In February 2023, a photograph circulated across Nigerian social media that seemed to capture something the country desperately needed to believe in.
It showed Donatus Mathew, a former commercial motorcycle rider from the dusty hill country of Kagoro in southern Kaduna, standing tall after defeating a four-term incumbent lawmaker in one of the most dramatic upsets of that electoral cycle.
His fellow okada riders danced in the streets of Kaura.
His victory was not just a personal triumph. To millions of ordinary Nigerians, it felt like proof that the system could still be broken open.
Two years later, that same man would poll a humiliating 255 votes in an APC party primaries, rejected by the very party he had abandoned his principles to join.
The arc of Donatus Mathew’s political career, compressed into barely 30 months, has become one of the most instructive cautionary tales of the 10th Assembly.
From seminary to motorbike
Mathew was born in 1988 in Kpak, a community within Kagoro Chiefdom in Kaura Local Government Area of Kaduna State, a region shaped by strong Christian minority identity, persistent insecurity, and a history of electoral marginalisation.
He attended LGEA Primary School in Kadarko before proceeding to Saint Jani Seminary School, where he began his secondary education, and later completed it at Teachers’ College, Kagoro.
He subsequently earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Saint Albert Institute.
Philosophy, as a field of study, teaches one to interrogate power, weigh competing truths, and reason through difficult choices.
The irony of Mathew’s later political decisions is not lost on those who followed his journey.
He is married with four children.
Before politics found him he navigated the economic realities that confront millions of young northern Nigerian graduates: unemployment, limited opportunities, and the daily calculation of survival.
He turned to commercial motorcycling, joining the anonymous army of okada riders who ferry commuters through the congested arteries of Nigerian towns for a few hundred naira a day.
“Before I became a councillor, I was an okada man. I used a bike to sustain myself, and I am proud of that. That is my humble beginning,” he once told journalists.
That line has delivered without embarrassment and was what made Donatus Mathew different.
In a political class that routinely inflates credentials and conceals humble origins, his candour was disarming.
The wave that carried him
By 2022, Mathew had moved from okada riding into low-level local politics, serving as a councillor.
When the Labour Party’s presidential campaign built momentum around Peter Obi in 2023, Mathew was among those swept up by the Obidient movement, which inspired unexpected enthusiasm across parts of the country.
He initially joined the Labour Party to support Obi’s presidential ambition before party supporters persuaded him to contest the House of Representatives seat for Kaura Federal Constituency.
What followed defied nearly every prediction. He was an underrated candidate during the campaign because he had no funds to run a large-scale operation, but focused entirely on grassroots mobilisation.
The strategy worked. Mathew polled 10,508 votes to defeat the incumbent member from the Peoples Democratic Party, Gideon Gwani, who came second with 10,297 votes.
The APC candidate trailed with 9,919 votes, while the NNPP secured 5,354.
A margin of 211 votes, barely more than the capacity of a small secondary school hall, had produced one of the biggest shocks of the 2023 elections.
His victory sparked enthusiasm among many activists in Southern Kaduna, particularly as he unseated a four-term incumbent.
Across the country, his story was celebrated as evidence that grassroots political awakening could overcome incumbency advantage and elite financing.
What was less visible in the celebrations, however, was the cost of that victory. A Labour Party women’s leader in Kaduna State, Victoria Chintex, was assassinated in 2022 while working for Labour Party candidates in the state, including Mathew. Her death was a sobering reminder of how dangerous political mobilisation in southern Kaduna can be. The victory that Mathew would later walk away from had been purchased, in part, with another person’s life.
Cracks in the chamber
Inside the green chamber, the Mathew story became more complicated. His time in the National Assembly was anything but inspiring by the accounts of observers who tracked his legislative record.
He was not prominent in debates. No landmark bill, constituency intervention, or high-profile oversight inquiry is publicly associated with his name.
For a man who had campaigned on providing credible leadership for ordinary people, the silence from Abuja was noticed in Kaura.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party was convulsed by internal leadership crises that pitted factions loyal to different national figures against each other, leaving many of its lawmakers politically isolated. Mathew himself acknowledged he was the sole Labour Party member across the entire Northwest region a point he would later cite as justification for what came next.
The defection and its consequences
On December 5, 2024, Mathew’s letter of defection to the APC was read on the floor of the House by Speaker Tajudeen Abbas. He was joined by four other LP lawmakers — Tochukwu Okere (Imo), Bassey Akiba (Cross River), Iyawe Esosa (Edo), and Daulyop Fom (Plateau) — in what became the most significant single-day exit from the Labour Party’s legislative caucus.
His justification was framed in the language of pragmatism. “You cannot just work on the decision of the people at the constituency level because you are dealing with people with different levels of understanding,” he said. “I am taking this decision based on conviction.”
The Labour Party was withering in its condemnation. In a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, the party described the defections as irrational, untenable, and inconsistent with democratic values, and demanded that the House Speaker declare the affected seats vacant in line with the constitution.
The party subsequently approached the courts to declare the seats of the defecting members vacant.
For Mathew specifically, the anger in southern Kaduna ran deeper than party loyalty. His constituents had not simply voted Labour Party — they had voted for him because he embodied a rejection of the political establishment.
By crossing to the APC, the very party that his 2023 campaign had implicitly run against, he did not merely change his political address. He repudiated the meaning of his own victory.
The reckoning
When the APC primaries for the 2027 elections were conducted, the verdict from within the party was swift and unambiguous. Mathew polled only 255 votes. His rival secured 1,085.
The numbers told a story that required no analysis: a defector who arrives in a party without structures, loyalty networks, or longstanding relationships does not inherit its support base. He becomes, in the cold arithmetic of Nigerian machine politics, a stranger with no claims.
The outcome places Mathew among approximately 70 members of the current 10th Assembly who will not be returning after 2027, according to figures emerging from primary contests across the country.
A lesson written in two numbers
The story of Donatus Mathew is ultimately the story of two numbers: 10,508 and 255. The first was the product of sacrifice, grassroots energy, the courage of ordinary voters, and tragically the blood of a woman named Victoria Chintex. The second is what remained when he chose to trade all of that away.
Nigerian politics has seen defection stories before, and it will see more. But few have illustrated so sharply the difference between borrowed momentum and genuine political capital.
The Obidient wave that carried Mathew to Abuja was not his. When he chose to walk away from the people who generated it, he found too late that the wave had already moved on without him.
The okada rider from Kpak who once made Nigeria smile now faces the 2027 election cycle without a party ticket, without the platform that built him, and without the grassroots coalition that once believed, briefly and beautifully, that his victory was their own.
APC Ends LP Okada Rider’s Bid To Return As Rep is first published on The Whistler Newspaper
