Bello Mandiya

Bello Mandiya (19 February 1964 to 7 September 2026) was a Nigerian politician of the All Progressives Congress. He served as Chief of Staff to Katsina State Governor Aminu Bello Masari from May 2015 to May 2019, then as senator for Katsina South, also called the Funtua zone, from May 2019 to May 2023. In the Ninth Senate he chaired the Committee on Water Resources. He died in Abuja on Monday, 7 September 2026, aged 62. The Katsina State Government confirmed the death. No cause was given in the government statement or in Daily Trust, Daily Nigerian, or THEWILL.

This page is for that senator. He is also written Senator Bello Mandiya, Sen. Bello Mandiya, and Sanata Bello Mandiya. No other legal name is verified. He is not Governor Aminu Bello Masari, the man he served as chief of staff. He is not Governor Yahaya Bello. He is not any other Nigerian public figure named Bello. The portrait and the videos here are of the Katsina South senator who died in Abuja on 7 September 2026.

He was born in Katsina State. Wikipedia records the birth date as 19 February 1964 and does not name a town. Later reporting ties much of his public work to Malumfashi and the wider Funtua zone, but that is constituency geography, not a sourced birthplace. He studied at the University of Lagos and took a bachelor's degree in Mass Communication. That UNILAG record is stated on Wikipedia and repeated by TheNewsGiant in its 2026 death report. A master's degree is sometimes claimed on secondary biography sites. It is not in Wikipedia or the obituaries used here, so it is left unverified.

His first widely recorded executive role was inside the Katsina Government House. From May 2015 he was Chief of Staff to Governor Aminu Bello Masari. That post put him at the centre of a state already living with banditry, cattle rustling and displacement in its southern local governments. In the 2018 APC primaries he won the Katsina South Senate ticket. The Eagle Online reported in October 2018 that the returning officer, Alhaji Yakubu Hadejia, said in Funtua that Mandiya scored 1,469 of about 3,400 votes cast. He then won the February 2019 general election for the district, succeeding Abu Ibrahim, and took his Senate seat in May 2019.

In the chamber he became a voice for a violent district. On the floor he described coordinated armed attacks in Katsina, including the 5 and 6 May 2020 raids on communities in Faskari, Kankara, Sabuwa, Dandume and neighbouring areas, the shooting of a divisional police officer, and kidnaps of local officials. He said the attackers used sophisticated weapons, including AK-47s, and had grown bold enough to operate in daylight. After gunmen hit Government Science School, Kankara, on 11 December 2020, he rose in the Senate on 15 December and told colleagues that talk was not enough. Daily Post reported his motion the next day. He cited Governor Masari's figures: the boarding school had 884 students, and after the attack the whereabouts of 333 were still unknown. He warned that if rescue was delayed the boys could share the fate of the Chibok and Dapchi schoolgirls, and he invoked section 14(2)(b) of the Constitution, that the security and welfare of the people are the primary purpose of government. RootsTV recorded him making that case from the Senate.

As chairman of the Senate Committee on Water Resources he sat across from the water minister, Suleiman Adamu, at budget defence. Briefing reporters afterwards, he said the minister had met about 400 water projects scattered across the country, that some dams had been sited where dams could not even be built, and that the ministry had chosen to finish a shorter list, about 20, rather than pretend every site could be saved. He used the comparison to argue that the administration then in office had done better in the water sector than its predecessors. The line was part budget politics and part a Katsina senator's brief. Water, dams and irrigation were not abstract federal files. They were the same landscape his constituents farmed between bandit raids.

Away from Abuja he spent the seat on visible works in the eleven local governments of Katsina South. ThisDay's February 2023 survey, written after he had already lost the party ticket, listed classrooms and furniture at girls' schools in Kafur, Danja and Malumfashi, a skills centre in Malumfashi with tailoring, ICT and a clinic, solar power at the general hospitals in Funtua and Malumfashi, an ambulance for Malumfashi General Hospital, boreholes across the zone, repairs at Musawa and Dayi dams, fertiliser and pumps for farmers, motorcycles for security units, and street lights. Governor Masari, opening some of those works, said he was proud of Mandiya for showing political capacity and commitment and for renovating and upgrading classrooms in Malumfashi. A constituent, Adamu Usman, told ThisDay that people would be grateful because Mandiya had taken a stance when they were in difficulty, aside from hundreds of projects he had executed there.

The party did not send him back. On 29 May 2022 he lost the APC Katsina South primary to Muntari Dandutse, who succeeded him in the Senate. ThisDay, quoting an unnamed APC figure, said local power-brokers described as the "3 white-elephants" had the structure and had wanted constituency money rather than finished projects. That explanation is a single anonymous quote, not a court finding. What is documented is the sequence. He lost the primary, kept commissioning works through the rest of the term, left the Senate in May 2023, and did not return.

He died in Abuja on 7 September 2026. Ibrahim Mohammed, chief press secretary to Governor Dikko Umaru Radda, confirmed it. Radda said he had received the news with shock and deep sadness and called the death a great loss to Katsina State and Nigeria. He asked Allah to forgive Mandiya, reward his deeds, and grant him Aljannatul Firdaus. Former Senate President Ahmad Ibrahim Lawan, in a statement carried by CKN Nigeria, called him a trusted confidant from before the Ninth Senate, a thorough-bred lawmaker, chairman of Water Resources, a peacemaker and a man of his word. Burial was set for Abuja the next day. TheNewsGiant reported funeral prayers for 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday at Apo Legislative Quarters. Cause of death was not disclosed. Names of a spouse or children were not given in the government statement, Wikipedia, or the obituaries used for this profile. People search for a wife and for children. Those names are not published in the sources above, so they stay unknown.