By Prince Haliru Tsonga_
First, a word on the headline. The “ghost” here is not of death, but of memory—of unfinished business, of political debts unpaid, and of history that refuses to stay buried. May Allah grant Alhaji Shuiabu Yahman long life and good health.
Now, to the matter.
The latest eruption in Kwara’s zoning debate, triggered by the intervention of Prof. Abubakar Suleiman, has predictably drawn the usual chorus of outrage, especially from foot soldiers of power who mistake volume for validity. That some loyalists of Engr. Yakubu Danladi would descend with feral intensity on Suleiman for merely articulating a position tells you everything you need to know about the intellectual fragility, and, frankly, the political anxiety, within that camp. But let’s not dignify that sideshow with undue attention.
Because this is not about Suleiman. Not really. It is about Kwara North—and the curious case of an agitation that is at once legitimate and morally compromised. An agitation that demands justice but is repeatedly undermined by the very people who claim to be its custodians.
To understand this contradiction, we must summon the “ghost” in question: Alhaji Shuiabu Yahman.
In 2019, Yahman was not a fringe player. He was a serious gubernatorial aspirant within the APC, bolstered by the influence of figures like Alhaji Lai Mohammed, Bashir Omolaja Bolarinwa and other power brokers of the time. The political stars, for once, appeared to align in favour of Kwara North. If there was ever a golden window for the zone to clinch the governorship of Kwara State, that moment was 2019.
But that golden opportunity was snatched (or stolen) in broad daylight by no less a person than the sitting Governor of Kwara State, Abdulrahman Abdulrazak—a development that did not just alter the arithmetic of power but, in the eyes of many in Kwara North, amounted to a brazen political heist.
In the rough-and-tumble of Nigerian politics, ambition is not a crime. But there is a difference between contesting and, to put it bluntly, outmaneuvering a whole region at the very moment its long-denied opportunity beckoned.
AbdulRazaq did not merely win, he eclipsed a regional aspiration.
And here is where the irony becomes almost poetic. The same political establishment that sidelined Kwara North in its moment of greatest promise now seeks to don the robes of moral advocacy for the zone. It is a bit like setting a house on fire and later returning as the chief firefighter, expecting applause for the rescue effort. History is not so easily fooled.
If Kwara North today speaks of marginalization, it is not speaking in abstraction. It is speaking from a lived political experience, one in which opportunity was not just lost but, many would argue, actively denied.
But (and this is the uncomfortable “but” that must be confronted) Kwara North is not an entirely innocent victim in this narrative. Fast forward to 2023. The Peoples Democratic Party, in what appeared to be a strategic and symbolic move, zoned its governorship ticket to Kwara North. It was, by any fair assessment, a direct response to decades of agitation. The door that had been slammed shut in 2019 was now, at least partially, reopened.
What did Kwara North do with that opportunity?
It hesitated. It fragmented. It equivocated.
Even more troubling was the role played by individuals from the zone who, rather than rally around the ticket, found creative justifications to undermine it. Among those prominently at the forefront of this brazen betrayal was Yakubu Danladi, whose position at the time suggested that it was, curiously, “not yet the turn” of the very region that had clamoured for that turn for decades. You couldn’t script a more baffling contradiction.
And here lies the moral crisis of the Kwara North agitation: it demands justice in one breath and sabotages it in another. It invokes equity when convenient and abandons it when politically expedient. This is not merely inconsistency, it is self-sabotage elevated to an art form.
As for AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq, his evolving posture on the Kwara North question raises its own set of questions. Can a political actor who benefited from the truncation of a regional aspiration convincingly position himself as its latter-day champion? Perhaps. Politics, after all, thrives on reinvention. But reinvention without acknowledgment of past actions often rings hollow. The past has a way of insisting on being reckoned with.
Which brings us back to the “ghost of Yahman.”
It is not a spirit that haunts in the supernatural sense. It is a reminder, a persistent, inconvenient reminder, of a moment when Kwara North stood on the brink of political history and was pulled back, not by fate, but by human calculation. And, in a twist that would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic, it is also a reminder of how the zone itself fumbled a subsequent chance to reclaim that history.
So when today’s political actors posture, maneuver, and position themselves for 2027, they would do well to remember this: you cannot repeatedly betray a cause and still claim moral authority over it. You cannot eat your cake and insist on having it intact.
History is patient, but it is not forgetful. And when the chips are finally down, as they inevitably will be, it is this history, not rhetoric, that will deliver the ultimate verdict.
Prince Haliru Tsonga from Edu LGA
