President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s careful and well considered search for a perfectly square fit into the perfectly square role of Deputy Director General, North of the 2027 Tinubu/Shettima Campaign Organization, ended up with a perfectly suited match: Mai Mala Buni, Governor of Yobe State. If such a living fit did not exist, who could have invented him?
The campaign organisation’s principal task is to mobilise grassroots support, turn voters out to the polls to cast their votes to re-elect the President in January 2027 presidential elections. Well, in Mai Mala Buni you have got a natural mobiliser who has operated at all the crucial levels of politics and governance and has gathered all the experience that there is to gain in political and electoral mobilization.
He had his first political baptism as a Local Government Councilor. You cannot be more grassroots than that, dealing with problems from primary schools to culverts to sewers to local markets to local security to births to marriages to illnesses to graveyards to local customs and local conflicts.
Mai Mala Buni was a Political Adviser to the state governor. He saw through all the gimmicks and rigmarole zigzags of political actors and advised the governor correctly on how to keep his eyes on the ball and pursue his mandate and programmes while at the same time ensuring that the people are happily carried along.
Mai Mala Buni was a state chairman, at different times, of three opposition political parties in Yobe State, namely AD, AC and ACN. He had been a ruling party insider and an opposition party insider; he knew how to mobilise voters from both ends of the political spectrum.
Who else knows All Progressives Congress [APC] better than Mai Mala Buni? He was the first Yobe State APC Chairman; he presided over the integration, amalgamation and consolidation of the state chapters of four parties, namely the ruling ANPP, ACN, and APGA and a break away nPDP faction.
Mai Mala Buni was later upgraded, politically, to become the first substantive National Secretary of APC, which by then was the ruling party at the Federal level as well as in Yobe State. After completing a full term, he was re-elected to serve a second term as National Secretary but before he could complete that, he won the nomination as APC’s governorship candidate for the 2019 election in Yobe State. He was elected with a landslide.
During his first term as governor, Mai Mala Buni simultaneously became Chairman of APC’s Caretaker/Extraordinary Convention Planning Committee (CECPC), in which position he stitched turmoil within the party and organized the March 26, 2022 national convention, before handing over the reins to the newly elected National Chairman, Senator Abdullahi Adamu.
He was re-elected to a second term as governor in 2023, again with a landslide. During his second gubernatorial term too, he was appointed Chairman of APC’s Strategy, Conflict Resolution and Mobilisation Committee as later as Secretary of APC’s 2026 National Convention Planning Committee. No surprise there; he is the man who knows everything about political strategy, resolution of intractable conflicts and grassroots mobilization. Whenever the party has any of these issues to contend with, it turns to His Excellency Mai Mala Buni, newly minted as Deputy Director General, North of the Tinubu Reelection Campaign Committee.
And, on top of all these, he has served two terms as Governor of Yobe State, recording spectacular achievements in the security, infrastructure, education, health, environment, disaster management, resettlement of displaced persons, science and technology as well as adept handling of political and chieftaincy issues.
No better fitting square peg in a square hole than Mai Mala Buni, a man with the friendliest mien, warmest human relations, adept political posture, very generous heart, enduring popular appeal, most prudent management of state resources and the ability to mobilise people towards the worthiest goals.
Mahmud writes from Abuja
