Kano State chapters of the African Democratic Congress (ADC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) have explained why they declined to participate in the just-concluded by-elections in Kano Municipal and Ungogo state constituencies.
The by-elections, conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), produced winners for the vacant seats in the Kano State House of Assembly. However, major opposition parties, including the ADC and PDP, were absent from the ballot.
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The ADC state chairman, Musa Shu’aibu Ungogo, said his party opted out of the contest over concerns about alleged misuse of state resources.
Ungogo also questioned the political value of the contest, noting that the eventual winners would serve for only about 14 months, completing the tenures of their late fathers.
Similarly, the PDP state chairman, Yusuf Ado Kibiya, attributed his party’s non-participation to what he described as an inadequate time frame provided by INEC to conduct primary elections.
Kibiya said INEC wrote to party chairmen in the state directing them to conduct primaries within a four-day window.
“The letter was written on Friday and we got it on Friday. In the letter, he was directing the parties to convene primary elections between Friday and Tuesday the following week. That is barely four days,” he said.
He described the timeline as impractical, stressing that primary elections involve processes handled at the national and zonal levels of the party.
Following the deaths of the former legislators in December, political actors within the NNPP — the platform on which the deceased lawmakers were elected in 2023 — moved swiftly to manage the succession.
The NNPP leadership in Kano, reportedly in consultation with its national leader, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, endorsed the sons of the deceased lawmakers to succeed their fathers. The move was widely interpreted as a sympathy-based consensus aimed at preserving the political legacies of the late lawmakers while offering support to their families.
Within NNPP circles and the Kwankwasiyya political movement, the endorsement was framed as a moral and compassionate decision rather than a purely political calculation.
At that stage, the expectation was that the two young men would contest under the NNPP banner.
However, the political landscape shifted following the defection of Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf from the NNPP to the APC — a development that reconfigured alignments in the state.
Subsequently, the two sons who had earlier been linked to NNPP’s succession plan emerged as candidates of the APC for the bye-elections.
According to accounts from within the NNPP and the Kwankwasiyya Movement, the young aspirants resigned their membership of the NNPP before their names were submitted under the APC platform.
