In the story of Cain and Abel, the Bible gives us one of humanity’s earliest accounts of how rivalry can turn kinship into hostility. The tragedy is not simply that one brother killed another. It is that envy can make a person regard the success of someone close to him as a personal injury. Something of that drama is now happening in Kwara State, where Senator Saliu Mustapha, who once stood firmly within the political camp that produced Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq, has moved from the All Progressives Congress to the Peoples Democratic Party and emerged as its candidate for the Kwara Central senatorial election. He will face Gov. AbdulRazaq, who is seeking the seat on the APC platform.
The development is significant precisely because Sen. Mustapha is no outsider. He was an important participant in the movement that brought Gov. AbdulRazaq to power. But the most curious element is not the defection itself; politicians defect, alliances change, yesterday’s ally becomes today’s opponent. What deserves scrutiny is the senator’s insistence, after decamping, that his loyalty to President Bola Tinubu remains intact, even as he now contests against the President’s own party in Kwara Central. That position is legally possible, but politics is a theatre of perception, and voters are entitled to ask what changed, and why the voice still claims to be Jacob’s while the hands have become Esau’s.
