The Youth Must Remain at the Heart of Adamawa’s Future

Fatima is twenty-three years old. She sells cosmetics from a small table near the Jimeta market in Yola, running her micro-business on a grant she received through the Fintiri Business Wallet initiative. Before 2023, she was sitting at home with a secondary school certificate and no capital, watching her peers migrate to Lagos and Abuja in search of something better. Today, she employs one assistant, reinvests weekly, and is learning bookkeeping through a PAWECA follow-up training session every first Saturday of the month.

Fatima is not a statistic. She is the argument.

And there are thousands of Fatimas across Adamawa’s 21 local government areas; young women and men who, for the first time in their political memory, felt that a government actually saw them and made a deliberate, funded decision to invest in their future. That is not a campaign promise. That is a documented record of governance. And the conversation about who leads Adamawa after 2027 must begin and end with the question of whether the next occupant of Dougerei Government House understands what it means, and what it costs, to maintain that connection.

Let me put it plainly, as a political analyst who has followed this administration from the ground up: e don show, and anybody who ignores the youth in Adamawa’s next chapter is making a strategic error they will not recover from at the ballot box.
{{GNA_PROTECT_0}}
Across six years, the Fintiri administration built a measurable youth investment record that can be verified against documented government sources, not just political press releases.

Through the Poverty Alleviation and Wealth Creation Agency, PAWECA, which was established in 2020 and operates through ten revitalised Skills Acquisition Centres across the state, over 55,000 youths have been trained in various trades including ICT, construction, fashion, and agro-processing, according to the PAWECA Director-General Dr. Michael Zira Wadaragwo. More than 60,000 citizens have graduated from the state’s Technical Skills Acquisition Centres, with 10,000 new trainees recently shortlisted for the latest intake. The Fintiri Business Wallet, which began in 2023 with grants of N50,000 each to 10,000 women, had by December 2025 reached at least 140,000 direct beneficiaries across all 21 LGAs, with total disbursements of over N5 billion, according to reporting by Daily Trust. A further 100,000 beneficiaries were scheduled to receive grants before the end of 2025.

The poverty numbers corroborate this. Adamawa’s poverty rate declined from 74 percent to 60 percent during the Fintiri administration, according to National Bureau of Statistics data cited by the governor. That 14-percentage-point reduction in a state that ranked among the country’s most economically vulnerable is not rhetoric. It is a measurable shift in the quality of life for real people.

Six consecutive years of paying WAEC and NECO examination fees for public school students removed a financial barrier that had quietly pushed thousands of young Adamawa residents out of secondary education every year. Annual scholarships for tertiary institution students and international postgraduate scholarship windows gave ambition a pathway that did not require a wealthy family. The Civil Service Commission recruitment of over 5,000 youths into public employment added structural income to households that had never had it. The Fresh Air subsidised transport fleet served thousands of daily commuters, most of them young workers and students navigating distances that public infrastructure should have made affordable long ago.

These programmes are significant in national context. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, over 60 percent of Nigeria’s population is under 30 years old, and youth underemployment stood at 13.2 percent in Q2 2024. The informal sector absorbs over 93 percent of Nigerian workers, meaning most young people exist outside the formal economy’s safety nets entirely. Against that backdrop, a state government that deliberately invested billions in grassroots youth empowerment, consistently, year over year, is doing something that most Nigerian states are not.

The youth of Adamawa noticed. And they voted accordingly, twice.
Emmanuel Philip Tumba is a political analyst writing from Adamawa State. The views expressed in this article are entirely his own and do not represent the editorial position of The Gazette News.[/gna_callout]
The human investment did not stand alone. It was scaffolded by physical transformation that will define Adamawa’s possibilities long after this tenure ends.

The ongoing world-class stadium, now approaching its finishing stage in Yola, is not just a sports facility. It is a statement that this state believes its young people deserve spaces built for them, not left as abandoned concrete from a previous administration’s promises. The modern market under construction in Yola is a direct response to the devastating cycle of fire outbreaks that has destroyed the livelihoods of traders, predominantly young women and men, for years. 1,000 housing units under construction, eight cottage hospitals bringing healthcare to underserved communities, massive road networks and flyovers easing commercial movement across the state, and the Adamawa International Conference Centre positioning the state for events and investments that do not currently land in the northeast. These are legacies. They are also benchmarks. They tell every aspirant for the 2027 ticket exactly what kind of government they are being asked to continue and improve.

One detail that rarely makes the political headlines is the responsiveness. On several occasions during this administration, when young people raised concerns on social media, the governor did not vanish behind a government spokesperson. He engaged. That willingness to be present in the digital spaces where young Nigerians actually live, to acknowledge frustration and respond with action, built a quality of civic trust that no single programme can produce alone. You cannot manufacture that. It either comes from genuinely caring about the people you govern, or it doesn’t come at all.

Na so e be, whether political heavyweights want to hear it or not: the next governor of Adamawa will be judged by the youth on whether they maintain that relationship, not just whether they announce empowerment programmes in campaign season.
Emmanuel Philip Tumba is a political analyst writing from Adamawa State. The views expressed in this article are entirely his own and do not represent the editorial position of The Gazette News.[/gna_callout]
This is where the analysis becomes both personal and structural. I am not endorsing any candidate. I am making an evidence-based argument about the minimum conditions for competent and credible governance in a state where the youth demographic is decisive.

In Adamawa, youth constitute approximately 80 percent of the state’s estimated 4.9 million population, according to the TheCable’s analysis of population projections. The INEC registered voter roll for the state stood at approximately 2,196,566 as of the 2023 elections. Young voters are not a niche constituency in this state. They are the constituency. Any candidacy that does not prioritise their concerns is not a serious candidacy.

The next governor must be youth-friendly and grassroots-oriented, understanding what life looks like not in the conference rooms of Abuja but in the markets of Numan, the farms of Ganye, the schools of Michika, and the trading tables of Jimeta. They must maintain high regard for traditional institutions, which carry community authority and social trust that no government structure can replicate. They must be active and genuinely engaging in the media space, not through handlers and managed statements, but through the kind of direct, accessible communication this generation expects and responds to.

They must be civil servant-friendly and teacher-friendly, because a state’s long-term development rides on the morale and welfare of the people who run its schools, hospitals, and offices every day. They must be patient, tolerant, and open to criticism, which in practice means the ability to hear dissent from young people on social media without treating it as a threat to be managed. And above all, they must be a unifier, with the capacity to listen across religious, ethnic, and zonal lines, because Adamawa’s diversity is its greatest political asset when leadership is inclusive, and its greatest vulnerability when it is not.

Abraham Lincoln said democracy is government of the people, by the people, and for the people. In Adamawa, the people are overwhelmingly young. This is not a sentiment. It is a demographic reality backed by data.

Any leadership transition, whether through party primaries or consensus, that does not reflect this reality is making a costly political miscalculation. And I say this with the full weight of the record behind me: the administration that is ending in 2027 proved that governing with young people, rather than for young people in theory, is possible in northern Nigeria. It produced results that are documented, verifiable, and felt by real families.

The argument is not that the next governor must be a young person by age. A 55-year-old with a young orientation, genuine grassroots instincts, and the discipline to remain accountable to ordinary people is preferable to a 35-year-old who governs from a distance. What is non-negotiable is the orientation: toward the majority, toward the everyday, toward the kind of leadership that builds Fatima’s table in Jimeta market into a foundation, and then builds a thousand more tables just like it.

Because leadership is not just about occupying an office. It is about understanding the people, carrying them along, and leaving behind a legacy that speaks long after the tenure ends.

Adamawa’s youth are watching. They have been watching since 2019. And in 2027, they will deliver their verdict, as they always have, at the ballot box.