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Claim
A widely circulated post on twitter claimed that the first senator and female senator of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Abuja is Khairat Abdulrazaq-Gwadabe.
Mohammed Saad, with the handle @aminsaad tweeted the claim stating that ‘Senator Khairat Abdulrazaq Gwadabe was the first female Senator of the FCT Abuja’
The tweet which has 1082 views was posted on the 8th of March, 2023.
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On March 12, 2023, one Gbénró Adégbolá with the handle @GbenroAdegbola tweeted the claim.
As gathered from his twitter account, Gbénró Adégbolá is an educational book publisher and tech enthusiast who usually tweets mostly about Nigeria affairs.
Full text of the tweet: ‘The first senator and female senator for the FCT Abuja, is Khairat Abdulrazaq-Gwadabe. She’s a sister of current Kwara State governor, Abdurahman Abdulrazaq.She served from May 1999 to May 2003.This makes Senator-elect Ireti Kinigbe the second female senator for the FCT.’
The post had 10.5k views, 22 retweets, 1 quotes and 89 likes as at the time of filing this report.
Who is Khairat Abdulrazaq-Gwadebe
Khairat Abdulrazaq-Gwadebe is Nigerian politician born in Ilorin in April 1957, she was elected senator for the Federal capital territory constituency Abuja at the start of Nigerian Fourth parliament running under the platform of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). She held the office from May 1999 to May 2003.
Abdulrazaq-Gwadabe is a sister to the current Governor of Kwara state, Abdulrahman AbdulRazaq and wife to colonial Lawan Gwadabe, former military governor of Niger State
After taking her seat in the fourth Nigerian Parliament, she was appointed to committees on Environment, Health, Federal Character, Tourism & Culture and Federal Capital Territory. She became chairman of the women’s affairs committee of the Senate at that time
As of December 2011, Senator Abdulrazaq-Gwadabe was the chairman of the Senators Forum, through which former and serving senators share their knowledge and experience.
ROUNDCHECK Findings
We conducted a check on the claim and discovered that it started going viral immediately after the just concluded Presidential and National Assembly Elections on February 25, 2023, which saw Ireti Kinigbe, a female, elected as a Senator representing the Federal Capital Territory Senatorial District at the Tenth Nigerian Parliament
ROUNDCHECK obtained information from the official Wikipedia page of Nigerian National Assembly (NASS) stating that Senator Khairat Abdulrazaq-Gwadabe was the first senator and female senator of the FCT from May 1999 to May 2003.
She became the Senator representing the FCT immediately after Nigeria returned to Democratic System from Military Regime. Senator Khariat AbdulRazaq-Gwadabe became a member of the Fourth Parliament. Currently, the National Assembly of Nigeria is at the Ninth Parliament.
Senator Khairat AbdulRazaq-Gwadabe was succeeded by Maina Isa, a male Senator who represented the FCT under the platform of PDP from 2003 to 2007.
Other Senators who had represented the FCT include; Adamu Sidi Ali, a male politician who served from 2007 to 2011 under the platform of PDP. He was succeeded by Philips Aduda.
Philips Aduda, also a male senator who served from 2011 to 2015 under the platform of PDP. However, he was re-elected for the second and third term from 2015 to 2019 and 2019 to 2023 respectively. He is the present outgoing senator.
Also, checks from Citizen Science Nigeria , a data portal about election results in Nigeria showed that Senator Khariat AbdulRazaq-Gwadabe was a Senator representing the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Abuja from 1999 to 2003.
This is to say that the current Senator-elect Ireti Kinigbe is the fifth senator and second female senator of the FCT having emerged from the February 25 Presidential and National Assembly polls under the platform of the Labour Party (LP).
Verdict
From the information gathered, Senator Khariat Abdulrazaq-Gwadabe is the first female senator of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja; since Nigeria’s return to civil rule.
