Kano governorship elections since 1999: the Kwankwaso factor

Kano has more registered voters than any state except Lagos, and its governorship elections have been among the most competitive in the country. Since 1999 the state has swung between parties four times, and one man, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, has been at the centre of nearly every contest, either as a candidate or as the sponsor of one. His red-cap Kwankwasiyya movement is a political brand in its own right.

1999: Kwankwaso’s first term

Kwankwaso, an engineer and former deputy speaker of the House of Representatives, won the January 1999 election for the PDP with 587,619 votes against 311,218 for Magaji Abdullahi of the All People’s Party. Turnout was low, with about 943,000 of 3.68 million registered voters casting ballots.

2003 and 2007: Shekarau and the ANPP

In April 2003 Kwankwaso became one of the few sitting governors to lose a re-election bid. Ibrahim Shekarau, a schoolteacher and former permanent secretary running for the ANPP, took 1,082,457 votes to Kwankwaso’s 888,494. The vote tracked the presidential contest, in which Muhammadu Buhari carried Kano for the ANPP. Shekarau introduced a state Hisbah corps and campaigned on sharia-based morality and welfare.

Shekarau was re-elected in April 2007 by a much slimmer margin, 671,184 votes to 629,868 for the PDP’s Ahmed Garba Bichi, who had replaced Kwankwaso as the party’s candidate.

2011: Kwankwaso returns

Kwankwaso came back in April 2011 in one of the closest races in the country. He polled 1,108,345 votes for the PDP against 1,048,317 for the ANPP’s Salihu Sagir Takai, Shekarau’s chosen successor. In his second term he began the free-education and foreign-scholarship programmes his supporters still cite, and fell out with the PDP leadership in Abuja. In late 2013 he joined four other PDP governors in defecting to the new APC.

2015: Ganduje’s landslide

Kwankwaso’s deputy of eight years, Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, won the April 2015 election for the APC with 1,546,434 votes, about three times the 509,726 polled by Takai, now of the PDP. Within two years the two men had fallen out, a quarrel that would shape the next two elections.

2019: eight thousand votes

The March 2019 election was Kano’s most disputed. Kwankwaso, back in the PDP, sponsored his son-in-law Abba Kabir Yusuf against Ganduje. After the first round on 9 March, Yusuf led with 1,014,474 votes to Ganduje’s 987,819, but INEC declined to declare a winner because the number of cancelled votes exceeded the margin. A supplementary election followed on 23 March in the affected polling units. Amid reports of violence, thuggery and vote buying in Gama ward and elsewhere, Ganduje won the rerun by a wide margin, and INEC declared him re-elected with 1,033,695 votes to Yusuf’s 1,024,713: a margin of 8,982. The PDP’s petition failed at the tribunal and the Court of Appeal.

2023: the NNPP breakthrough and the court battle

Kwankwaso left the PDP again in 2022 and took over the little-known New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), running for president himself and fielding Abba Yusuf for governor. On 18 March 2023 Yusuf won with 1,019,602 votes (about 52%) against 890,705 for Ganduje’s deputy, Nasir Yusuf Gawuna of the APC.

The result then went through every level of the courts. On 20 September 2023 the election tribunal deducted 165,663 votes it said came from ballot papers that were not signed or stamped, and declared Gawuna the winner. The Court of Appeal agreed in November, though a clerical error in its judgment caused days of confusion. On 12 January 2024 the Supreme Court set both rulings aside, holding that the votes had been wrongly deducted and that Yusuf’s party membership was an internal matter for the NNPP. Yusuf stayed in office.

2026: the split with Kwankwaso

The NNPP spent 2025 fighting over its leadership and symbols, and relations between the governor and his godfather soured. On 23 January 2026 Yusuf resigned from the NNPP and days later formally joined the APC, taking most of the state assembly and several federal lawmakers with him. Kwankwaso said he was shocked and that the defectors would regret it. The split leaves Kano, for the first time since 2011, with the Kwankwasiyya movement and the governor on opposite sides going into the 6 February 2027 election.

Read more on elect.ng

• Governorship elections in all 36 states.
• Kano leaders since 1999.
• Incidents recorded in Kano elections.
• Election court cases that changed Nigeria.
• Vote buying in Nigeria, explained.