By Farooq A. Kperogi
Intra-state cultural and subregional tensions are building up in Kwara State ahead of the 2027 governorship elections because of credible worries that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s all-too-well-known Yoruba nationalist agenda is about to upend the state’s harmony through candidate imposition.
First, some background. Like several states in the country, Kwara is a multi-ethnic and multicultural state. It’s customary to divide it into three distinct geo-cultural zones. There is Kwara Central, which encompasses all of Ilorin and its adjoining areas. It’s linguistically Yoruba but ethnically a mixed bag of people who trace ancestry to Yoruba, Fulani, Kanuri, Baatonu (or Bariba), Hausa, and Nupe ancestors but who are, for all practical purposes, Yoruba. It is a little over 6 percent of the state’s landmass but constitutes 38 percent of the state’s population.
Then there is Kwara South, the most ethnically homogeneous part of the state, which is wholly Yoruba and, in many ways, culturally and linguistically indistinguishable from the Southwest. It is a little over 18 percent of the state’s landmass and 30 percent of its population.
Kwara North is the most ethnically diverse geo-cultural region and is peopled by the Baatonu (or Bariba), Bokobaru, Nupe, and Fulani. It is the non-Yoruba-speaking part of the state that constitutes more than 75 percent of the state’s landmass and 32 percent of its population, although Moro, a small part of Ilorin Emirate, was mysteriously grafted onto Kwara North. Nonetheless, the Nupe, Fulani, Baatonu, and Bokobaru people are culturally closer to the far North than they are to any part of the state.
Since the restoration of civilian rule in 1999, Kwara Central, that is, Ilorin Emirate, has dominated the governorship of the state. By the time of the next governorship election in 2027, Kwara Central would have ruled for 20 out of 28 years.
Kwara South produced the governor for eight years, from 2011 to 2019. Abdulfatah Ahmed, from Ifelodun Local Government, is from Kwara South.
But the entirety of Kwara North has never produced a governor for even a day since 1999, and only for a year and 10 months since 1992.
Kwara State governor Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq, from all indications, is committed to course correction in 2027 by supporting a rotation of power to Kwara North. A news report I read said he is lending support to Yakubu Danladi Salihu, the Speaker of the Kwara State House of Assembly, who is from Baruten, the second-largest local government in the country, to succeed him. It may not be true, but it has crystallized in public perception.
Senator Sadiq Suleiman Umar, who represents Kwara North in the Senate and who is from Kaiama, is another contender who enjoys widespread support to succeed Abdulrazaq. Both Baruten and Kaiama used to be part of Borgu Local Government before one half of it was ceded to Niger State in the early 1990s.
Yet although consensus, even among prominent players in Ilorin, appears to be coalescing around the idea that the remnant of Borgu in Kwara State, that is, Baruten and Kaiama, should produce the next governor (because the Nupe briefly produced a governor in the aborted Third Republic), it is said that President Tinubu insists that a Yoruba person from Kwara South must be governor.
Widespread whispers indicate that Tinubu’s preference for Abdulrahman’s successor is a certain Bashir Omolaja Bolarinwa, who hails from the same local government as former governor Ahmed and who used to be a local government chairman in Lagos.
A self-described “Yoruba irredentist” who has privileged access to people in Tinubu’s inner circle told me a few days ago that Tinubu wants to use his presidency to advance his sense of a pan-Yoruba agenda and be seen as the reincarnation of Oduduwa.
To that end, he said, Tinubu wants to force the election of “Yoruba” governors in Kwara and Kogi states. Since I didn’t listen in on any conversation where Tinubu said this, I can’t be certain that it’s entirely true, but given what I have described as Tinubu’s studied “Visibilization of Northern Yorubas” in my October 11, 2025, column, it would not surprise me if it were true.
But it would be a grave error of judgment to railroad Yoruba governors in multi-ethnic states, particularly in Kwara State. First, as I have pointed out, a person from Kwara South has been governor for eight years.
Second, Mohammed Lawal, Kwara’s first governor in the Fourth Republic, although from Ilorin, self-identified as Yoruba and performed many symbolic acts to signal that.
In fact, Governor Abdulrazaq, although a cosmopolitan person who seems to transcend ethnic and religious boundaries, is Yoruba. At least that was what one Sheikh Abdulrahim Aduranigba said seven years ago when he contrasted him with the PDP candidate for the governorship election.
“We have adopted Abdulrazaq as our governorship candidate because he is a Yoruba, and we have instructed him to conduct his campaigns in Yoruba language,” THISDAY quoted him as saying. “The PDP candidate is Fulani, and we challenge him to conduct his campaigns in Fulani language.”
In other words, the Yoruba are not a marginal group in Kwara that need saving by a reincarnated Oduduwa. The people who need “saving” are the non-Yoruba-speaking people of the state who have never produced a governor.
Third, the pushback that the imposition of a governor on account of his ethnic identity would invite could plunge the state into crisis. Ilorin people will resist it. People in Kwara North will resist it, and it will cause needless friction with the south of the state.
Interestingly, Tinubu’s second most prominent traditional title after “Asiwaju” is “Jagaban Borgu.” Kwara’s Kaiama and Baruten local governments, which have never produced a governor for the state since its founding in 1967, are one half of Borgu. It would be ironic if the champion of Borgu (that’s what Jagaban Borgu means) champions the political exclusion of the people he is symbolically supposed to lead and protect.
Tinubu himself is president because of a deliberate policy of positive political discrimination called power rotation, and he is anchoring his reelection on the basis that the South must complete its eight years, like the North before it.
As I have repeatedly pointed out, political representation at the highest levels is more symbolism than substance. Although the nature of ethnocratic governance we call democracy ensures that people in positions of power give preferential treatment to their kind and places of origin, for the most part, all politicians are the same. They first take care of themselves, their families, friends, and associates before the crumbs spread to their “people.”
Yet political representation is the symbolic conduit through which people vicariously connect with governments. When people of Ayetoro Gbede demonstrated the other day, telling Nigerians to leave their “son” Joash Amupitan alone, even though his past tweets question his neutrality and therefore his suitability as INEC chairman, I understood where they were coming from. He is the symbolic conduit through which they connect to the government. Ours is an ethnocracy, not a democracy.
That’s why it’s my long-term belief that the surest way to sustain the form of government we practice now is to deepen and constitutionalize representational equity. No ethnic group should dominate leadership because it has profound implications for psychic exclusion and the predilection to violence.
Baruten, Kaiama, Patigi, and Edu local governments, the non-Yoruba-speaking local governments in the state, are some of the least developed and most backward places in Nigeria. The first roads were tarred in Baruten only a little over a decade ago, and they are already death traps. Most towns are not connected to the national grid, and healthcare is among the worst.
A governor from the area will be compelled by ethnocratic pressures to attend to the most egregious infrastructural deficits that previous governments overlooked.
Let me end with a full disclosure: I am from Baruten Local Government of Kwara State and therefore from “Kwara North.” But my concerns are located in my broader concerns about representational justice, about which I have written in regard to other parts of the country.
