Kano and Lagos in Nigeria’s Power Equation: Myth, reality, and influence

By Temi Salako

It started, as most Nigerian controversies do, with a sentence that someone probably regrets. At the Invest Lagos Summit 3.0 in June 2026, Vice President Kashim Shettima stood before an audience and said, “Lagos donated President Tinubu to Africa, it was Lagos that donated to Africa its richest man, not Kano.” He was talking about Aliko Dangote. He bundled in Abdul Samad Rabiu of BUA Group for good measure. The Hausa-language clips spread before the translators could catch their breath. And northern Nigeria, never short of fury when its pride is at stake, roared.

The outrage was immediate and predictable. Both Dangote and Rabiu were born and raised in Kano. Dangote belongs to the illustrious Dantata business family, old Kano merchant royalty. Rabiu, born August 4, 1960, founded BUA International Limited in 1988 right out of his father Isyaku Rabiu’s Kano-rooted business world. To say Lagos made them is, to the northern establishment, the kind of revisionism that makes blood pressure climb. PRNigeria’s fact-checkers were quick to note that Shettima was speaking about commercial platforms, not lineage. But political speeches are not academic papers, and the north heard what it heard.

Strip the offence from Shettima’s words and what remains is a structural truth that the north has not fully reckoned with: its two greatest industrialists built their biggest empires in Lagos. The Dangote Refinery, a $20 billion monument to northern capital and national ambition, sits in Lekki, Lagos. BUA Foods, now the most valuable publicly traded company on the Nigerian Exchange with a market capitalisation that crossed N10 trillion in 2025, is listed and headquartered in Lagos. Both men are Kano sons. Both men’s most consequential bets are Lagos assets. Shettima did not invent this irony. He simply said it out loud.

The deeper conspiracy that nobody wants to name is this: for nearly a decade, the most consequential policy decisions affecting Nigeria’s cement, food, and energy sectors have disproportionately determined whether Dangote or BUA wins. When the federal government extends the Sugar Master Plan, BUA Foods, which controls massive sugar plantations and refinery capacity, benefits. When the Dangote Refinery fights NNPCL over crude allocation and import competition, it is a battle between a northern billionaire’s Lagos asset and a federal institution that Abuja controls. And when a Vice President from Borno State praises Lagos for producing these men, he is, deliberately or not, weighing in on a long argument about who the north’s industrial policy should actually serve.

Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II of Kano has been the most articulate northern voice pushing back on the Lagos-centrism of the Tinubu administration. In January 2025, a few days after an appeal court ruled in his favour in the ongoing Kano emirship crisis, Sanusi travelled to Lagos and publicly criticised the trajectory of the administration’s economic reforms. This was not coincidental timing. It was a statement. The man whose throne has been bounced between governors like a political football, deposed by Ganduje in 2020 for criticising Kano’s N100 billion debt, reinstated by Abba Kabir Yusuf in May 2024, and now frozen in a Supreme Court limbo that will not be resolved until 2027, was making clear that his voice would not be contained by his ongoing legal vulnerability.

Sanusi has publicly backed Dangote in his war with NNPCL. In 2024, he called out NNPCL officials for protecting a “lucrative subsidy scam” and said the organisation had “no moral right” to accuse Dangote of monopoly when it had spent billions on turnaround maintenance without producing a drop of fuel from its own refineries. “As a nation, if we do not thank Dangote for what he has done as an African to deal a hammer blow to multinationals and the rentier system,” Sanusi wrote, “we have missed the point.” This is the Emir of Kano, spiritual leader of the Tijaniyyah Sufi order across Nigeria and beyond, publicly lending his theological and moral weight to a Lagos-based refinery owned by a Kano son. The politics in that sentence alone could fuel a doctoral thesis.

What Sanusi does not say publicly is as instructive as what he does. He has been conspicuously quiet about BUA. Rabiu has built a feed mill in Kano, partnered with Turkish firms to expand wheat milling capacity in the north, and committed to making BUA Foods the country’s largest food producer by 2026 with projected capacity of 10,000 tonnes of flour milling. These are northern-facing industrial investments in a way that the Dangote Refinery, for all its scale, simply is not. And yet Sanusi, the north’s most prominent intellectual voice, positions himself closer to Dangote’s orbit than Rabiu’s. There are those in policy circles who ask whether this reflects a genuine view about industrial strategy, or something older and more Kano-specific: a shared establishment sensibility between the Dantata-Dangote lineage and the Dabo dynasty that Sanusi comes from, two pillars of old Kano money that have always known each other.

If Sanusi is the north’s conscience, Shettima is its institutional spine. Born in Maiduguri in 1966 into a Kanuri Muslim family, Shettima rose through Zenith Bank, governed Borno State through the worst years of Boko Haram, and entered Aso Villa in 2023 as the first Vice President from the north east since the republic was restored. He holds the north east’s political fortunes directly. In June 2025, when APC north east stakeholders met to endorse Tinubu for a second term and pointedly failed to mention Shettima’s name, the Borno State delegates ended the meeting on the spot. By January 2026, political watchers were openly speculating about whether Tinubu would swap Shettima on the 2027 ticket. Shettima responded in writing, under his own name, in a piece titled “2027: Don’t Pull Down the Roof.” Sitting vice presidents do not usually write their own political survival memos. That he felt the need to says everything about where power actually sits.

The godfather of the north, in the classical sense of the term, is not a single man. The Sultan of Sokoto, currently Alhaji Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar IV, holds the highest formal religious authority. He is the President-General of the Nigeria Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs and the leader of Jama’atu Nasril Islam. When the Sultan speaks, 90 million Nigerian Muslims are expected to listen. Sanusi, as the Emir of Kano, holds the second most significant Islamic traditional throne in Nigeria, and as Khalifa of the Tijaniyyah Sufi order, his spiritual reach crosses into Niger, Senegal, and Mauritania. Together, the Sultan and the Emir of Kano constitute a kind of dual papacy over northern consciousness, one rooted in Sokoto’s Qadiriyyah tradition and the other in the Tijaniyyah. Their relationship is respectful but not frictionless. In political terms, however, it is Kano that generates the votes. Kano State delivered roughly six million votes in the 2023 presidential election, the single largest state bloc in the country. No northern godfather exists without at least the toleration of Kano.

The fight between Dangote and BUA is not merely a business rivalry between two Kano billionaires. It is a proxy war about which model of northern capitalism gets to shape federal policy. Dangote, with his refinery, his gas pipelines, his fertiliser plants, and his cement empire, is the Lagos-anchored northern tycoon whose wealth is so vast, and whose federal exposure so deep, that the presidency must engage him. His net worth, placed by Bloomberg at over $23 billion in 2025, means that when he fights NNPCL publicly, it is not David and Goliath. It is one goliath fighting another, with the Nigerian consumer watching from the sidelines.

Rabiu is different. His $14 billion fortune, confirmed by Forbes and Bloomberg as of 2026, is built on a quieter, more deliberate accumulation. BUA Cement is Nigeria’s second largest producer. BUA Foods, with revenue of N1.53 trillion in 2024, a 109 percent year-on-year increase, and a profit of N266 billion, is now the country’s most valuable publicly listed company by market capitalisation, surpassing Dangote Cement and MTN Nigeria. Rabiu paid himself N216.7 billion in dividends from BUA Foods alone in September 2025. His Kano feed mill, his Sokoto cement lines, his sugar plantations in the north, these are bets on the north’s economic body. Dangote’s refinery is a bet on Nigeria’s fuel sovereignty. Both are legitimate and both are geopolitically loaded.

When Shettima says Lagos made these men, whether he means it strategically or not, he is signalling something that the northern establishment reads as a concession to the Tinubu political economy: that the commercial south is the real seat of Nigerian wealth creation, and that northerners who succeed do so by plugging into it. Sanusi, the Islamic scholar who attended King’s College in Lagos and studied at Ahmadu Bello University before spending years in Khartoum reading fiqh and philosophy, would dispute this framing entirely. He has spent his public life arguing that the north must develop itself on its own civilizational terms, not merely as a labour and vote supplier to a Lagos-centred federal arrangement. This is not just intellectual disagreement. It is a collision between two visions of what northern Nigeria is for, and who gets to profit from its people.

The Sultan of Sokoto has not waded publicly into the Dangote-BUA industrial rivalry, nor into the Sanusi-Shettima ideological tension. This is itself a political act. Sultan Sa’ad Abubakar IV, who has held the throne since 2006, has been careful to position the Sokoto Sultanate as a unifying institution above the transactional politics of Kano. When Sanusi was deposed in 2020, the Sultan’s palace was quiet. When he was reinstated in 2024, the Sultan was again quiet. This is not weakness. It is the accumulated wisdom of an institution that has watched Kano emirs come and go and understood that Sokoto’s spiritual authority outlasts any individual tenure. The Sultan is the godfather in the truest sense: the one whose blessing everyone wants but whose explicit endorsement no one can claim.

The real battleground for 2027 is whether the north will arrive as a coherent bloc or as a collection of competing constituencies. Kano has six million votes and a fractured emirate with a Supreme Court case pending until 2027. The north east has a Vice President whose position on the 2027 ticket is whispered to be uncertain. The north west has Dangote’s refinery and Rabiu’s food empire competing for policy favour. And above all of it, the Sultan of Sokoto and the Emir of Kano together command a moral authority over northern Muslims that no elected politician has ever fully domesticated. Tinubu knows this. Sanusi knows this. Shettima knows this. And Dangote and Rabiu, whatever they say about business being business, know it too. In Nigeria, when billions of naira and millions of votes are in the same room, no one is just talking about industry.