NGScorecard

At his May 2015 inauguration, El-Rufai identified insecurity as "an obstacle to progress" and promised to work with law enforcement to drastically reduce violent crime and ensure safety of life and limb across the state.

A military base and two mobile police squadrons were deployed to southern Kaduna, but banditry and communal killings in southern Kaduna and along the Kaduna-Abuja highway persisted throughout both terms, with El-Rufai himself repeatedly attributing the violence to cycles of attack and reprisal rather than resolving it.

Declared 12 years of free and compulsory education up to junior secondary school level, later extended to senior secondary school.

The free-education policy was formally declared and extended as promised, and scholarship funding was scaled up from ₦8,000 to an average of ₦105,000 to cover tuition, accommodation, and learning materials.

Part of the "Restoration Master-Plan" pledge to make Kaduna business-friendly and attract private investment.

Kaduna was ranked Number One for Ease of Doing Business in Nigeria by the World Bank's Doing Business Report from 2018 onward, and the state attracted over $800 million in new investment between 2015 and 2021.

Committed to upgrading 255 Primary Health Centres across the state as part of a human-capital-development push in health.

The PHC upgrade programme was launched and renovation work carried out at a number of centres, but no independent, state-wide verification that all 255 centres reached full operational standard was found.

Made the ₦24 billion AfDB/IsDB-funded Zaria Water Supply Expansion and Sanitation Project his personal pledge, promising 150 million litres of water a day to Zaria and its environs.

The project was commissioned with fanfare in 2019, but by the end of his tenure it was reported to be on the brink of collapse, with Kaduna residents — including in Zaria — still lacking reliable potable water.

Pledged to restructure and reform the Kaduna State civil service to reduce its size and cost, launching a public service reform and revitalisation programme in 2016.

The reform was carried out aggressively — thousands of workers, including local government staff, were disengaged between 2017 and 2021 as part of the downsizing, fulfilling the promise but drawing sustained NLC opposition; his successor later reinstated 37 workers found to have been wrongfully disengaged.

In his second term, pledged an ambitious urban renewal programme covering Kaduna, Kafanchan, and Zaria to modernise education, healthcare, and transport infrastructure.

The Kaduna Urban Renewal Programme was launched and is described as the most ambitious and transformative infrastructure investment since the state's creation, generating jobs and renewing infrastructure in the named sectors.

Committed to holding local government council elections through the Kaduna State Independent Electoral Commission.

LG elections were held on 12 May 2018 across the state's 23 local government areas, but voting had to be cancelled and rescheduled in Kaura and Jaba LGAs after hoodlums hijacked election materials and attacked electoral commission offices.

Pledged to reduce Kaduna's dependence on federal allocations by aggressively growing internally generated revenue.

IGR rose from ₦11.5 billion in 2015 to roughly ₦58 billion by 2023 according to National Bureau of Statistics data, a more than fivefold increase over the two terms.

In 2019, El-Rufai became the first prominent northern APC politician to publicly declare that Nigeria's presidency should rotate to the south in 2023.

He remained one of the most vocal northern APC governors backing power rotation and was prominent in the campaign that delivered Bola Tinubu's 2023 election as the first southern president since Obasanjo.