There is a particular kind of writing that speaks to two people at once. It looks a leader in the eye and tells him what his work has meant, while turning to the crowd behind him to remind them of what has been done in their name. That is the only honest way to write about Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf, because his story belongs equally to him and to the people of Kano. Your Excellency, listen. People of Kano, listen too.
A man whose support was earned, not handed over
Kano has known Abba Kabir Yusuf longer than the chants have existed. In 2014, while serving as Commissioner for Works, Housing and Transport, he won the APC primary for the Kano Central Senate seat and then gave the ticket to his principal, Rabiu Kwankwaso. Nobody forced that decision. In 2019, running for governor on the PDP platform, he led the first count with 1,014,474 votes to Ganduje’s 987,819, before a disputed rerun in 28 local government areas turned the outcome by a margin of just 8,982 votes. He carried that without letting it harden into bitterness, and four years later he returned to poll 1,019,602 votes, more than Kwankwaso himself received in Kano as the presidential candidate of the same party.
People of Kano, this is worth remembering when anyone suggests the affection for this governor was manufactured. When the Supreme Court restored his mandate in January 2024, you did not wait for a summons. Thousands of you left your homes before sunrise and walked kilometres beside his convoy, chanting his name until the road itself seemed to answer. That was you, not a campaign budget. Your Excellency, hold on to that memory on the hard days, because it is the truest measure of what you have earned.
What the classroom and the household now look like
From the first months in office, this administration chose to spend its political capital where families feel it most. Between 29.95 and 31 percent of the state budget has gone to education in each of the last three years, above the 26 percent benchmark UNESCO recommends, and the result is not abstract. It is 80,000 new desks for 240,000 pupils who used to sit on bare floors, free uniforms for more than 800,000 Primary 1 children, thousands of rehabilitated schools, reopened girls’ boarding schools, thousands of new teachers and a cleared promotions backlog that had stood since 2017. Kano then finished first in Nigeria in the 2025 NECO results. Your Excellency, that is not a lucky statistic. It is the return on a decision to fund what you said mattered.
Parents, ask what your child’s classroom looked like three years ago. Retirees and the families of workers who died in service, remember the roughly ₦32 billion in gratuities and death benefits that sat unpaid until this government settled them. And women of all 44 local government areas, remember the ₦50,000 that reaches thousands of you every month, 5,800 of you in the round launched this September. These are not slogans printed on a billboard. They are deposits into real households.
The boring numbers that build the exciting projects
A state cannot spend what it does not earn, and this is the part of the record that rarely makes headlines. Internally generated revenue has grown from roughly ₦40 billion in 2023 to about ₦102 billion by 2025. The Kano Geographic Information System Agency, which once raised barely ₦50 million a month, now raises about ₦750 million. The 2025 budget was implemented at 96.9 percent, which means that what Kano’s government promises on paper is overwhelmingly what reaches the ground. Your Excellency, protect that discipline, because it is the engine under every flyover and every scholarship.
Farmers, you can now buy fertiliser at half the open market price, with anti-corruption agencies watching the distribution so that it reaches you and not a middleman. Traders of the Farm Centre GSM Market, your burnt stalls are being rebuilt in a ₦2 billion redevelopment that adds a fire station, drainage and a pedestrian bridge. Young people, a new digital market is projected to create more than 100,000 jobs. A state that raises more of its own money can keep building when federal allocations fall short, and that is what this reform was for.
Safer streets, healthier families, faster roads
Health, security and mobility are where the state’s promises are tested at the level of the ordinary day. More than a million vulnerable residents are being enrolled in health insurance, and enrolment has already beaten its target by 110,000. The Ramadan feeding programme reached 1.1 million people in the first ten days of the holy month. The Multi Agency Task Force on Drug Abuse recorded more than 200 raids and more than 200 convictions in its first forty five days and rescued 43 children from exploitation. More than 16,000 streetlights now burn across the state, and the Dan’agundi and Tal’udu interchanges, over 80 percent complete, are close to ending the gridlock that residents have endured for decades.
Every one of us knows the fear of a dark road and a snatched phone. Light is not decoration. It is the reason a trader can close later and a student can walk home without sprinting, and every convicted supplier is one fewer danger on a neighbour’s street. Your Excellency, finish those bridges and pay every contractor you owe, so that the projects at eighty percent become projects at a hundred. People of Kano, keep asking to see the work, because it was built to be seen.
Government you are allowed to check
One reform deserves more attention than it gets. By giving the Open Government Partnership a commissioner level co-chair and a dedicated focal office, and by publishing project progress through the state’s Integrated Projects Monitoring System, this administration invited exactly the kind of scrutiny that many governments avoid. Your Excellency, do not flinch from it. Let independent voices audit your completion figures, because a record this strong loses nothing by being checked and gains everything by being trusted.
And to the citizens, an honest word. Not everyone in Kano agrees with this governor. Some of his former allies, including the Kwankwasiyya camp he left, believe his move to the APC in January 2026 was a betrayal, and that view deserves a hearing rather than a shouting match. Your job is neither to cheer nor to sneer. It is to look at what has been built, ask what remains unfinished, and decide with your own eyes.
So Go Again
Your Excellency, you have touched the classroom and the clinic, the farm and the market, the road and the streetlight, the retiree’s envelope and the young graduate’s startup grant. Go again, Abba, and go with the humility of a man who understands that applause is a loan repaid in results.
And to you, people of Kano, you have seen enough to form your own judgment. If you believe what you have seen, say so with your vote and say it out loud. This is a state worth finishing what it started.
Musaddiq Kabir Adam rose through the civil service into public service in Kano State.
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Abba Kabir Yusuf
