By Elder Karofi
Salis Gamawa’s essay is an elaborate attempt to transform an uneven electoral history into a mythology of grassroots political dominance. It is eloquently written, generously sprinkled with figures, and emotionally reinforced with personal testimonials. But beneath the rhetoric lies a fundamental problem: the article repeatedly confuses political participation with political strength, electoral visibility with electoral success, and political association with independently demonstrable grassroots influence.
The central question is therefore simple: what exactly is the evidence that Farouk Mustapha possesses the formidable grassroots political capital the article attributes to him? The answer cannot simply be old election results.
Farouk Mustapha was elected to the House of Representatives in 2003. That is an established political achievement and deserves recognition. But one successful election more than two decades ago cannot, by itself, establish permanent political dominance. The subsequent record presented by the author actually invites a different interpretation.
In 2011, he contested the Bauchi North Senatorial election on the ACN platform and reportedly obtained 60,505 votes. In 2015, he contested on the PDP platform and obtained 97,047 votes. In 2019, he contested on the NNPP platform and obtained 92,140 votes.
The author adds these figures together and presents them as evidence of an enduring personal political constituency.
However, elections are not bank accounts. Votes from three different elections cannot simply be accumulated to create a permanent measure of political capital. They belong to different political environments, different candidates, different parties, different alliances and different electoral circumstances.
More importantly, the figures must be examined alongside the outcomes.
A politician does not become formidable merely because he repeatedly appears on a ballot paper and attracts substantial votes. The more revealing question is whether those votes consistently translate into victory, political control, legislative representation or an independently identifiable political constituency.
That is where the argument begins to weaken.
The article’s own evidence shows that Farouk Mustapha has spent much of his political career contesting and losing elections. His supporters are entitled to admire his resilience, but resilience should not be rhetorically converted into electoral dominance.
There is also an important distinction between being politically active and being politically formidable.
A politician can contest elections for decades, move between political parties, maintain relationships with influential figures and remain visible in political circles without possessing the kind of independent grassroots machinery that can reliably deliver victory.
Indeed, the repeated movement across ACN, PDP, NNPP and now APC raises a question the article conspicuously avoids: if the political capital is genuinely personal and independent of party structures, where is the consistent electoral evidence of it?
The article calls movement between political platforms proof that “thousands of supporters move with him.”
That is an assertion, not evidence.
How many supporters actually moved with him? From which wards? From which local governments? How many polling units? What proportion of his previous vote followed him from one party to another? Where is the comparative polling-unit analysis demonstrating that his personal support remained intact regardless of the party platform?
Without such evidence, “thousands of supporters move with him” remains a political claim rather than an established fact.
The 2019 NNPP result is similarly presented as decisive proof of personal political strength. Yet there is a logical leap in saying that because a candidate obtained 92,140 votes under a smaller party, those votes were necessarily his personal political property.
Votes belong to elections, not individuals.
A serious political analysis would examine the geographical distribution of those votes, compare them with previous elections, identify where his support increased or declined, and determine whether the votes were concentrated in particular communities or reflected broader political dynamics.
Instead, the article simply converts the headline figure into evidence of personal political capital.
That is precisely the kind of political arithmetic that deserves scrutiny.
The treatment of the 2019 governorship election is even more problematic.
The author suggests that Farouk’s support for Bala Mohammed after the senatorial election demonstrated his capacity to move political support behind another candidate. But the fact that Bala Mohammed won a closely contested election does not establish how many of those votes were mobilised by Farouk Mustapha.
Where is the evidence that Farouk personally delivered a measurable bloc of those votes?
Where is the polling-unit evidence?
Where is the counterfactual showing what Bala Mohammed’s vote would have been without Farouk’s intervention?
Without those answers, attributing a statewide electoral outcome to one political actor is little more than retrospective political storytelling.
The same problem becomes even more obvious in the discussion of the 2023 election.
The article says that because Farouk Mustapha served as Director-General of the PDP Governorship Campaign, the PDP’s 525,280 votes should be understood as evidence of his organisational capacity.
But Bauchi’s 2023 election was not conducted by one man.
It involved the incumbent governor, the PDP’s statewide party structure, elected officials, political appointees, local government structures, traditional and community networks, legislators, candidates at various levels, campaign organisations and thousands of party supporters.
To attribute the strength of that entire political machinery to one campaign director is not analysis. It is political exaggeration.
A campaign director is important.
A campaign director is not the election.
And this distinction matters.
More importantly, the actual electoral performance within Farouk Mustapha’s own immediate political environment presents an uncomfortable contradiction to the mythology of overwhelming grassroots strength.
Farouk Mustapha could not even win his own polling unit in Azare. He could not win his own Local Government Area of Katagum. For someone presented as possessing formidable grassroots political capital, and who served as Director-General of a gubernatorial campaign, that is not merely an embarrassing electoral outcome; it raises serious questions about the depth of his political base and his capacity to translate political visibility into votes.
If a politician cannot demonstrate dominance in his own polling unit, and cannot carry his own Local Government Area, the burden becomes even greater when his supporters seek to portray him as a political force capable of determining the direction of an entire state.
The question is straightforward: where exactly is this vaunted grassroots machinery?
If the political capital is truly formidable, one would reasonably expect its clearest expression to be found closest to home.
The author himself inadvertently provides the evidence against his own argument by acknowledging the scale of the wider PDP performance across the state.
If the PDP carried 18 of 20 local governments in the presidential election and subsequently won substantial numbers of legislative seats, then the result reflected a broad party and political environment. It cannot reasonably be reduced to the personal political capital of one individual.
The essay also repeatedly invokes Farouk’s ability to identify and promote individuals, eventually shifting from electoral evidence to personal testimony. The author describes himself as one of the beneficiaries of Farouk’s generosity and recounts how Farouk introduced him to influential political figures.
That may be personally meaningful, and there is nothing wrong with acknowledging someone who helped one’s career.
But personal gratitude is not empirical evidence of statewide grassroots political strength.
A person can be a generous mentor without being an electoral heavyweight. A person can open doors without controlling votes. A person can have influential relationships without possessing an independent political constituency.
These are different forms of political capital, and the essay deliberately blurs them.
There is, however, an irony in the fact that Salis himself presents himself as a political beneficiary and mentee of Farouk Mustapha while making such sweeping claims about political capacity. If the standard is political effectiveness, then it is fair to examine the political record of those making the argument as well.
By the same standard being used to elevate Farouk, what measurable political influence does Salis himself command in Gamawa Local Government? What identifiable grassroots structure does he control? What evidence exists of a sustained relationship with the people at the grassroots?
It is difficult to reconcile the grand language of political influence with the fact that Salis himself reportedly visited his Local Government Area of Gamawa no more than four times throughout his approximately three-year tenure as commissioner. A politician cannot build a serious grassroots political base from a distance. Grassroots politics requires physical presence, relationships, accessibility, community engagement and sustained interaction with the people.
If the allegation that he visited his Local Government Area no more than four times throughout his tenure is accurate, then it raises its own questions about the authenticity of the grassroots credentials being presented.
And perhaps even more revealing is the contrast between the political narrative being constructed today and the circumstances under which Salis himself entered public life.
He should remember the political circumstances in which Governor Kaura found him. Before his appointment, he was barely struggling to establish himself and, by his own political history, had not built a significant career, business empire or recognised professional platform that could independently explain the prominence he later acquired.
Governor Kaura gave him an opportunity and helped elevate him from obscurity into political relevance.
That history should matter.
How, then, can someone who benefited substantially from the political patronage and opportunity provided by Governor Kaura now so casually disregard that political history, while simultaneously comparing the governor’s political stature with that of a politician whose own electoral record is far less impressive?
And the contradiction becomes even more striking in Salis’s present political alignment. If he is now supporting M.A. Abubakar despite having no comparable history of personal political intervention in his rise, while opposing the candidate anointed by Governor Kaura, then he owes the public an explanation beyond the convenient language of political principle.
What exactly changed?
Was the same political patronage that was valuable when it elevated him suddenly irrelevant when it no longer served his present political preference?
These are legitimate questions, especially when the same writer is asking the public to accept a carefully curated version of political history.
Governor Kaura’s anointed candidate, by any objective assessment of political pedigree and demonstrated capacity, deserves to be evaluated on his own record rather than being dismissed in favour of a politician whose principal evidence of grassroots dominance appears to be a collection of past election results, political appointments and personal relationships.
There is another striking omission.
The article repeatedly argues that Farouk’s influence survives outside government office. Fine. Then the appropriate test should be simple: measure that influence when government machinery is not available to him.
How many elected officials owe their positions directly to his independent mobilisation?
How many local governments can he deliver in the grand scheme of things?
Elder Karofi is a political analyst based in Bauchi
