By Boma West
Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, the former two-term Governor of Kano State and one of northern Nigeria’s most influential political figures, has broken his silence. In a press statement released personally by the senator, he addresses the flood of speculation surrounding his political future and delivers a measured but firm message to anyone paying attention.
He is not going anywhere, at least not yet.
The statement comes at a moment of genuine turbulence inside the African Democratic Congress. Kwankwaso acknowledges the crisis openly, describing a party caught in the grip of overlapping legal battles that have steadily eroded its institutional footing. A Supreme Court judgment recently affirmed the legitimacy of the David Mark-led National Working Committee, yet simultaneously remitted the matter back to the High Court, leaving the party suspended between legal vindication and functional paralysis. A Federal High Court then moved to invalidate the party’s recent convention entirely. The Attorney General of the Federation followed with an application to deregister the ADC altogether, a development the senator describes in his statement as strange and difficult to explain away as mere coincidence.
Kwankwaso is too experienced a political operator to pretend otherwise. In his own words, no final decision has been reached regarding his next move or that of his political associates, and he is determined to communicate that directly rather than allow the rumor mill to speak on his behalf.
The senator draws a deliberate parallel in his statement between the ADC’s current predicament and the circumstances that forced his earlier exit from the New Nigeria Peoples Party. That departure, he recalls, was driven by externally orchestrated legal pressures that made continued membership untenable. The NNPP’s internal structures had been compromised by forces operating from outside the party, and remaining meant absorbing damage that was never his to carry. The ADC, he now says plainly, is following the same trajectory. For a man of Kwankwaso’s political instincts, recognizing that pattern early is not pessimism. It is survival.
Wide consultations are already underway. The senator confirms in his statement that he and his team have been engaging leaders from the National Democratic Congress, the Peoples Redemption Party, and several other political formations. The goal is straightforward: identify the arrangement that best protects the democratic interests of his movement and the millions of supporters who have remained loyal to him across decades of public life. These are not casual conversations. Kwankwaso is deliberate by nature, and the engagements he describes carry the weight of strategic intent. A formal announcement, he assures, will come at the appropriate time.
On the matter of presidential ambition, Kwankwaso uses his statement to remind the public of something his career has demonstrated more than once. At the 2014 APC presidential primary, he finished second behind Muhammadu Buhari, ahead of Atiku Abubakar, Rochas Okorocha, and the late Sam Nda-Isaiah. He did not sulk or fracture the party’s momentum. He backed Buhari fully and worked toward the collective goal. Five years later, he contested the PDP presidential ticket with equal conviction, lost, and immediately pivoted to support winner Atiku Abubakar, coordinating the campaign across the North with discipline and loyalty. The senator presents this record not as a boast, but as context. Personal ambition, in his political life, has consistently yielded to party unity and national interest.
He is equally direct about the current presidential conversation swirling around his name. The ADC has not zoned its presidential ticket. No candidate has been discussed, endorsed, or shortlisted in any forum he has participated in. Kwankwaso states clearly in the release that he has neither declared any intention to run for president nor endorsed any aspirant. Every report suggesting otherwise, he insists, is premature and without foundation.
His absence from two recent ADC stakeholders’ meetings, the senator clarifies, carried no hidden message. Personal commitments kept him away on both occasions. He communicated his apologies to party leadership promptly and without drama. Reading political symbolism into an absence, he implies, is a habit that serves no one’s genuine understanding of events.
Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso closes his statement the way a seasoned statesman would: with restraint, resolve, and a clear signal that the next move belongs to him. He made it clear that he remains engaged at all levels, his consultations are active, and his decision, when it comes, will be delivered formally through official channels.
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