You made me curious, so I've just started a Daura attempt myself. I started without automatically created families and without shattered retreat, which may make a difference. Before unpausing, I got married right away and also created and took three concubines. I also immediately declared war and raised my levies: the Gobir/Tahoua count next to me had a lower martial score and thus slightly fewer troops (RNG I guess) and if you send your troops into Gobir immediately after declaring war, you can fight his levies before they've had a chance of uniting. Then you play ping-pong and make sure you follow them and fight them several times until only 150 are left. Then you can siege Tahoua until 100% warscore are achieved. Congrats, you are now a three county count, which should make the rest easier, I hope. Edit: By 778, I already had 7 counties and two strong allies (I had weakened the guy to the south with his 4 counties by raiding him first).
P.S.: I think going with "created families=off" is the way to go here, because then you will have zero dynasty apart from the children you're going to have, and the elders hating your guts won't matter because there will be no wrong choices.
P.S. 2: I've just realized that it's not possible to start with full council power as a tribal realm in 769, so I wonder what happened there in my Ghana playthrough... Maybe this happened while I was an imbecilic child ruler or something? All I know is that it seemed to me that very early in the game, I already had full council power without having actively done that.