26-year-old Rukayat Motunrayo Shittu, of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, has been declared the winner of Owode Onire state constituency of Asa Local Government Area in Kwara State House of Assembly election.
Ms Shittu polled 7,521 to defeat her rival in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), who scored 6,957 during Saturday’s election.
This makes her one of the youngest candidates in Nigeria to contest and win a political seat.
Shittu is a journalist and a former Senate President of the Congress of NOUN Students (CONS) at the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN)
She attended Baptist Primary School LGEA in Ilorin, and Government Girls Day Secondary School, Oko Erin, where she obtained her Senior Secondary School Certificate in 2011.
She proceeded to Kwara State College of Arabic and Islamic Legal Studies affiliated with Bayero University Kano where she obtained a diploma certificate in Mass Communication and Islamic Studies in 2015.
After her diploma, she enrolled in a fashion school. In 2017, she was admitted to the National Open University of Nigeria and graduated in 2022.
In an interview with the Premium Times, after she won the nomination as APC candidate, Shittu said her parents are fully in support of her political career.
“I have the best parents anyone could pray for on earth. They are the backbone of my political aspirations and it has been like that since I was an undergraduate. My dad usually advised me to contest positions in school and I mostly got finances for the contests from him. Their disposition regarding my political aspiration is so firm,” she said.
“My dad studied me and knows what is best for me so he doesn’t hesitate when I aspire for things. I had been class reps since primary school days and that continued until I graduated from National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) as the first female senate president of the Congress of NOUN Students (CONS), heading the legislative arm of the students’ association in over 85 study centres across the federation.”
