Rita Odafe
Rukayat Motunrayo Shittu, a 26-year-old candidate from the All Progressives Congress (APC), has been declared the winner of the Owode Onire state constituency of Asa Local Government Area in Kwara State House of Assembly election. Shittu won with 7,521 votes, beating her rival from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) who scored 6,957. This makes her one of the youngest candidates in Nigeria to 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 then went on 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 and was admitted to the National Open University of Nigeria in 2017, graduating in 2022.
In an interview with Premium Times, Shittu said that her parents are fully supportive of her political career. She said that her father had been encouraging her to run for positions since she was an undergraduate and had provided her with the finances to do so. She also mentioned that she had been a class representative since primary school days and had gone on to become the first female senate president of the Congress of NOUN Students (CONS).
