Wednesday April 08, 2026

Nigerian political power doesn't retire. It rests, then it finds a new body.

Yusuf Buhari, the only son of the late former president Muhammadu Buhari, formally declared his intention to contest the House of Representatives seat for the Sandamu/Daura/Mai'Adua Federal Constituency in Katsina State this week. He's running on the APC platform. The state governor, Dikko Radda, is reported to back him as his "anointed candidate." Party stakeholders held a meeting at the Sandamu Local Government Secretariat, produced an endorsement, and the machinery moved.

Buhari's father died in 2025. His son's political debut is happening before the year of mourning is out.

The mechanism here is one of the most reliable in Nigerian politics. When a political patron dies or exits power, the network they built doesn't dissolve. It looks for continuity. A son, a deputy, a trusted ally. Someone the existing structure can recognise as a legitimate heir without requiring the loyalty relationships to be rebuilt from scratch. Radda's endorsement of Yusuf Buhari is not about Yusuf Buhari. It's about the Daura political establishment maintaining its claim on a constituency it has held for three decades, using a name the voters already know.

The letter Yusuf signed on April 3 is written in the standard language of constituency ambition. Infrastructure. Human capital. Qualitative leadership. What it actually signals is that the political estate of Muhammadu Buhari is open and the beneficiaries are staking their claims. Every governor, every lawmaker, every contractor who built their position on the Buhari network is now calculating which succession relationship to invest in. Yusuf is the first formal move on that board.

INEC has scheduled party primaries for April 23 to May 30. The 2027 machine is already running. The names on the ballot are beginning to take shape, and so far those names look very familiar.

There's a pattern worth naming here that goes beyond Katsina. Across the country, the same weeks that party primaries are opening are seeing a rush of declarations from sons, spouses, deputies, and aides of former power holders. The electoral system creates a window every four years in which political capital must be converted into formal position or it begins to decay. That conversion is happening now, and the raw material being converted is often inherited rather than earned. What Nigerian democracy has not yet produced is a mechanism that makes inherited political capital harder to spend.

The election that produces a different Nigeria requires different people entering it. The people currently entering it are the children of the last one.