By Adamu Lawal Toro
Judge Northern governors by slogans and every administration sounds transformative. Judge them by six concrete metrics, insecurity, youth skills, education and out-of-school children, agriculture, road construction and general infrastructure, and the field narrows sharply. Weighed against these, Kaduna’s Governor Uba Sani emerges as the strongest performer among his Northern peers, not because his state has solved every problem, but because he shows measurable, independently verified progress across most categories rather than a single flagship achievement propping up a weaker record.
Start with the independent check that matters most, because government self-reporting is cheap and every state produces it. Phillips Consulting’s most recent state ranking, combining objective performance data with citizen feedback across governance, security, education, agriculture and infrastructure, placed Kaduna third among all 36 states, a four-star rating built on gains in exactly these categories. That is not a Kaduna government press release. It is a third-party methodology applied uniformly across the federation, evidence Northern governors rarely submit to.
On insecurity, Kaduna’s Peace Model, built on coordination between security agencies, traditional rulers and community structures rather than military force alone, has been credited with a measurable decline in banditry and kidnapping in previously affected zones. Compare this to Katsina, where Governor Dikko Radda has invested in security infrastructure but where an internal party feud with the presidency’s political adviser has disrupted the coordination his administration needs to sustain gains. Or Borno, where Governor Babagana Zulum deserves real credit for resettling displaced communities, but where the state remains an active conflict zone against Boko Haram and ISWAP, security still managed as ongoing war rather than a challenge being resolved.
Education is where the comparison sharpens further. Kaduna reduced its out-of-school children figure from roughly 550,000 to 187,720 within two years, backed by a Reaching Out-of-School Children project mapping 360,000 households to identify exactly which children were missing and why. More than 25 per cent of the state’s budget goes to education, above international benchmarks, and the administration has built more than 2,000 new classrooms and 62 new secondary schools to absorb returning enrolment. It is a state that measured its problem precisely enough to track it shrinking, more than most Nigerian states can currently demonstrate.
On youth skills development, Kaduna’s transformation of Panteka Market into a formalised vocational hub, alongside the Institute of Vocational Training and Skills Development, which graduated its first cohort of 4,050 trainees in August, shows a deliberate attempt to connect training to actual employment pathways rather than one-off empowerment ceremonies. The state has also funded young innovators directly, from assistive technology developers to Nigeria’s first female astronaut candidate.
Agriculture rounds out the case. Through the Tallafin Noma programme, more than 69,000 smallholder farmers have received improved seeds, fertiliser and mechanisation support, backed by the largest fertiliser distribution exercise in the state’s history, over 900 trucks reaching 300,000 farmers across all 23 local government areas. The Special Agro-Industrial Processing Zone pushes this further, moving Kaduna from raw cultivation toward processing maize, ginger, tomatoes and soybeans for export, the value addition Nigerian agriculture has chronically failed to achieve at state level.
Road construction is where every Northern governor beats his chest hardest, and where claims need the most careful reading, because kilometres are the easiest number for any government to inflate or misattribute. Kaduna’s roads agency puts the state’s tally at 160 projects covering 1,355 kilometres spread across all 23 local government areas rather than a few urban centres, roughly 60 per cent completed or under construction. But the single largest road associated with Kaduna this year, the 122 kilometre, 178 billion naira Birnin Gwari reconstruction, is a federal project funded and commissioned by President Tinubu, with the governor merely representing him at the flag-off, a distinction the state’s own coverage tends to blur. Katsina’s road claims are smaller but individually more verifiable, a dualised stretch here, a link to the Kano border there, each commissioned with a specific contractor and cost attached. That granularity favours Katsina on transparency, even where aggregate scale trails Kaduna’s claimed total. Before applauding any kilometre figure, ask three questions: state money or federal, which local governments benefited, and is the number independently auditable or simply asserted.
None of this means Kaduna has solved its problems. Household pressures still keep tens of thousands of children out of school despite the progress, and a 2026 field assessment found real gaps remaining in teacher competency and learner support even in project-linked schools. Insecurity has receded rather than disappeared, and no Northern state can honestly claim the problem is behind it. It is also worth being candid that some of the most detailed figures circulating about Kaduna’s performance, on roads as much as education, come from friendly press coverage the state government itself commissioned or amplified, coverage that reads closer to endorsement than reporting, and that deserves the same scrutiny any self-reported government data deserves. What tips the balance toward Kaduna is not that its numbers are perfect. It is that they are specific, trackable and increasingly corroborated by an outside methodology, rather than vague claims of transformation with no independent verification behind them.
The broader point matters more than any single ranking. Northern governors are not short of ambitious programmes, Tallafin Noma in Kaduna, mechanised farming in Borno, agricultural subsidies in Katsina echo similar language, and every one can point to a commissioned road. What separates genuine performance from press release governance is whether a state can show its own baseline numbers and demonstrate movement against them over time, verified by someone other than the government itself. By that standard, most Northern states are still asking Nigerians to take their word for it. Kaduna, imperfectly, is one of the few beginning to show its work.
Nigerians evaluating their governors ahead of 2027 should demand the same discipline from every state house, not slogans about transformation, but baseline numbers, tracked progress, and independent verification, on roads as on everything else. Anything less is governance measured by press conference rather than by children actually returning to classrooms.