While I was strolling through social media in search of a topic that would break away from politics into something more human, the material came from Kano, and it fitted the weekend perfectly. It was a caption capable of breaking every resistance and setting curiosity on fire, as reported by Daily Nigerian: Exclusive, Governor Abba Yusuf’s wife files for divorce in Abuja court, offers to refund dowry.
Zainab Musa Kwankwaso, the second wife of Kano State Governor Abba Yusuf, has filed for divorce at the Upper Area Court sitting in Gudu, Abuja, according to court documents obtained by the newspaper. A civil summons, with reference number CV/97/26, ordered the governor to appear before the court on November 17, 2026. Zainab, who is described as a daughter of Senator Rabiu Kwankwaso, married gov Yusuf on July 29, 2006 while serving her father as aide.The marriage produced six children.
In Nigerian politics a governor is imagined as a man who has everything, power, money, security, loyalists and praise singers, and yet here was a woman walking away from the very centre of that power and offering to return her dowry in order to be free.
The first thing that came to my mind was to call Dr Abubakar Alkali and many others who had dismissed the conflict between Governor Yusuf and Senator Kwankwaso as stage managed. This news tends to further validate the fact that the public exchange between the two camps, the open rivalry, malice and bitterness, is too natural, too raw and too real to be scripted to deceive the public.
Yet I also understand that political parties and opponents love narratives that fit their interest and help them demarket rivals by suggesting conspiracy or connivance as a tool of blackmail. We cannot change the judgement of people who stand to gain from such framing. What we can do is look closely at the human drama behind the political theatre, because politics may begin in party secretariats but it often ends at the dining table.
However, Zainab is not the true biological daughter of Senator Rabiu Kwankwaso, even though the Daily Nigerian report describes her as his daughter. The confusion comes from how the word daughter is used in Kano and Hausa family language, where a niece or a girl from the extended family is often called daughter. A journalist who had once repeated the same claim later corrected himself, saying that one of Yusuf’s wives was from his erstwhile godfather’s extended family but was not his biological daughter, while another report put it more specifically, that Yusuf is said to be married to the daughter of Kwankwaso’s brother, not Kwankwaso himself. In northern Nigeria, kinship is not merely biology, it is belonging, loyalty, obligation and identity, and a woman raised inside the Kwankwaso household can be a daughter in every social and emotional sense even when she is not a daughter by birth.
Daily Nigerian links the divorce directly to the political fallout, saying that although Yusuf fell out with his godfather-cum-father-in-law about a year ago, the fallout now appears to have extended into his marriage, which sources say has been experiencing a prolonged crisis. The same report says that on 28 October, Zainab reportedly left Kano Government House for her father’s residence on Miller Road, Kano, before flying to Abuja without her police orderly and escorts, that security operatives attached to her quarters and to Kwankwaso’s residence were reportedly arrested, questioned and later released, and that her elder sister and elder brother, Ado Kwankwaso, were reportedly invited by police over allegations that they assisted her leaving, with alleged pressure to charge Ado with kidnapping.
In the court papers themselves, Zainab did not cite politics. She cited personal breakdown, a persistent lack of reciprocal care, love, affection and emotional connection, saying she had lost her love and affection for the governor and developed a deep-seated aversion to the marriage, that all efforts to reconcile them had failed, and that the governor’s heart had completely turned away from the union. She is seeking dissolution through khul’i, an Islamic procedure under which a wife may seek separation, usually in return for compensation or the refund of the dowry.
This is where Murray Bowen’s concept of triangulation becomes painfully illuminating, for it explains how a third person, in this case the extended family or the political camp, becomes pulled into a two-person conflict, so that a wife is no longer merely a wife but a messenger, a symbol, a hostage or a spy, and every private quarrel is interpreted as a political signal.
If two families are in conflict, as a wife at the centre, would you side with your husband or your uncle? Will you side with your in-law family or your own family? This is how people inherit hate, transfer malice and aggression, and become suspects in a war they did not start.
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As the relationship between Nasir El-Rufai and Governor Uba Sani degenerated, one of El-Rufai’s sons came to the media to accuse his brother, a member of the House of Representatives, of siding with their enemy and failing to defect from the APC. Yet Atiku Abubakar’s son is with Tinubu, to show the other side of how people can still navigate such family vendetta and resist faulty perception. Blood does not automatically produce loyalty, and marriage does not automatically erase origin, and in a society where politics is family and family is politics, the most intimate relationships become the most vulnerable to public pressure.
This news still challenges the assumption that a governor or president should have everyone loving them, including their enemies, especially when they are in power. It is strange and one of those odd things about life that we cannot easily explain, that it is the wife who is lodging the complaint in court, and we are left wondering what it is that she cannot tolerate despite a lifetime opportunity.
The news also called her the second wife. In most cases, the last wife is seen as the first lady, the lady of the house and the one reigning, so it raises suspicion about why she should be complaining more after marrying her last.
Yet Arlie Hochschild’s idea of emotional labour offers a clue, that a woman can smile in public, perform loyalty, host guests and endure neglect in private, until the emotional account is overdrawn and she decides that dignity is worth more than status, and that even the Government House can become a gilded cage when love has left it.
Politics and power are temporary, but relationships are built to last forever. I wish Kwankwaso would go beyond politics and see reason to intervene to save the relationship. There are times when we make choices that save lives by compromising or sacrificing pride.
For once, Atiku and David Mark have shown that politics can co-exist with both family alliance and feud for the good of all.
In the end, this story is not merely about a governor, a godfather and a divorce suit in Abuja. It is about what happens when the public and the private collapse into each other, when a political divorce becomes a marital divorce, and when a woman who was once a bridge between two powerful men decides that she will no longer be the bridge that everyone walks upon.
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Bagudu Mohammed is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media, and writes a weekly newspaper column published every Monday on the back page of Peoples Daily.Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
