By Farooq Kperogi In late 2024, it came into the open for the first time that the relationship between Dr. Rabiu Kwankwaso and his protégé,...
By Farooq Kperogi
In late 2024, it came into the open for the first time that the relationship between Dr. Rabiu Kwankwaso and his protégé, Gov. Abba Kabiru Yusuf, had fractured. But it was quickly papered over and dismissed as mere noise, a distraction engineered by enemies of Kwankwasiyya.
Then a few people in Gov. Yusuf’s government, accused of standing in the way between Dr. Kwankwaso and Gov. Yusuf, were fired. The most prominent of such firings was that of Prof. Abdullahi Baffa Bichi, the Secretary to the Government (SSG).
Prof. Bichi’s firing shocked me, so I reached out to a friend of mine who seems to be deeply inserted into, or at least close to people who are denizens of, the Kwankwasiyya power structure to seek explanations for why Bichi was let go.
He confided that Prof. Bichi was one of the arrowheads of the people who were goading Gov. Yusuf to assert his independence from Dr. Kwankwaso. That shocked me.
It shocked me because when Dr. Kwankwaso called me sometime in late 2023, he was with Prof. Bichi. He introduced Bichi with a lot of enthusiasm and asked if I knew him because we are both professors who graduated from Bayero University.
I said Bichi graduated before me but that I knew him by reputation because of his service as the Executive Secretary of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) from 2016 to 2019. He had a major falling out with former Education Minister Adamu Adamu, which caused his unceremonious firing, about which I wrote at the time.
Kwankwaso spoke very highly of Bichi and said he wanted me to get close to him. We never did. Kwankwaso did not remember to send me Bichi’s phone number as he promised, and I never reminded him.
But they seemed to have a great chemistry, and I got the impression that Bichi was one of Kwankwaso’s metaphoric eyes in the government, a trusted sentinel planted at the nerve center of power.
You can imagine my shock when I was told that he was one of the engineers of a political divorce between Yusuf and Kwankwaso.
But now that the divorce between Yusuf and Kwankwaso appears to have happened even after Bichi has been sacrificed in the service of signaling the indissolubility of the political bond between them, what do we make of this?
Where is Bichi? What is he saying about all this? Is he having the last laugh?
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