Rabiu Kwankwaso

He led the New Nigeria Peoples Party into the 2023 presidential election and joined the Nigeria Democratic Congress in 2026. He is named in the Nigerian presidential election race of 2027 as the party's vice-presidential candidate on Peter Obi's ticket, not as its presidential candidate.

Career

Kwankwaso trained as a civil engineer at Kaduna Polytechnic and in the United Kingdom, where he took a master's degree in 1985; Wikipedia lists a doctorate from Sharda University in India in 2022. He sat in the House of Representatives for Madobi in 1992 and 1993 and was its deputy speaker. He was Governor of Kano State from 1999 to 2003 and again from 2011 to 2015, Minister of Defence from 2003 to 2007, and senator for Kano Central from 2015 to 2019. He changed parties several times: the Peoples Democratic Party, the All Progressives Congress from 2014 to 2018, the PDP again, then the NNPP from 2022. In 2023 he finished fourth in the presidential election with about 1.5 million votes, 6.23 per cent. In 2026 he moved to the African Democratic Congress and then the Nigeria Democratic Congress.

Positions

Wikipedia describes Kwankwaso as socially conservative and economically left-leaning, drawing on the legacy of the Kano politician Aminu Kano, and as a populist with strong support in Kano and north-western Nigeria through his Kwankwasiya movement. As governor from 2011 to 2015 he put weight on education, with free school feeding and uniforms for primary pupils, new universities, technical colleges and foreign scholarships, and on road and flyover building. In May 2026 he told Arise Television that quality leadership against insecurity and economic hardship mattered more than whether the president comes from the North or the South, and that the South should hold the presidency for another term, with Peter Obi as its leading candidate.

Controversies

In 2004 a Kano State commission of inquiry, according to Wikipedia, indicted Kwankwaso over his first term as governor. In 2015 a group of retired Kano state workers petitioned the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, alleging that about 10 billion naira of pension remittances paid in 2011 to 2015 had been misused for a housing scheme that benefited associates. In October 2021 the EFCC questioned him at its Abuja headquarters about abuse of office, diversion of public funds and the allocation of government properties; he had skipped an earlier invitation in September. News reports mention no charge, and according to Wikipedia he has never been charged or convicted and calls the allegations politically motivated.

Summarised automatically from the linked sources. Wikipedia · AllAfrica · News Central TV · The Will · BusinessDay

Photo: VOA, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons (cropped)