May 20, 2026
By Chioma Gabriel, Editor Special Features
After taking his seat in the Senate in June 1999, Saidu Mohammed Dansadau was appointed to committees on Public Accounts, Health, Labour, Commerce (chairman), National Planning, and Internal Affairs. For several years, he was secretary-general of the Northern Senators’ Forum. In March 2005, Dansadau was a strong opponent of then President Olusegun Obasanjo’s alleged third term ambition. As a member of the National Assembly Joint Constitution Review Committee, in February 2006, he said he would boycott a public hearing on the review of the 1999 Constitution, which would allow this change. As Chairman of the Publicity Committee of the 2007 Movement, he said that Nigeria would break up if the move to allow a third term succeeded.
Dansadau left the Senate in May 2007, and in October 2008 announced that he was resigning from the ANPP and from partisan politics in general. Dansadau, who had previously been a large-scale farmer, became the promoter of the Maslaha Seed Firm in Gusau, Zamfara State
In 2010, Dansadau was appointed Chairman of a 12-person Committee on Repositioning Land Administration in the Federal Capital Territory, FCT. The committee was set up to verify all land allocations from 2007 and all mass housing allocations from 2004. The goal was to find and prevent multiple allocations, forgery, and abuse of records at the Land Registry and the Abuja Geographic Information Systems. In this encounter, he talks about religious differences and how religion should not be used to destabilise Nigeria.
