankwaso and Obi’s departures — alongside the G-5 governors’ revolt — for Atiku’s defeat, lamenting that “the party failed to bring them back on board.” Kwankwaso knew his numbers. He knew he had no path to victory. He finished fourth. Yet he ran anyway. And the North paid the price.

Kwankwaso’s political history is a chronicle of serial abandonment unmatched in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. He was first elected governor of Kano in 1999 on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). After losing re-election in 2003, he returned to the PDP in 2011 and governed again until 2015. In November 2013, he staged a walkout from the PDP’s national convention alongside five other governors and defected to the freshly formed APC. But in 2018, he defected again — leaving the APC and rejoining the PDP alongside 14 APC senators. When that didn’t yield the presidency, he left the PDP once more, founding the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) ahead of the 2023 elections.

In January 2026, his political protégé, Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf, defected from the NNPP to the APC, taking with him dozens of Kwankwasiyya loyalists, all but four members of his State Executive Council, all members of the State House of Assembly, and all 44 local government chairmen. It was, by any measure, a political earthquake — his own godson, the man married into his family, abandoning him barely three years after being elected governor.

In response, Kwankwaso himself defected from the NNPP to the African Democratic Congress (ADC) in March 2026, announcing his resignation in a statement dated March 29, 2026, citing “the need for a strategic political realignment amid the evolving dynamics of Nigeria’s political landscape.” Within weeks of that defection, the ADC descended into its own leadership crisis. By May 2, 2026, the Kwankwasiyya movement had already announced that it was considering leaving the ADC for yet another platform — the National Democratic Congress (NDC).

Some of Kwankwaso’s admirers have had the audacity to compare him to the late, great Mallam Aminu Kano — a founding father of northern progressive politics, a man who fought for the talakawa (common people) with ideological conviction and institutional permanence.

The comparison is an insult to Aminu Kano’s memory. The late Mallam did not defect every election cycle. He did not abandon his political home because another platform offered a more convenient route to personal ambition. He built institutions — the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU), the People’s Redemption Party (PRP) — that outlasted him. Kwankwaso has built only one lasting institution: a personality cult called Kwankwasiyya that moves wherever he moves, like a caravan without a compass.

Kwankwaso’s defenders point to his landslide victory in Kano State during the 2023 presidential election, where he secured 997,279 votes, winning 36 of the 44 local government areas. It was indeed a spectacular performance. But it was also a spectacular mirage — one that has convinced Kwankwaso that he carries the North on his shoulders.

The reality is sobering. Outside Kano, Kwankwaso’s influence evaporates. Even his own factional NNPP chairman, Dr. Agbo Major, has publicly questioned Kwankwaso’s national electoral strength, noting bluntly that “his influence appeared limited to Kano State despite contesting as a presidential candidate”.

The signs of Kwankwaso’s declining grip on Kano politics are unmistakable. His protégé, Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf, defected from the NNPP to the APC in January 2026 — less than two years to the next general election — taking with him the entire political structure of Kano State. Abba did not go alone. He crossed over with dozens of former Kwankwasiyya loyalists, all but four members of his State Executive Council, all members of the State House of Assembly, and all 44 local government chairmen.

While Kwankwaso moves from party to party in pursuit of a presidential fantasy, the North is enduring one of its most brutal humanitarian crises in decades.

According to the World Food Programme (WFP), nearly 35 million people in northern Nigeria are projected to face severe food insecurity from June to August 2026 — the highest figure recorded in Nigeria since monitoring began. In Borno State alone, 15,000 people are projected to face “catastrophic food insecurity” — the highest level under the global standard for measuring food insecurity. Malnutrition rates are highest among children in Borno, Sokoto, Yobe, and Zamfara.

Meanwhile, insecurity continues its grim march. On November 21, 2025, 230 children were kidnapped from Saint Mary’s Catholic School in Niger State. Extremist violence from Boko Haram and armed bandits have displaced millions across the Lake Chad Basin.

This is the North that requires urgent, focused, united political leadership. Instead, it gets Kwankwaso — a man who cannot unite his own political camp, cannot settle in a single party for more than a few months, and cannot be honest enough to admit that after decades in public life, his moment has passed.

Now, as 2027 approaches, all the signs suggest that Kwankwaso is preparing to repeat the same fatal mistake. The ADC, which was supposed to be the vehicle for a grand opposition coalition, is already fracturing. According to a recent report, “the opposition is splintered”. Neither Peter Obi nor Rabiu Kwankwaso said a word about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on the ADC leadership, “because they had already moved on” to the NDC.

Even more damning, the same analysis makes a chilling observation: “Even now, the verbal darts between Atiku’s supporters and Obi’s and Kwankwaso’s supporters are more caustic and more venomous than the exchanges between either camp and Tinubu’s supporters. In fact, Tinubu is the net beneficiary of their maximalist posturing and internal warfare. Obi and Kwankwaso supporters say they would rather let Tinubu continue for another four years than support Atiku’s aspiration.

And at the heart of it sits Kwankwaso, refusing to subordinate his ambition, refusing to build a united northern front, refusing to admit that a regional Kano-based movement cannot win a national presidential election.

Kwankwaso has spent his entire political career positioning himself as a tribune of the northern masses. But his actions tell a different story. By refusing to unite the North behind a single candidate, by fracturing the opposition into irreconcilable parts, by rushing from one political platform to another every few months, he is not building a northern future. He is dismantling it — whether deliberately or through colossal vanity.

The late Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, understood that northern strength required unity. The late Tafawa Balewa and Aminu Kano understood that political institutions must outlast individuals. Kwankwaso has learned neither lesson. He is a regional strongman masquerading as a national leader, a political caravan leaving wreckage in its wake.

If 2027 mirrors 2023 — if the opposition fragments again, if Tinubu secures a second term because the North could not present a united front, if Kwankwaso refuses once more to subordinate his ambition for a northern victory — then the North will have a clear answer to the question posed at the beginning of this piece.

It will not matter whether Kwankwaso is secretly working for Tinubu. What will matter is that his public actions have produced the same outcome: a divided North, a victorious APC, and a frustrated region plunged deeper into hunger, insecurity, and political irrelevance.

And the North will not forgive.

Kwankwaso cannot win. If he is honest with himself, he knows that. The only question remaining is whether he will allow honesty to overcome ambition before 2027 becomes 2023 all over again.

 

Doka can be reached via [email protected]