The Kwara State governorship primary of the All Progressives Congress, held on May 22, 2026, produced a candidate: Yakubu Danladi-Salihu, Speaker of the State House of Assembly. It also split the party’s two most powerful figures in the state, Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq and Senator Saliu Mustapha of Kwara Central.
The rift did not start there, The PUNCH reported. But the primary appears to have turned a quiet disagreement into an open one.
The primary
The vote was held across the state’s 193 wards after an earlier postponement that party officials blamed on logistics. Danladi-Salihu polled 94,990 votes. Yahaya Seriki got 41,700, and Bashir Bolarinwa, a former state APC chairman, placed third with 22,118. The winning margin over Seriki was more than 53,000 votes. Eight other aspirants were on the list, according to the results announced by Musiliu Obanikoro, who chaired the APC primary election committee.
Danladi-Salihu comes from Kwara North, a district that has never produced an elected governor. Its leaders had pressed for power to rotate there after AbdulRazaq’s eight years in office. Pre-primary calculations had appeared to favour Seriki, with some aspirants reportedly stepping down in his support.
Some aspirants and stakeholders called for a review of the process. The APC leadership said a committee from the national secretariat supervised the exercise and that Danladi-Salihu was duly elected. He was later handed his nomination form.
Mustapha’s account
Mustapha, who is also the Turaki of Ilorin Emirate, had been seen for months as a major contender to succeed AbdulRazaq, whose second term ends on May 29, 2027. His executive assistant, Abdulkareem Alabi, told The PUNCH the senator wanted one thing. “What the senator wanted was the governorship ticket, nothing more, nothing less,” Alabi said.
According to Alabi, Mustapha had consulted at national and local levels and believed he had a green light, including from the Presidency. Then, on the morning of the National Assembly primary, word spread that his name was on the list of Senate aspirants. “Even the senator himself was unaware that his name had been included on the list,” Alabi said.
Alabi alleged that President Bola Tinubu had shown a special interest in Mustapha succeeding the governor, and that AbdulRazaq objected: “the governor insisted that Mustapha could only become his successor over his dead body.” The newspaper said it could not independently verify those claims.
The governor’s response
The governor’s camp rejected the account. Ibraheem Abdullateef, the governor’s senior special assistant on communications, said it was wrong to claim AbdulRazaq took the ticket from Mustapha. “The truth is that it was President Tinubu who denied him the governorship ticket,” he said. He also said “the senator is largely responsible for losing the ticket,” because he told the President he had agreed with the governor to swap positions.
Abdullateef denied that the governor blocked Mustapha’s phone line after a reconciliation meeting chaired by the Emir and the late Chief Imam. Alabi had made that allegation and dated the feud to 2023, after a dispute over a seat at the Eid praying ground in Ilorin meant for former Senate President Bukola Saraki.
Exit from the APC
After the primary, the state’s three APC senators, Mustapha, Oyelola Ashiru and Sadiq Umar, called for a review of parts of the exercise and urgent reconciliation. Alabi claimed Mustapha’s loyalists were pushed off party structures and that Kwara Central lost road projects worth more than N20bn, about N14bn of it in 2024. Those claims are his, and the governor’s camp has rejected the broader narrative.
Mustapha resigned from the APC in August and joined the Peoples Democratic Party, which named him its candidate for the Kwara Central Senate seat. AbdulRazaq is seeking that same seat when his term ends. Asked on Channels Television whether he could beat the governor, Mustapha said, “I will defeat him before 12 noon.”
His departure set off resignations in Gambari Ward 1 in Ilorin East, where the ward chairman, the secretary and 10 other executive members left the APC.
