A former Senate Majority Leader, Jonathan Zwingina has passed on. He was 70.
The former lawmaker who represented Adamawa South Senatorial District died on Wednesday (yesterday, October 2) in an undisclosed hospital in Abuja after a protracted illness.
An ebullient northern Christian and political strategist, Zwingina was the director general of the ‘Hope ’93’ presidential campaign organisation of late Chief Moshood Abiola of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 1993 election annulled by former military president, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida.
A founding member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), where he was elected as a senator in 1999 and reelected in April 2003, Zwingina served on the Senate Committees on Works & Housing, Establishment, Internal Affairs, Information, Special Projects, Privatization and Economic Affairs.
Out of politics and limelight, Zwingina’s apparent desire to live a quiet life after politics and public office was shattered in 2007 when his house in Abuja, the FCT, was demolished in 2007, allegedly on the orders of former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai.
It was not immediately clear how long he had been sick or the kind of illness he had suffered from but sources stated he died after a “protracted illness.”
