By Ibrahim G. Lamara
When the All Progressives Congress named Farouk Mustapha as running mate to its governorship candidate, Muhammad Abdullahi Abubakar, SAN, the announcement drew attention for an obvious reason. Mr. Mustapha is a former Commissioner for Special Duties and Rural Development, and he directed Governor Bala Mohammed’s campaign organisation in 2023.
Now he stands on the opposing ticket. Many in Bauchi are asking whether his change of sides can hurt the Allied Peoples Movement, to which the governor moved in May. A sober look at how elections are actually won suggests it cannot.
Start with the plain arithmetic of the ticket. Mr. Mustapha is the deputy, not the principal. A running mate can add balance, a few networks and some campaign experience, but nobody has ever won a governorship on the strength of the second name on the ballot. Votes are delivered by structures that run from the polling unit to the ward to the local government, and those cannot be handed over by a press statement or a defection letter.
The APM, for its part, did not arrive empty-handed. When Governor Mohammed announced his move on 2 May, he said he was leaving the Peoples Democratic Party with his structure intact, from the ward to the local government to the state level. The party’s national chairman, Yusuf Dantalle, received him publicly and described the platform as free of the legal entanglements that have troubled other parties. The governor has since secured the APM ticket for the Bauchi South Senate. A movement built on that footing is not shaken by the exit of one former appointee, however familiar his face.
It is worth remembering where Mr. Mustapha’s public standing came from. He served in government because the governor appointed him, and he later resigned, along with other commissioners, after the governor directed appointees with elective ambitions to step down. That was proper and unremarkable. But it shows that much of his political weight came from office and association rather than from an independent base that he can carry from one platform to another. Without the platform, his reach is that of any other politician: real, but limited.
Nor does his arrival turn the APC into a juggernaut. The party in Bauchi has its own house to put in order. Over recent months, reports have described deepening disaffection in the state chapter. Former deputy governor Sagir Saleh and several aspirants resigned from the party, while the camp of former Foreign Affairs Minister Yusuf Tuggar publicly rejected the emergence of Mr. Abubakar as candidate. A party that must first reconcile its own members has little energy left to disrupt anyone else. A new running mate does not heal those divisions and may well sharpen them.
Then there is the question of how Mr. Mustapha has chosen to frame his move. He has suggested that he is being targeted for leaving the governor’s camp. Public figures who change sides must expect to be asked why, and asking is not persecution. Bauchi voters are entitled to know what he did as commissioner, what he now offers, and what changed. A politician who answers those questions with a plan for the state will be heard. One who answers with grievance will find that attention moves on quickly.
Bauchi people are not passive observers of these events. They have watched governments come and go, and they know the difference between a programme and a performance. They will weigh records, promises and conduct, and they will do so with the patience of an electorate that has heard many speeches. Whatever name appears at the bottom of a ticket, it is that judgment which counts.
Defections have always been a feature of Nigerian politics, running in every direction, and the parties that last are the ones that treat them as a test rather than a crisis. The APM can welcome this contest, answer every fair question put to it, and keep doing the patient work of the organisation: registering members, strengthening ward structures, and taking its message to communities across the state. That work does not depend on any one individual, including the governor’s former lieutenants.
Mr. Mustapha is free to pursue his ambition on the platform he has chosen. But a right to compete is not a power to stop a movement. In the end, the people of Bauchi will decide who earns their trust, and nothing in the record so far suggests that one running mate will change the way they go about it.
Ibrahim G. Lamara writes on politics and public affairs from Bauchi.
