Tinubu Proved Me Wrong In Kwara

By Farooq A. Kperogi

My April 18, 2026, column titled “Tinubu’s Yoruba Agenda Risks Deep Rupture in Kwara” used privileged information I received from a self-described Yoruba irredentist to advance a narrative that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu had planned to impose a Yoruba candidate from Kwara South as Kwara State’s APC governorship candidate at the expense of the Borgu people in the state, who are found in Baruten and Kaiama local governments and of whom he is the Jagaba, that is, champion.

Well, after surviving several fits and starts, maneuvers, negotiations, disappointments and unpleasant surprises, a Borgu man from Baruten, Yakubu Danladi Salihu, who is the current Speaker of the Kwara State House of Assembly, emerged as APC’s governorship candidate.

Since it is difficult to imagine anyone emerging as APC’s governorship candidate in today’s party structure without at least Tinubu’s acquiescence, several Tinubu supporters privately wrote to challenge me to openly admit that I was wrong in my assumption that he would impose a certain Bashir Omolaja Bolarinwa on the state in furtherance of his “Yoruba agenda.”

They alleged that I wrote my column out of “hate” for Tinubu. I do not “hate” Tinubu. Hate is a mental and emotional burden that I have no capacity to carry for anyone. As much as I have been his critic, I have also defended Tinubu in the past, even when no one else did, when I was convinced that he was unfairly attacked. My impassioned, consistent defense of the validity and legitimacy of his Chicago State University certificate, which drew false accusations that I had been compromised, is a case in point.

And anyone who has followed my public commentary for more than two decades will concede that I am never shy about publicly owning up to my mistakes, apologizing when I err and correcting my assumptions when irrefutable, overwhelming evidence contradicts them. I recognize that I am only human and that my imperfections are the biggest proof of my humanity. So, I was going to write this column even if I wasn’t prompted by private, angry messages challenging me to do so.

Of the several messages I received after Malam Yakubu Danladi Salihu was announced as the winner of the Kwara APC primary election, the one by Pastor John Dara, former presidential candidate in the 2011 and 2019 election cycles and chairman of the African Development Investment Limited, was the most conciliatory.

“Please do a follow up article to thank President Tinubu and Governor Abdulrazaq for supporting the emergence of a Kwara North Governorship Candidate. They both did,” Pastor Dara, who is Yoruba from Kwara South, wrote on May 22. “We also need to call on the people of Kwara State to support this just and positive development.”

I hesitated to write straight away because of the uncertainties that attended the primaries and the resistance, however feeble, that Salihu’s emergence appeared to be generating in a few places. What if I wrote and his victory was reversed?

But Oloriewe Raheem Adedoyin, former Kwara State Information Commissioner and veteran journalist, implied in a June 17 article in the Vanguard that Salihu’s victory is sealed. It is typical in any political contest for people who lose out to discredit the outcomes and for those who win to acclaim them. “The primaries in Kwara are no less credible than those conducted in Lagos or elsewhere,” wrote Adedoyin, who is from Kwara South.

Now that it is fairly certain that both the Kwara State governor and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu are committed to course correction, representational equity and inclusivity, I won’t mince words in saying they deserve plaudits. Kwara North (and Borgu in particular) would never have produced APC’s governorship candidate without them.

It would be too self-important to assume that the president had a change of mind after reading my column, which he probably didn’t even read. But on the off chance that he or the people close to him did and decided to change course partly because of it, it demonstrates admirable sensitivity to public opinion and reasoned arguments.

It didn’t matter to me who between Senator Sadiq Suleiman Umar, Kwara North’s senator who hails from Kaiama, and Yakubu Danladi Salihu, who is from Baruten, won the APC nomination. They are both sons of Borgu in Kwara who are as qualified as anyone who has ever been governor of the state. I am glad that in thanking President Tinubu after his announcement as the winner of the APC governorship primary, Salihu acknowledged that Tinubu has lived up to his title as the Jagaba of Borgu.

Both the governor and the president were obviously under competing pressures from several constituencies, but they resisted them and chose to throw their weight behind a candidate from a part of the state that has never produced a governor since the state’s creation in 1967 and that has remained in its geographic, political and symbolic margins ever since.

It is gratifying that a wide swath of people from the state recognize the imperative of the inclusion of its most peripheral part into the mainstream. After the publication of my April 18 column, countless people from Ilorin Emirate reached out to me to say they saw merit in my arguments and were committed to remediation.

It still honestly and pleasantly shocks me that so many people from Ilorin Emirate concede that the remainder of Borgu in Kwara State should produce the next governor of the state.

My pleasant surprise springs from my knowledge that it takes conscious effort to acknowledge that you are the beneficiary of unfair advantages and to willingly let go of those advantages. Of course, it would be unrealistic to expect everyone to be on the same page on this issue, but my sense is that the vast majority of people in both Ilorin Emirate and Kwara South are sold on this.

Perhaps it’s not altogether out of place that most people in Ilorin Emirate support the shift of power to the North. After all, they have produced the governor for 19 of the 27 years since the restoration of civilian rule in 1999.

Plus, many Ilorin indigenes, my younger sister’s husband being an example, have distant Borgu ancestral roots, even if they are now, for all practical purposes, Yoruba people, and therefore may have some emotional investment in the emergence of a Borgu person as governor.

But the fact that many prominent and not so prominent people from Kwara South are on board is the bigger pleasant surprise for me. Kwara South has had only one 8-year shot at the governorship since 1999. That many of them think conceding the governorship to a part of the state that has never produced a governor for even a split second is worthwhile is commendable.

You won’t appreciate what I am driving at until you realize that there are many multi-ethnic states in Nigeria where just one ethnic group dominates the governorship in perpetuity.

An example that stands out like a sore thumb is Benue State. Since the state’s creation in 1976, every elected civilian governor has come from the Tiv-speaking part of the state. The governorship has never gone to Idoma, Igede or any other non-Tiv group in a civilian election. So, every child in Benue who isn’t Tiv has little reason to imagine that they could someday become governor.

In complex, transitional, multi-ethnic and plural countries like Nigeria, conscious efforts should be made to formalize strategies for the symbolic inclusion of all collective identities in governance structures. That is the only way people can relate to governance and feel a vicarious identification with power and authority.

It obviously is not a substitute for good governance, accountability, transparency, performance and improvement in the lot of the people, but it’s an indispensable precondition for getting every citizen invested in the business of government.

Kwara has now shown that even in a country where exclusion often masquerades as democracy and “meritocracy,” power can still be made to travel to the margins when conscience, pressure and enlightened self-interest meet.

*Kperogi is  US-based professor of Journalism Studies.