Amina Halake, the wife of former presidential candidate Abduba Dida, has announced her intention to run in the 2027 general election.
In an interview with TV47 on Monday night, Halake revealed that she will be running with a ticket from the Alliance for Change party, which Dida used as party leader in his 2013 and 2017 bids.
Although Dida was the party leader at the time and Halake was secretary general, she said that they had recently held elections in which she was promoted to party leader.
"I was party secretary general and his wife at the same time, and I was involved with almost everything, campaigning, his welfare at home, so there is nothing I don't know about the campaigning, the strategy and all that," she said.
As for Dida, Halake said that his position on whether he would be vying for the third time was not clear, noting, "old habits die hard", suggesting that he might decide to vie.
Dida is currently in the United States after serving a three-year stint of a seven-year sentence in a US prison after being convicted of stalking his American wife.
"We haven't had much of a discussion about it, but he knows I am the one moving on with the party. He knows about the election we recently had and the change of officials," she stated.
"I mentioned a bit about my ambition, but we didn't discuss it deeply because he is still currently not in the country."
In 2021, Dida was sentenced to seven years in prison after being found guilty of stalking and threatening his American wife, whom he had lived with in Illinois.
He had reportedly violated a restraining order that his wife had obtained, something his family claimed he did unwittingly by visiting a mosque near the premises he was prohibited from.
“He visited a nearby mosque to pray, and unfortunately, the mosque also happened to be around the area where he was not supposed to be because Mama Lila also frequently visited the mosque,” commented Dida’s family member in September 2024.
In April 2025, news broke that he had been freed after serving a 3-year jail sentence at the Big Muddy Correctional Centre in Illinois.
