Ishaya Inuwa Durkwa: ‘I Have the Competence, the Character, and the Knowledge. Adamawa Cannot Go Back’

He walks into the conversation with the quiet assurance of a man who has spent years in rooms where crises are diagnosed, policies are written, and nations are either saved or left to unravel. Ishaya Inuwa Durkwa, governorship aspirant on the platform of the African Democratic Congress in Adamawa State, does not open with campaign slogans. He opens with a curriculum vitae and an argument.

“What I have is leadership skills. What I have is competence. What I have is character,” Durkwa says, and the repetition is not accidental. It is the cadence of a man who has made this case many times before and intends to make it many more.

A Scholar Who Refuses to Stay on the Sidelines

Durkwa holds a PhD in global development, a credential he is quick to contextualise not as academic decoration but as operational experience. He speaks of travelling through West Africa, Southeast Asia, and North America to study how small nations have pulled themselves from fragility into functionality.

“I’m not just an idealist,” he says firmly. “I’m a pragmatic person, and I’ve been involved to see the emergence and development of many nations.”

It is from that vantage point that he looks at Adamawa State and arrives at what he considers an urgent conclusion: the progress achieved under Governor Ahmadu Umaru Fintiri is real, but it is also fragile. And fragile things, he insists, must be protected by people who understand them.

“Development is fragile, and because it is fragile, it has to be protected,” he says. “Whatever varieties he has done, if we don’t have the technology and the know-how to maintain them, it’s just a matter of time before those things are damaged or spoilt.”

Peace as the Foundation of Prosperity

When the conversation turns to policy priorities, Durkwa is unambiguous. The crisis eating at the livelihoods of Adamawa’s rural communities, the farmers who have abandoned their fields because of insecurity, is not in his telling merely a security problem. It is an economic and humanitarian emergency with identifiable root causes.

“People weren’t asking for too much,” he says. “They just need a decent life, and all the while they’ve been living on their farms, but now they can’t go to them. Why? Because of security challenges.”

Durkwa says he has spent years studying precisely these kinds of conflicts. His organisation has conducted extensive research across Nigeria’s flashpoint regions, profiling crises and producing white papers submitted to governments and commissions. The frustration, he explains, is that the research was done, the solutions were mapped, but no one acted.

“I became frustrated. “Why can’t we go and implement it since we know what is required?” he says. “You have to have executive power.”

He frames his governorship bid as a direct response to that frustration, a decision to stop advising from outside the system and enter it.

“Peace is foundational to prosperity,” he says. “Without it, we can’t prosper as a people.”

On Fintiri: Credit Where It Is Due

Durkwa is careful not to position himself as a critic of the incumbent. Asked about Governor Fintiri’s record, his answer is pointed and deliberate.

“Yes, His Excellency Governor Ahmadu Umaru Fintiri has done tremendously well. He has broken the ground. Now we must take over so that we don’t go back to retrograde.”

The framing is strategic: acknowledging achievement while arguing that continuity requires a specific kind of successor, one with the technical depth to sustain what has been built.

Defending Atiku Abubakar

Perhaps no moment in the conversation draws more heat than when Durkwa is asked about former Vice President Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, Adamawa’s most prominent national political figure and a potential ADC presidential candidate.

Durkwa pushes back hard against what he describes as unfair treatment of the elder statesman.

“Many people are doing a great disservice to him,” he says. “Some people are saying his age; he should go sit down, and some people are saying he had the opportunity to lead this nation. What has he done?”

Durkwa argues this line of criticism misunderstands the architecture of the presidency Atiku served in. As Vice President under President Olusegun Obasanjo from 1999 to 2007, Atiku headed economic policy and development but did not hold executive power in his own right.

“He didn’t have executive power,” Durkwa says. “He served as vice president, and we know what transformation he brought. It was under his office that the EFCC was created. It was under his office that privatisation was insured, because the government owning Nitel and all of those things was no longer sustainable because of corruption. You needed to inject private-public partnership to drive that, and he did that incredibly well.”

Durkwa says that as Atiku’s kinsman and as ADC’s standard-bearer in Adamawa, he will work to ensure the former vice president emerges as the party’s presidential candidate and ultimately as Nigeria’s next president.

“We would work to see that he emerged and became the president of Nigeria,” he says. “Because I believe he has the expertise.”

ADC: Surviving the Storm

Durkwa is candid about the turbulence the ADC has weathered: litigations, internal crises, and questions about its staying power. But he reads that survival as evidence of something, not nothing.

“It is a party that was marred by litigations and crisis and all of that”, he says, “but it survived. That tells you that there is something strong and good about the party.”

He argues that the ADC’s base in Adamawa is not a liability but a foundation and that the party’s endurance in the face of adversity signals genuine grassroots attachment.

“The people, not the code or the litigations, didn’t discourage them. They are still waiting at home. Many of the cases are behind us, and we are in a place where we can compete. And yes, we will win the election.”

A Plea for Substance

Durkwa closes his argument the way he opened it, returning to the question of what he brings and issuing a quiet challenge to anyone who doubts the answer.

“What do people need that I don’t have? Absolutely nothing.”

It is a bold claim. But in Adamawa State, where the stakes of the 2027 governorship race are beginning to crystallise around questions of continuity, competence, and peace, Ishaya Inuwa Durkwa is betting that voters are ready to hear it.