On 14 October 2018, the Abuja-based online newspaper Daily Nigerian, founded and edited by Jaafar Jaafar, published the first of a trove of video clips that would become the most iconic corruption footage in Nigerian Fourth Republic history. The clips — recorded covertly by a contractor whose identity was protected — show the then sitting Governor of Kano State, Dr Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, receiving wads of US$100 bills and stuffing them into the wide front pockets of his babariga. Multiple contractors told the paper that the payments, alleged to total roughly US$5 million in bribes for state contracts, were a routine kickback arrangement.
Ganduje denied the videos and his administration alleged they were doctored. The Kano State House of Assembly opened an investigation in 2018 but it stalled; Ganduje sued Daily Nigerian and Jaafar Jaafar for defamation. The case meandered through the courts for years without final resolution.
The story was reopened decisively in July 2023, after Ganduje had left office, when the Kano State Public Complaints and Anti-Corruption Commission — under chairman Muhuyi Magaji Rimingado, appointed by the incoming NNPP Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf — announced that an independent forensic analysis of the original video files had confirmed they were genuine and not digitally altered. The commission filed fresh charges against Ganduje. Ganduje, by then the National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress, was eventually charged at the Kano State High Court in 2024 in a bribery case tied to the same tapes; the case became one of the most politically sensitive corruption prosecutions of the Tinubu era.
The Dollar Videos are recorded here as a Fourth Republic pivot point: the first time a sitting Nigerian governor was filmed in the act of collecting alleged bribes, the first time such footage was forensically authenticated by a state agency, and a case study in how Nigerian political-party power (Ganduje's chairmanship of the APC, 2023–24) interacted with criminal accountability.