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
