Accord Party presidential candidate Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim has said his late father deliberately concealed his Hausa and royal Yauri heritage from him for almost three decades, a disclosure he made in a statement and set out in his forthcoming autobiography.
Olawepo-Hashim, a grandson of the 40th Seriki of Yauri, said his father, Alhaji Hashim Abdullahi Yauri, hid the lineage after an Islamic cleric warned of possible dangers within the royal family. In his account, the cleric advised against exposing the child’s identity too early, and his father chose to protect him by keeping it secret. “He chose protection over inheritance,” Olawepo-Hashim said.
He said he was named Abdulmalik at birth, relocated to the Borgu Emirate and raised under a different identity within a Yoruba cultural environment, largely cut off from his paternal family’s Hausa traditions and history. “For 27 years, I lived without knowing the full story of who I was,” he said.
According to him, the account appears in Chapter 13 of the autobiography, titled Sunrise At Midnight, which he said would be published soon. The chapter, he said, covers his childhood, his father’s decision and his eventual discovery of the heritage that had been kept from him.
The story fills in a childhood he has spoken about before. In an earlier interview with THISDAY, he said he was born in Yelwa, Yauri, in 1969, while his father was a young police officer, and grew up with the family of his stepfather, Julius Bamidele Olawepo. His father later rose to Commissioner of Police and Commandant of the Police College, Kaduna, and was known across Northern Nigeria as “Zaki”, the Lion, a name Olawepo-Hashim said reflected the man’s discipline and commanding presence.
He and his siblings recently marked the 30th anniversary of their father’s death with commemorative notices in Nigerian newspapers.
Olawepo-Hashim also traced the family further back, to his grandfather, Seriki Abdullahi Jibril, popularly called Maiy Yauri, whom he described as one of the prominent traditional rulers of Northern Nigeria in his era. He said the grandfather belonged to a generation of educated Northern royals who combined traditional authority with modern administration and commerce, and was honoured with the Officer of the Order of the British Empire during the colonial period. He added that British colonial records portrayed his grandfather as an unusually independent ruler who exercised some administrative autonomy during the Second World War.
He said learning of his Hausa and Yauri roots did not diminish the Yoruba environment that raised him, but deepened his sense of the different strands that shaped him. He framed the story as one about family, sacrifice and heritage rather than royalty alone.
The timing is notable. The disclosure of a biography built around a candidate able to claim both Northern and Southern roots comes while Olawepo-Hashim is fighting to stay in the 2027 race at all, and while he has been publicly emphasising his cross-regional appeal against opponents he accuses of trading in ethnicity and religion.
His candidacy is currently disputed. The Independent National Electoral Commission left his name off the final list of presidential candidates published in September, and he has rejected that exclusion as an administrative act that cannot override a pending court case.
“I am the candidate of the Accord Party. No one can exclude me from the 2027 presidential election. The court will do justice,” he said in a statement issued in Abuja, arguing that the commission has no power of finality over who a party puts forward.
The dispute is before the Federal High Court in Abuja in a suit marked FHC/ABJ/CS/1263/2026, with the Accord Party as first defendant and INEC as second. Olawepo-Hashim is asking the court to compel the party to recognise him and transmit his name to the commission, on the ground that he emerged as sole winner of the party’s presidential primary on 30 May 2026 after paying the nomination fee, in an exercise he says INEC officials monitored.
The party and the commission have relied in part on a letter said to have cancelled that primary, a document Olawepo-Hashim has urged the court to disregard. As an alternative relief, he has asked the court to order a fresh primary in which he would take part.
Justice Mohammed Umar reserved judgment in July after all parties adopted their final addresses, and a date is to be communicated. Until that ruling, the question of whether Olawepo-Hashim appears on the ballot remains unresolved, and the claims in both the biography and the court papers stand as his own account rather than settled fact.