Engr. Bitrus Venjei Kambas Buys APC Nomination Form, Declares Bid for Michika-Madagali House of Representatives Seat

The news broke with quiet force. Engr. Bitrus Venjei Kambas has purchased his All Progressives Congress nomination form to contest the Michika and Madagali federal constituency seat in the 2027 House of Representatives election, and he is not waiting to see how the political winds blow. He is ready for direct primaries.

For a constituency that has carried the weight of insurgency, displacement, and years of underrepresentation, this is the kind of announcement that stops conversations at the tea stalls of Michika town and the market squares of Madagali. A man who built his name through engineering precision and real estate achievement has decided that his next project is his own people, and he is putting his reputation behind that decision in the most public way a Nigerian politician can, by picking up a form and stepping into the ring.

The purchase of the APC nomination form is not a soft gesture in Nigerian politics. It is a declaration. It says, in the language that party structures and voters alike understand, that Engr. Venjei is not testing the waters or positioning himself for a future cycle. He is in this race, now, and he intends to win it through the party’s direct primary process, where delegates from across the constituency will have the final say.

That readiness for direct primaries matters for a specific reason. In Nigeria’s current electoral framework, the direct primary system gives registered party members at the ward and local government level a direct voice in choosing their flag bearer. It is a more transparent and participatory process than the delegate-only model that has historically been easier to manipulate. Engr. Venjei’s willingness to go through that process tells you something about the kind of politician he intends to be. He is not looking for a back-door path to the ticket. He is willing to be tested by the people closest to the ground, because he believes his record and his vision can survive that scrutiny.

Engr. Bitrus Venjei Kambas is not a man who arrived at this moment by accident. He rose from modest beginnings in the Michika-Madagali corridor to establish himself as a respected figure in Nigeria’s real estate sector, an industry where reputation is currency and where only those who deliver on their promises survive long enough to matter. His work took him beyond Adamawa State and eventually placed him in professional conversations that reached global platforms. That kind of trajectory, from a small northern town to boardrooms and forums where Nigeria’s development challenges are discussed, is not common. And it is exactly the kind of biography that a constituency with as much ground to recover as Michika-Madagali needs representing it in Abuja.

The Michika-Madagali federal constituency has lived through more disruption in the past fifteen years than most Nigerian communities experience in a generation. The Boko Haram insurgency, which terrorised the Lake Chad Basin from 2009 onward, hit these two local government areas with particular severity. Families were displaced, farmlands were abandoned, schools were destroyed or shut down, and the basic social fabric that holds communities together was torn in ways that are still being repaired today. The Nigerian military has made significant progress in rolling back the insurgency, but the humanitarian and developmental debts it left behind in places like Michika and Madagali remain enormous. Infrastructure is thin, healthcare access is stretched, youth unemployment is high, and thousands of people who were displaced are still working to rebuild lives interrupted by violence they did not invite.

This is the constituency Engr. Venjei is asking to represent. He is not walking toward a comfortable seat. He is walking toward one of the most demanding legislative responsibilities in North East Nigeria, and the fact that he is doing so with his eyes open, and with a readiness to face direct primaries rather than seek a softer route, suggests he understands the weight of what he is asking for.

Those who know him in Michika and Madagali speak of a man who shows up in person when others send intermediaries, who listens before he speaks, and who has never made the kind of transaction-based promises that evaporate after polling day. His engineering background gives him a working fluency in project costing, infrastructure delivery, and the technical dimensions of budget appropriation that many legislators rely entirely on aides to interpret. In a National Assembly where the quality of a constituency’s representation often determines whether federal projects actually reach that constituency, having a lawmaker who can read and interrogate a budget from first principles is not a small thing.

His decision to run on the APC platform also carries strategic weight. The APC is the ruling party at the federal level, which means a lawmaker from that platform has more direct access to the executive branch, to ministerial offices, and to the appropriation corridors that determine how federal money moves. For a constituency that needs roads rehabilitated, schools rebuilt, primary healthcare centres properly equipped, and resettlement programmes funded and monitored, a representative with ruling-party leverage is in a stronger position to deliver than one who must negotiate from the opposition benches.

But none of that leverage matters unless the man wielding it is genuinely committed to his people. And that is the question that direct primaries, by their nature, begin to answer. Ward-level party members are harder to fool than central delegates. They know the candidate. They have watched him from close range. When Engr. Venjei stands before APC members across Michika and Madagali local government areas and asks for their support, he will be standing before people who have seen him in both ordinary and difficult moments. The process he has embraced is the most honest test available within the party framework, and he has chosen it willingly.

The 2027 election is still two years away, but in the North East, political conversations do not wait for campaign season to open. The news of Engr. Venjei’s form purchase has already begun to move through the networks of the constituency, through phone calls between community leaders, through discussions among young people who have been watching their area’s political leadership with growing impatience, and through the quieter deliberations of elders who remember what this constituency looked like before the insurgency and who have been waiting for someone with the competence and character to help rebuild it.

He has not made wild promises. He has not arrived with a convoy of vehicles and a loudspeaker full of slogans. He has done something simpler and, in its simplicity, more powerful. He has committed himself publicly, through the act of buying that form, to a process that will require him to earn his way, one ward at a time, through the direct primary, and then, if he wins the ticket, one voter at a time, through the general election.

The constituency he wants to serve has waited long enough for representation that takes it seriously. The insurgency took years that cannot be returned. Political choices made in Michika-Madagali’s name have too often deepened that loss rather than beginning to repair it. Engr. Bitrus Venjei Kambas is making a different argument. He is saying, with his professional record behind him and his form in hand, that competence and character and a genuine connection to this land are enough to build on.

Whether the people of Michika and Madagali decide to give him that mandate is a conversation that begins today and ends at the ballot. But it is a conversation that, for the first time in a while, feels worth having.