The Classroom As The Starting Point
Every serious conversation about this administration has to begin in the classroom, because that is where Governor Yusuf chose to spend his political capital first. He reopened the all-girls boarding schools that a previous administrations had shuttered, schools whose closure had quietly pushed a generation of girls out of education altogether. He did not stop at reopening doors; he put children who had been sitting on bare concrete floors into proper seats, and he put buses on the road to carry girls to school who would otherwise have stayed home. None of this is self-praise. It is why the Nigeria Union of Teachers gave him its Golden Award for rescuing a school system that had been left to decay, and why Leadership Newspaper independently named him Governor of the Year in 2024. Awards from teachers' unions are not handed out to governors who merely talk about education. They are handed to governors who fix it.
An Engineer Governing Like One
It matters, too, that the man in the Kano Government House is not a career politician performing infrastructure, he is a trained civil engineer who cut his teeth as Commissioner for Works, Housing and Transport between 2011 and 2015, in an administration Kano still remembers for its roads and bridges. That technical instinct shows up everywhere in his own government now: in the water supply improvements he has personally committed to, in the meticulous urban renewal plan that has quietly modernised the Kano State Metropolitan Master Plan, mapped land through a new GIS system at KANGIS, and put kerbs, crash barriers, repainted lanes and proper signage on major routes across the metropolis. This is unglamorous work! nobody cuts a ribbon for a repainted lane marking but it is exactly the kind of work that separates governors who build cities from governors who merely occupy them.
Paying Kano's old Debts
Then there is the matter of the roughly ₦32 billion in outstanding gratuities and death benefits that had piled up under previous administrations, money owed to retired civil servants and to the families of those who died in service. Governor Yusuf settled it. There is no more basic test of a government's character than whether it honours what it owes to the people who spent their working lives serving the state, and this administration passed that test without waiting to be shamed into it by protest or litigation.
Taking Back the Streets: the Fight Against Thuggery, Phone-snatching and Drug Abuse
If there is one thread that has quietly strangled ordinary life in Kano since around 2018, it is the rise of drug-fuelled street crime – thuggery, phone-snatching, the kind of casual violence that has made evening commutes and market visits a small act of courage for ordinary Kano residents. This is the problem Governor Yusuf chose to confront head-on rather than manage with press statements, and the instrument he built for it – the Kano State Multi-Agency Task Force on Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking chaired by the relentless Barrister Muhuyi Magaji Rimingado has produced results fast enough to make even skeptics pay attention.
Within just forty-five days of its inauguration, the Task Force's own chairman disclosed that it had carried out more than 200 raids on the warehouses, dens and stockpile points that had been feeding Kano's drug trade, and secured more than 200 convictions, some carrying sentences of up to ten years. In one operation alone, the Task Force rescued 43 children –many of them not even from Kano originally, drawn into street life and then supplied with rubber solution and other intoxicants in place of the wages they were promised for scavenging and secured nine-year prison terms for two of the men responsible for exploiting them. The Task Force has not treated enforcement as the whole answer, either: it has set its sights on removing as many as 10,000 vulnerable youths from the streets altogether, with medical assessment, rehabilitation at facilities like the Kiru Reformation Centre, and skills training built into the plan so that young people are not simply arrested and abandoned back into the same conditions that trapped them.
Sit with that pace for a moment. Two hundred raids and two hundred convictions in a month and a half –not a full year, not even a full quarter. If a Task Force barely six weeks old can dismantle that much of the machinery behind Kano's drug and street-crime problem, it is not unreasonable to ask what a full year, or four more years, under the same political backing would look like. This is precisely why the fight cannot be handed to a different administration to restart from zero, with a new team learning the terrain that Rimingado's Task Force has already mapped.
Why The Lights Matter More than They Sound
Here is a detail that rarely makes headlines but that anyone who has actually lived in a Nigerian city understands instinctively: darkness is where thuggery and phone-snatching thrive. I personally have drove through long stretches of Abuja, the capital territory after sundown, kilometre after kilometre without a single working streetlight and you understand immediately why criminals prefer the dark and why residents in those stretches walk faster, grip their phones tighter, and get home before dusk if they can help it. It is a small thing until you are the one walking through it.
Kano, under this administration, has made a visible, deliberate break from that pattern. More than 16,000 streetlights, a significant share of them solar-powered, so they do not depend on an unreliable grid m now illuminate major roads and public spaces across the state, backed by over 500 new transformers installed across all 44 local government areas. New roads commissioned in places recently Sumaila and Wudil have been fitted with streetlights as standard, not an afterthought, specifically because the governor has said openly that visibility at night is a security issue as much as a convenience — light that lets traders extend their hours and lets residents move without fear. Even the newly approved Kano–Kongolom road, a 132-kilometre federal project championed under this administration, is being built with solar-powered streetlights and CCTV surveillance designed in from the start, not bolted on later.
This is what makes the anti-drug and anti-thuggery campaign more than the routine para military operation — it is being built into the physical geography of the state. A phone-snatcher needs shadow. A thug needs a dark corner to disappear into after the act. Every streetlight that goes up in Kano is one more corner taken away from them. Combine that with a Task Force that is convicting suppliers and rescuing children at a record pace, and you are not looking at two separate initiatives you are looking at one coherent strategy to make crime physically harder to commit and legally more expensive to attempt. That is not something Kano has seen executed with this much coordination before, under any administration.
The Honest Caveat
No fair column pretends a record is without controversy, and Governor Yusuf's has one obvious one: his defection from the NNPP to the APC in January 2026 cost him the public blessing of his long-time political godfather, Senator Rabiu Kwankwaso, who called the move painful and accused him of abandoning the movement that first put him in office. Critics inside the kwankwasiyya camp argue he owes his mandate to voters he never consulted before switching sides, and some analysts have questioned whether the move was about "unity and development," as he put it, or about political self-preservation ahead of 2027. Kano voters are entitled to weigh that question seriously — loyalty in politics matters, and so does the appearance of it.
But governance is ultimately measured in what changes for the person walking home from the market at night, the child who used to sit on a bare classroom floor, and the retiree who waited years for a gratuity that finally arrived. On those measures, the record between 2023 and now speaks for itself and it argues, plainly, for letting the man who built it finish the job.
Musaddiq rose through the civil service into public service in Kano State.
musaddiiqkabir@gmail.com
