Kaduna rally as the North’s referendum on Tinubu, By Abdulaziz Abdulaziz

The gathering was beyond a rented crowd; it was organic, massive, and emotional. A few photos from the event displayed that spectacularly: the excited trio waving so happily at their president who wound down the window to greet them; the many people who kept vigil at the venue so they could get a good spot to witness history; and the excited young men and women who spent the whole day under the sun waving flags and chanting praises. It was Arewa saying, without apology: we still stand with our friend.

Through Kaduna, its old political capital, the North spoke two days ago. And the echo will haunt those who have spent months marketing the lie that the North has abandoned President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

The Kaduna Township Stadium was full beyond capacity, and the mammoth crowd overflowed into the well-adorned streets. It was a confetti of colours, flags raised high and proudly: a sea of red caps, white babanriga, green wrappers, placards proclaiming “Sai Asiwaju.” It was a cacophony of languages — Hausa, Fulfulde, Tiv, Idoma, Gbagyi, Yoruba, Nupe, Kanuri, and English. Entire APC governors from the North, supported by their southern counterparts, sat shoulder-to-shoulder with former governors, legislators, imams, pastors, women leaders, and artisans who trekked kilometres to see the man they still call Jagaban, the leader.

The gathering was beyond a rented crowd; it was organic, massive, and emotional. A few photos from the event displayed that spectacularly: the excited trio waving so happily at their president who wound down the window to greet them; the many people who kept vigil at the venue so they could get a good spot to witness history; and the excited young men and women who spent the whole day under the sun waving flags and chanting praises. It was Arewa saying, without apology: we still stand with our friend.

As I wrote in February 2023, in the heat of the last campaign, when the same suspects tried to whip up ethnic sentiments against him, Asiwaju Tinubu and the North have always been friends. This friendship is not transactional. It is historic. Tinubu’s consequential political journey did not begin in Lagos. It began with the North.

In 1991, at the beginning of the aborted Third Republic, when General Ibrahim Babangida midwifed two parties, a young Tinubu had a choice. His kinsman, the great Chief Lateef Jakande, was in the field. Yet he chose to pitch his tent with General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua’s Peoples Front (PF) — the most organised, most progressive political machine of that era.

On the SDP platform under that PF, Tinubu became senator for Lagos West in 1992. When MKO Abiola emerged as SDP candidate, Tinubu was instrumental in pushing Ambassador Babagana Kingibe, a son of Borno, as the running mate. He chose North, again. That choice in 1992 has defined his politics ever since.

When President Obasanjo wanted to skin Atiku Abubakar alive in 2007, Bola Tinubu was his saviour. In 2011, he propped up Nuhu Ribadu, and Muhammadu Buhari in 2015 and 2019. In 2011, he supported Aminu Tambuwal for speaker at a time Tambuwal’s own party, the PDP, was against him. No other Southern politician has invested that much political capital in the North.

Indeed, the North doesn’t forget.

This is why Arewa for Asiwaju, a political movement of the crème de la crème of the Northern political establishment, is a commendable and timely intervention. At a time when the opposition offers only recycled fuel subsidy — illegal under the PIA — and AI-generated falsehoods which Governor Uba Sani rightly warned about in Kaduna, A4A provides what Arewa needs most: honest conversation, the voice of truth, in Hausa, Fulfulde, Tiv, Nupe, Gbagyi, Kanuri, in every market, motor park, mosque and church.

A4A is not just a campaign apparatus. It is a reminder that friendship is a two-way street and that the North is faithful to its values of fairness, justice, peaceful coexistence and national unity. As a political movement, its raison d’être is consensus-building and evidence-based campaigning. The purpose is to counter with evidence the lies that as president, Asiwaju Tinubu has abandoned his old friend, the North. How? With the Ministry of Livestock Development that the North craved for 60 years? With the North Central Development Commission and North West Development Commission? With the new federal universities in Mubi, Kachia and Kabo? Would the person who abandoned the North rush the completion of the Kano-Maradi rail or the Akwanga-Lafia-Makurdi road? Would he have established cancer centres and upgraded dozens of hospitals and schools? Well, Arewa for Asiwaju is throwing those questions with hard facts.

Kaduna provided a ground to further deflate the vacuous noise of the opposition. The North came together with one powerful voice. Eighteen out of 19 governors, an array of former governors from the class of 1999 to date, a horde of Young Turks, an armada of party faithful. It was a spectacle.

For months, a small but loud echo chamber in Abuja and on social media had been working hard to sell a fiction that the North regrets 2023, that the president and his campaigners can no longer enter Arewa, that 2027 is already decided. Kaduna buried that fiction with one picture.

As the Campaign Director-General of the APC Presidential Campaign, Senator Abdulaziz Yari said from the podium, everyone that mattered in the North was at the stadium yesterday. Most of them were there in person, a lot more in spirit. The few and scattered dissenters are too insignificant to cause any political upheaval.

Vice President Kashim Shettima and Yari did not come to Kaduna to speak grammar. They came with history and with receipts.

VP Shettima was as sharp and straight as always. He used a clincher to remind voters from the North of the options before them. “We won in 2023 not because we were the wisest or richest, but because you saw the options before you and knew the alternative was a calamity. We have come to ask you to renew a second term for the APC from top to bottom.”

Senator Yari, who was evidently pleased by the turnout across all walks of life, assured: “By God’s grace, Northern Nigeria is 101 per cent behind you, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and we are determined to deliver our promise on 16 January 2027.” Speaking further in Hausa, Senator Yari said the president should as well go to sleep and wait for victory.

Yet, President Tinubu did not just go to Kaduna to excite the crowd or display supporters. He went with deliveries. In a first for campaign rallies, President Tinubu used the occasion to inaugurate the 81-kilometre section of the Kaduna-Abuja highway with a symbolic ribbon-cutting. It is just one of many dividends Kaduna got from the Tinubu administration, as Governor Uba Sani reeled out so many benefits Kaduna reaped from the Tinubu administration in his welcome address. They range from roads to rail to universities and health institutions. The North, as Governor Sani testified, has never had it this good.

President Tinubu is repaying loyalty in concrete, steel, and care.

From Peoples Front in 1991 to Arewa for Asiwaju in 2026, President Tinubu has always operated as a friend. Kaduna proved it. On 16 January 2027, the ballot will confirm it louder.

Abdulaziz Abdulaziz is senior special assistant to the president on print media and director of media and communication, Arewa for Asiwaju.