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.

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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.

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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.

Kperogi is a renowned columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism

You may resent Bola Ahmed Tinubu, but you can’t deny that he has earned his place in Nigerian political history as one of the, if not the, most consequential opposition figures in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. He constructed a carefully planned political and rhetorical template to oppose central governments effectively and then converted the symbolic capital he gained into a path to the presidency.

By May 29, Tinubu will mark his third year as president. He is beset by the same constraints his predecessors faced and is reacting to opponents almost exactly as they did, perhaps with even more viciousness and guile.

But the opposition seems to be in the wilderness. It is flustered, incoherent, spineless, and in strategic disarray. It would do well to study how an opposition Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu would have confronted an increasingly tyrannical and devious President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

If Bola Ahmed Tinubu were in opposition today, watching a president preside over widening and deepening oceans of blood and rising insecurity, constrict the space for alternative parties, intensify economic hardship and offer only perfunctory condolence optics amid horrendous mass slaughters, he would launch a sustained, strategic, organized, merciless and unsparing regime of critical engagement using every available medium. We know this because we have a record of him doing precisely that.

My recollection of his key moves as an opposition politician aren’t intended to be exhaustive. They are merely representative.

In March 2013, for instance, in remarks widely reported at the time, Tinubu said that if President Goodluck Jonathan could not guarantee security, he should “honorably resign.” By November 2014, his tone had hardened. According to TheCable, Tinubu said that in any serious country Jonathan would have resigned over the scale of insecurity in the country.

In the same 2014, he accused Jonathan’s government of “failure, lack of capacity, vision and creativity” and of misleading Nigerians about the true state of security.

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That is the vocabulary Tinubu reaches for when he is not in power. He did not treat insecurity as a complicated policy arena deserving of cautious language. He treated it as evidence of unfitness for office.

An aggregation of all his statements about the insecurity that pervaded the country when Jonathan was in government (which has become worse on his watch) amounted to this: insecurity equals loss of legitimacy. That was one of his most potent rhetorical blitzkriegs against Jonathan, which traveled beyond the shores of Nigeria.

The same pattern holds for economic distress. On January 11, 2012, in an article published by PM News, Tinubu attacked Jonathan’s removal of fuel subsidy, dubbing it the “Jonathan tax.” He said the policy breached the social contract between the rulers and the ruled, described it as a punitive imposition on the poor and, crucially, urged Nigerians to resist it.

He wrote that citizens had a duty to “peacefully demonstrate and record their opposition.” That line matters. It shows that Tinubu, in opposition, does not merely diagnose hardship. He authorizes not just rhetorical dissent but physical rebellion against it.

Following his exhortation, there were disabling, convulsive and fatal nationwide protests and strikes. Tinubu aligned himself with that mood. He did not urge patience. He gave moral and political cover to resistance. Some even said he funded the protests, called “Occupy Nigeria,” in which at least 12 people died. It ultimately forced Jonathan to reverse the withdrawal of subsidies, which Tinubu is now implementing with more soullessness than Jonathan ever did.

He also does not leave resistance unorganized. On February 6, 2013, opposition parties merged into what became the All Progressives Congress. Tinubu was one of the principal architects of that coalition. The merger’s stated aim was to end corruption, insecurity and economic stagnation. It was a calculated attempt to convert grievance into power. Tinubu did not wait for electoral cycles to do their work. He engineered an alternative.

When he believed the Jonathan administration was using institutions against the opposition, he said so without equivocation. In January 2014, during the Rivers State political crisis, Tinubu described the disruption of opposition activity as “a frontal assault against democracy” and even a “coup against democracy.” In November 2014, after the chaos at the National Assembly, he again held Jonathan responsible. He saw pattern, not accident, and he said it plainly.

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He went further. In October 2014, when Jonathan sought legislative approval for a $1 billion loan to fight Boko Haram, Tinubu opposed it. He argued that the funds could be used for political purposes rather than security. In other words, he was willing to recast even security spending as partisan maneuvering. That instinct has not been erased by time.

Now bring this record forward.

On April 2, 2026, President Tinubu met victims of the Plateau killings at the airport rather than visiting affected communities, with the presidency citing time and logistical constraints. Strip away the explanations and look at it from the vantage point of opposition Tinubu. This is the sort of image he historically converts into a political weapon. He would not defend it. He would amplify it as proof of cold detachment and deadly incompetence.

In fact, the seemingly intractable and worsening sanguinary communal upheavals that are spreading all over the country and the rising mass abductions for ransom that seem to be unabating would have constituted more than sufficient grounds for opposition Tinubu to delegitimize the presidency of President Tinubu.

There is also the matter of political space. Tinubu’s own rise was made possible by the constellation of opposition forces. The 2013 merger was a deliberate construction of an alternative to an incumbent he portrayed as incompetent and anti-democratic. If he were outside power today and perceived any effort, real or imagined, to frustrate the emergence of rival parties, such as we are seeing with the ADC, he would not respond with restraint. His record from 2013 to 2015 shows a readiness to build countervailing structures and to accuse incumbents of undermining democracy.

In early 2013 when there were credible fears that INEC might block or frustrate the registration of the new opposition merger that became the APC, including the controversy over a rival party using the same acronym, Tinubu framed any attempt to deny registration as authoritarian sabotage of democracy by the president.

Tinubu’s stance as opposition was confrontational and absolutist. When he was outside power, he interpreted procedural or institutional resistance in maximalist terms as existential threats to democracy, not routine political or legal friction.

And he routinely blamed it on the sneaky wiles of the president, not the institutions that were responsible for the actions he railed against. Opposition Tinubu would have put the blame for INEC’s withdrawal of recognition of the David Mark-led leadership of the ADC squarely on President Tinubu’s desk and would have called it Tinubu’s fascist, cowardly, fear-inspired strangulation of a rival, oppositional political space.

What emerges from this is not a series of isolated reactions but a coherent oppositional method. Tinubu indicts insecurity as presidential failure, frames economic pain as betrayal, promotes and legitimizes physical public resistance, works to consolidate opposition power and heaps all blames for the misfortunes of the opposition on the president. He combined rhetoric with organization. He did not do half measures.

Tinubu in opposition would not recognize the defenses now offered on behalf of Tinubu in power. He would reject them, loudly and repeatedly, and he would mobilize against them.

Criticism of Bola Ahmed Tinubu on the grounds that his NADECO-era allies or Southwest loyalists no longer protest policies they had consistently condemned misses a basic truth about power. People rarely mobilize against themselves, their benefactors or the networks that sustain them. Expecting otherwise is naïve.

The more useful lesson is not to lament their silence but to study Tinubu’s own playbook when he stood outside power. He exemplified disciplined opposition, coalition building, strategic messaging and relentless pursuit of institutional leverage. Those outside the orbit of power should stop waiting for insiders to revolt and instead organize to displace them. Power is not donated; it is taken. Tinubu has proved that.

Kperogi is a renowned columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism.