A Transport Union Endorsement Is Worth More Than It Sounds
Katsina · Sunday 23 August 2026
The Katsina governor has welcomed the endorsement of the Tinubu and Radda ticket by NARTO and NURTW. Endorsements are usually filler. Transport union endorsements are not.
What these two organisations actually control
The National Union of Road Transport Workers and the National Association of Road Transport Owners between them touch almost every motor park and interstate route in the country. That gives them three things a campaign wants and cannot easily buy.
- Movement. Getting supporters to a rally, and getting agents to polling units on election day, is a logistics problem solved by people who own vehicles.
- Presence. Motor parks are among the few remaining places where large numbers of working-age Nigerians gather daily and talk politics in person.
- Members. A large, organised, mostly male membership concentrated in exactly the demographic that turnout campaigns target.
The part that deserves care
Nigerian transport unions have a complicated history with elections, and it is not all logistics. Park control has been contested violently in several states across multiple cycles, and union structures have at times been used for things that had nothing to do with moving passengers.
An endorsement is lawful and ordinary. What matters is what the organisation does with it in January, and whether the same structures that move voters to polling units are ever used to discourage other voters from reaching them.
The value of a transport union to a campaign is its reach. The risk is that reach works in both directions.
The North West arithmetic, again
This lands in the same week the APC named Abdulaziz Yari, former governor of Zamfara, as Director-General of the presidential campaign council, with the former Katsina governor Aminu Masari as one of two deputies.
The North West is the largest single bloc of votes available to any Nigerian presidential candidate. Everything the ruling party has done in the last week points at it.
Reporting: Daily Trust, Leadership and Vanguard.
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- Venita Akpofure Says Only Younger Men Approach Her, And She Is Describing A Real Thing
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