Twenty-seven years ago, Abdulaziz Abubakar Yari was a young party functionary in the shadow of a bigger man — a foot soldier in the political machine of Ahmad Sani Yerima, the sharia-championing governor who ruled Zamfara State from 1999 to 2007 and remains, in the formal telling of Nigerian political history, Yari’s political godfather. Today, Yari sits atop one of Nigeria’s most capitalised power companies, presides as Director-General over President Bola Tinubu’s 2027 re-election campaign council, and commands a fortune that, by any reasonable market accounting, now dwarfs that of the man who first gave him a political foothold. It is a trajectory that has left even hardened watchers of Nigerian politics — an arena not easily impressed by sudden wealth — struggling to explain how, and startled by how far, he has come.
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