I have written about Ali Pate in the past. I have praised his appointment as Minister. I naturally should. I love intelligent people who demonstrate competence in what they do. I only met him once and interviewed him once, when he contested the election under the PRP.
That interview was in 2019. I went in with admiration. I came out with admiration. The man had ideas. The man had a pedigree. The man had everything Bauchi could ask for in a governor.
During the election, he got a few thousand votes. The number is in INEC’s records. Anyone can check.
A lot has happened since. He was selected to lead GAVI, the global Vaccine Alliance. Then President Tinubu called him home. He is now the Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare. He oversees the health of more than 220 million Nigerians.
This is a serious man. This is a globally serious man.
Which is why what he is now doing in Bauchi politics is so difficult to understand.
A few days ago, Professor Pate publicly ruled out a 2027 governorship bid. He cited national service. Fair enough. But ruling out a bid is not the same as standing aside. And anybody following Bauchi politics today can see that Pate has not stood aside. He has stepped into something else. He has stepped into the role of kingmaker.
The candidate he is positioning is Mohammed Abdullahi Abubakar — MA Abubakar, the former governor who lost to Bala Mohammed in 2019. The plan, as it is being read in Bauchi, is straightforward. Install MA Abubakar for one term. Then take the seat in 2031, after eight years as a federal minister.
I want to ask the questions that people facing this proposal must ask.
What has changed in MA Abubakar?
The guy who failed to settle gratuities? Someone who failed to complete the roads he excavated and destroyed? Has MA Abubakar produced the development blueprint he could not produce while in office? Has he accounted for the ghost workers his administration could not? Has he, in the years since 2019, demonstrated any administrative capacity that he failed to demonstrate while in office? What has changed in the MA Abubakar we knew in 2019?
If the answer to any of these questions is no, on what basis would Professor Pate insist that MA had to come back?
I am not going to call MA Abubakar’s tenure what some Bauchi people call it in private. I am only going to ask: in the recorded history of governance in Bauchi State, can anyone point to a worse-performing tenure? Salaries that came late and were sometimes denied. Pensioners who waited. Roads that were torn up and left as trenches. A capital that lost its dignity in those four years. An administration whose most reliable export was the governor’s command of English. A graveyard for chickens?
What he had was a vocabulary. What the state needed was a government.
This is the man Pate is now investing his credibility in.
And it gets stranger. Reports now indicate Pate is purchasing nomination forms for individuals he has never empowered, never mentored, and never worked with. People who have no political base of their own. People whose only qualification appears to be spoilers.
Why?
If a man is not running himself and is not building a coalition for the most credible candidates in the field, what is he doing? Is the buying of forms for unknown aspirants a serious political strategy? Or is it a deliberate effort to fragment the field, confuse the party, and clear the path for MA Abubakar by ensuring no consensus emerges around anyone else?
I leave the question on the table.
But I want to ask Pate something more fundamental.
Whose credibility is he spending?
Pate’s stature was not built in Misau. It was built in Abuja, in Geneva, on the global stage. It was built on the backs of institutions whose mandate is the welfare of the poor, including the poor of Bauchi. Every Talakawa who watched him rise contributed something to that rise. They conferred legitimacy on his name. They allowed his name to mean something.
That credibility is not his to spend privately. It is not his place to transfer to a man his own constituency has rejected by their lived experience. When he tries to do so, what is he saying about the people who built him?
This is the disservice. It is not just bad politics. It is a betrayal of the public who made his political existence possible.
Consider what this conduct does, even if the project succeeds.
It tells future MA Abubakars that incompetence is survivable, provided one is well-connected. It tells future Bala Wuntis, Shehu Bubas, and Yusuf Maitama Tuggars that their records and their constituencies matter less than their proximity to a senior man with a personal calculation. It corrupts the very discipline that elections are supposed to impose on aspirants. It empties out the moral category of the statesman in a country that already has too few statesmen left.
And consider what this does to Pate himself.
His value to Nigeria — the reason Tinubu reached for him, the reason GAVI selected him, the reason the international development community returns his calls — is that he has been seen as standing apart from the politics that hollow out Nigerian governance. The MA Abubakar project ends that perception. It places him inside a faction. It identifies him with a discredited predecessor. It makes him answerable for an outcome he cannot control.
When the project fails — and it will fail — who will own the failure?
Not MA Abubakar. He has nothing left to lose. Pate. The man who used his stature to revive a discredited tenure cannot escape the verdict on it.
Bauchi politics has alternatives. Pate’s calculation pretends otherwise. Senator Shehu Buba has a documented legislative record and a base that elected him on his own terms. Bala Wunti carries a technocratic credibility comparable to Pate’s own MA and an independent constituency that owes nothing to a patron. Yusuf Maitama Tuggar, a former foreign minister, brings a deep northern political pedigree. None of these men is Pate’s to allocate. None of their constituencies is his property.
Even Governor Bala Mohammed, whom one need not personally admire, has run an administration that has mega projects to its credit. The comparison does not flatter the candidate Pate is attempting to install.
Why will this backfire?
Three reasons. Plain ones.
First, Pate’s national brand depends on standing above politics. The MA Abubakar project ends that perception, and it cannot be retrieved.
Second, when the project collapses, Pate is responsible for the collapse. The man who spends his credibility to revive a discredited tenure cannot escape the verdict on it.
Third, Bauchi voters have memory. The 2019 result was not an accident. It was a verdict — on the assumption that federal stature translates to state legitimacy, on the distance between a global CV and local political work, on the hope that a constituency can be addressed in absentia.
To Professor Pate directly: the path you are on protects neither your legacy nor your political future. There is still time to step back from the MA Abubakar project. There is no time to recover from owning its failure. You are too valuable to Nigeria for this. You were too valuable to Bauchi to spend this way.
To the Bauchi political class and to the Talakawa whose interests are nowhere in this calculation: 2031 is being negotiated now, in 2026, by men who hope you have forgotten 2015 to 2019. You have not. The men who govern you next will be the men whose names you choose to remember, and the men whose names you choose to refuse.
A statesman who spends his credibility against the memory of his own people has misunderstood whose credibility it was in the first place.
Haruna Mohammed Salisu, who publishes WikkiTimes, could be reached at harunababale@wikkitimes.com. He writes from Indiana, USA.
