Accepting to be in Zamfara State a little over a week ago appeared to me as the dangerous dalliance between the hawk and chicken chicks. Yoruba Sakara music lord, Yusuff Olatunji, succintly painted the danger I felt. When the hawk (Asa) turns the chick into her playmate and the chick relishes this pseudo unity, the chick is playing with fire, so sang Olatunji. As we landed in Gusau that torrid afternoon, in my subconscious, Yusuff Olatunji kept on singing about the danger that lay ahead of me. Àsá ńb’éyelé se’ré, eyelé ńyò, eyelé ńfi’kú seré…” the warning, like a gun’s ricochet, bounced off ceaselessly in my brain.
I had been in Gusau 26 years earlier. Governor Sani Yerima had just amputated the hand of Bello Jangebe as martyrdom for his Sharia experimentation. I was one of the journalists who spoke with Yerima at the Government House over this burning conflagration. Since that unconscionable decision, Zamfara had worn the badge of an extreme Islamic fundamentalist state, a no-go area for any decent creation of the Most High God. The few people who knew of my impending travel to Gusau recoiled as if stung by a rattlesnake.
Thirty-four years ago, I lived in Yelwa-Yauri, Kebbi State and as such, Northwest Nigeria was not strange to me. But here I was in Gusau as part of a six-member crew that would interview Governor Dauda Lawal on the occasion of Zamfara’s 30th anniversary. The Gusau I saw had changed tremendously. The new airport was my first pleasant shock. I had hitherto followed the huge opposition from Lawal’s predecessors, Bello Matawalle and Abdulaziz Yari, to this idea of a Gusau airport project. Beholding the imposing, aesthetically colonizing structure of the airport, with reports that the runway and facilities, including the control tower, were state-of-the-art, made me to connect with Lawal’s stubborn pursuit of the project. In a state marooned by terrible federal roads, with a journey connecting Gusau to the next airports of Sokoto and Birnin Kebbi a traveler’s nightmare, Lawal seemed to have drilled a path for investors to ply to his state.
In the evening of our arrival, Lawal asked to meet those who would grill him. And thus, we drove round Gusau till about midnight. Night life bubbled. Commerce went on unabated as we drove round town on dualized roads constructed by his administration. Gradually, the geography of dissent to Zamfara began to be recalibrated in my mind. Buoyed by this atmosphere of a peaceful Gusau, the ladies on the entourage even attended church service in Gusau the second day, Sunday.
We soon arrived at Lawal’s private residence in Gusau’s GRA It was my first encounter with a Northern Nigerian governor in this dispensation, which proved exhilarating. Youthful, modern in thought and trained in universities outside Nigeria, this son of a textile giant looked like a departure from Northern Nigerian fad of depositing Acheulian characters with scant education in Government Houses.
We later visited the Ahmad Sani Yerima Bakura Specialist Hospital along Zaria Road/Tudun Wada, which is the state’s primary tertiary healthcare facility. We saw a very clean hospital environment, newly procured hospital equipment like MRI, CT Scan, ultrasound machines etc. The whole hospital was completely off-grip, with almost a kilometer-long solar farm. I instantly became a photographer, taking photographs of all the eye-stopping equipment.
With his nostalgic recall of what Gusau used to be, Lawal bridged the North-South divide with history. He took his journalist guests on a historical journey of Gusau-Southern Nigeria interface of his growing up years. Gusau was historically associated with traditional crafts like blacksmithing, weaving, and leather, as well as mid-20th-century agro-allied manufacturing like cotton textiles and vegetable oil extraction, he told us. With railway’s arrival in 1927, Gusau became a major collection and processing hub for cotton, culminating in the major Zamfara Textile Industries plant. Gusai shipped textiles to Lagos and petrol was pumped from Lagos and Ogun depots to this foremost northern economic hub. It also had facilities like the historic Gusau Oil Mill processed groundnuts and agricultural seeds.
Over the years however, things went cumulatively bad for Zamfara. It regressed so badly that it boasts of not even a single befitting hotel today, except the 7-storey hotel Lawal is currently constructing in Gusau.
I was however not one to meet the Lion in its lair, be scared of its mane and allow him take away my composure. So, I asked Dauda Lawal: “You made so much hoopla about the alleged corruption in Zamfara when you came on board, especially over the humongous amount hitherto spent on the airport by your predecessors, funds which you said you couldn’t track that ran into billions of Naira. It was also alleged that you computed the books and sent details to the EFCC to look into. Since you decamped to the APC, we haven’t heard you talk about inherited corruption, especially now that a politician in this state, who was barely making ends meet, bought the Geregu Power Plc for a billion Naira. What has changed?”
The governor attempted to parry the question. He didn’t succeed. But I succeeded in seeing Zamfara State from a new telescope.
Also published by the Sunday Tribune, October 11, 2026.
