Governor Lawal’s battle with the old order in Zamfara, By Emmanuel Ado

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In Nigeria, many party members treat government resources as spoils of “war” to be shared among themselves. Victory at the polls, they believe, entitles them to offices, contracts and other benefits, whether or not they are competent. Left to them, state governors and even the President would only appoint card-carrying party members as commissioners, ministers and board members.

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Technocrats, however qualified, should never be considered on the grounds that “they didn’t contribute” to the victory. And when they are appointed over their objections, they most often treat them as interlopers occupying positions that rightly belong to party loyalists.

This is the mindset Governor Dauda Lawal encountered in Zamfara State. His decision to balance competence with political considerations, and his choice to award major projects, including the Zamfara International Airport and major road projects, to reputable construction companies, unfortunately brought him into conflict with an old political order that sees contracts and appointments as rewards for only party members.

The problem is not peculiar to Zamfara State or even to Nigeria. It has a long political history. In the United States, Senator William L Marcy of New York famously defended what became known as the “spoils system”, arguing in 1832 that “to the victor belong the spoils.”

The expression captured the idea that political victory entitled the winning party’s supporters to government positions and benefits. The Nigerian version has its own peculiarities, but the underlying logic is similar: membership of a party is treated not simply as a contribution to the democratic process, but as an investment that must be richly rewarded when power is won.

Under this patronage logic, a party member who helped mobilise votes feels entitled to a government contract, regardless of whether he possesses the technical or financial capacity to execute it or not. The same applies to appointments, which are treated as jobs for the boys. But for Zamfara State to develop, that mindset had to change. For years no governor wanted to rock the boat.

Lawal was always going to meet stiff resistance from the old order, however deftly he handled it. He nevertheless came into office determined to change an entrenched system in a state that, though three decades old, had little to show for its potential. The same habit that favoured party members in unexecuted contracts shaped the annual budgets: recurrent spending, which pays salaries and running costs, was always well funded, while capital spending was starved, leaving a deep infrastructure deficit. The 2026 budget reversed that order. Of the ₦861 billion he presented, ₦714 billion, or 83 per cent, was for capital projects, against ₦147 billion, or 17 per cent, for recurrent spending.

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Lawal’s attempt to reverse those old ways of doing things, which had not worked and to move government away from serving a narrow circle of party members and towards development that would benefit the wider population, naturally unsettled those accustomed to the old arrangement that worked for them.

The sense of entitlement by many politicians is so deeply entrenched that there was a time when the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was derisively described by the politicians themselves as “People Dividing the Pepper”, a crude expression of the perception that political power was primarily about sharing state resources among party members. The expression captures the patronage mentality that Governor Lawal is confronting: the belief that those who helped him win the election are solely entitled to the resources of the government their party controls.

A very good student of politics, Lawal must have anticipated that the attacks, or rather the ambush, would come around election time. He also clearly understood that any fundamental change to an established system was never going to be without friction. He must have consequently prepared himself for the claims of marginalization that would have inevitably followed, by ensuring that while key projects went to reputable companies, local contractors equally benefited. This has turned out to be his saving grace.

That inevitable confrontation eventually came at the APC stakeholders’ meeting, where Governor Lawal addressed the allegations surrounding contracts, patronage and empowerment. Rather than being put on the defensive, he put his administration’s record on the table and strongly rejected the narrative that political stakeholders had been deliberately excluded from government opportunities.

According to the governor, several party stakeholders and prominent political figures had been awarded contracts and had benefited from various government programmes. He rejected the claim that his administration had deliberately shut out political stakeholders. The real failure, he said, was that the government had not publicly disclosed the details of contract awards, including the beneficiaries, the projects and the sums involved. “Na yi kuskure,” he said, meaning “I made a mistake not disclosing these facts.

Lawal’s admission matters because the missing information gave the false claims the room to spread. Contractors were patronized by the government and still told the public that the administration had not benefited from the government. With no official record to contradict their claims, they were believed. He criticised those who deliberately misrepresented the facts, but accepted that the government’s silence had made it possible.

Lawal’s response to address the information gap rather than trade words with his critics is critical. He said the government would henceforth publish the names of contract beneficiaries, the projects awarded, the contractors executing them and the sums involved. This masterstroke would make it impossible for beneficiaries to continue to make their claims of exclusion against the official record.

What the banker-turned-politician did not say, perhaps deliberately, was that some of those making the allegations may have been motivated either by a desire to give his administration a bad name or because they didn’t want to share their benefits with their associates, so they lied. There is also the remote possibility that some are “fifth columnists” intent on creating a false impression about his administration and its prospects ahead of the 2027 elections.

The stakeholders’ engagement has moved the argument beyond the political accusations to a more fundamental question: what should public resources be used for?

Governor Lawal, who came into office on a “Rescue Mission”, challenged the definition by politicians of empowerment as cash handouts, personal favours or opportunities for a few individuals to share public resources. Responding to complaints from figures such as Hon. Sani Jaji and Hassan Nasiha, he argued in favour of a broader vision of empowerment—one that includes the construction of roads, water projects, security funding and other infrastructure that would create opportunities for a greater number of people, rather than serving the interests of a handful of political actors.

Governor Lawal also challenged the reduction of “empowerment” to distribution of money, popularized by the former Ekiti State Governor Ayo Fayose’s “stomach infrastructure” school of politics. Lawal’s argument is that governance cannot and should never be reduced to the distribution of small sums of money, motorcycles, food items or other temporary benefits. He argued that while such interventions may provide immediate relief, that they have failed because they do not address the structural causes of poverty or create the conditions for sustained growth.

For Lawal, meaningful empowerment is about government creating the conditions under which citizens can become economically self-reliant. Which explains the huge investment in education, healthcare, vocational training and scholarship opportunities, while restoring security and providing the infrastructure necessary for productive economic activity.

His administration’s emphasis on tackling the security challenges facing the state is not separate from its economic agenda: farmers cannot return to their farms, traders cannot operate freely if their communities remain unsafe. By restoring peace and creating an environment in which commercial activity can flourish, government would have created the opportunity that extend far beyond the immediate beneficiaries of any political handout.

The same principle applies to infrastructure. Roads, schools, hospitals, water systems and other public facilities should not be benefits reserved for those who support the government; they are public assets that should be available to everyone. A functional hospital will serve the politician and the farmer alike. A good rural road will enable agricultural produce to reach markets more efficiently. Reliable infrastructure will connect the various communities, reduce the cost of doing business and spread economic prosperity.

In this sense, Lawal’s vision of empowerment is less about what government can distribute today to party members and more about what it should build that will benefit more people.

The significance of the stakeholders’ meeting lies precisely in this debate. It brought into the open two competing approaches to governance: one rooted in the distribution of government resources through networks of influence, and another that places greater emphasis on the greater good of all. Governor Lawal’s decision to depart from the established practices of the past was always going to unsettle those accustomed to the privileges of the old system. But the citizens of Zamfara State deserve a government that uses public resources in the overall public interest.

Governor Lawal has rightly remained firm on the side of the social contract between government and the people. For him, leadership is ultimately about delivering on that contract—creating the conditions for a more secure, and economically developed Zamfara State.

For Zamfara State, the issue is not whether members of the ruling party have a legitimate role in governance. They do. The question is whether political participation should automatically translate into entitlement to public resources, irrespective of competence, capacity or the wider public interest.

*Ado, a public affairs analyst, contributed this piece from Kaduna

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