Beyond Sanusi II (I)

Public reactions to the dethronement and banishment of the Emir of Kano, Alhaji Muhammadu Sanusi II, could not be but this furious for obvious reasons, not least because it was an empty show of force where macho action was hardly needed. Still, as shocking as it was, as unfair and unjust as it was and as humiliating as it was, Sanusi’s deposition by the governor Kano State, Dr Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, on March 9, was not all that unexpected. It merely climaxed a series of shameless attempts by the governor to humiliate him and thus pave the way for what he eventually did. When the hammer finally came down on the head of Sanusi, few discerning men and women who had watched the drama of the absurd starring Ganduje in the star role, simply shrugged their shoulders. They saw it coming.

It is difficult for anyone who loses a throne this high and this revered in such clumsy circumstances not to feel the pain and the humiliation that Sanusi feels. I offer my commiserations to the fearless, courageous and articulate technocrat who refused, rightly, to accept that being emir meant that he must padlock his lips and only be seen and not heard. There is always a prize, big or small, to pay in defence of one’s principles.

Sanusi is paying his in the hands of a man who could not stand the emir’s robust criticisms of northern leaders, past and present, who, by acts of commission collectively reduced the former towering region to its current position as the least peaceful, the least safe, the least educated and the poorest in the country. I do not think Sanusi delighted in his repeated warnings that if the northern leaders fail to take on the challenge of turning things around, it could only get worse, much worse, particularly for the sons and daughters of the talakawa. But he had a duty to his conscience, his people and his country. He carried out that duty at various public fora and became a strident and lone voice in the northern political wilderness. The uncomfortable found the voice jarring and accusatory.

Maybe, his deposition must have come, and I am not being cynical about this, as a relief for the former emir. His humiliation in the hands of the governor had been total. Ganduje reduced his power, authority and prestige among the nation’s number one traditional rulers by carving Kano emirate into four emirates. Sanusi was thus given only one quarter of the 500 year-old kingdom he inherited from his ancestors as his kingdom. That was bad enough.

Ganduje ignored the prestige of Sanusi’s high office and chose to treat him like a junior civil servant. He queried him, not once and not twice, accusing him of corruption. The governor ordered the state house of assembly to investigate allegations of corruption against the emir. He took all these and more unholy steps to justify Sanusi’s eventual dethronement, and acting well beyond his powers, banishment, depriving a fellow citizen of his constitutionally guaranteed right to live in any part of the country of his choice as a private citizen. His action diminishes him as much as it diminishes Sanusi and the rest of us.

I am sure no one would be naïve enough to doubt that our traditional institution faces clear and continuing dangers to its place and relevance in the hands of commoners calling the shots from their elevated positions of political power. Those of them who had nursed open or quiet grievances against the place of the traditional institution in a democracy are casting the stones with reckless and inebriated abandon. I fear for some of our traditional rulers whose principled stand against the egregious assault on the culture and the tradition of their people inevitably puts them at odds with the ogas at the top. Today it is Sanusi; tomorrow it would be another traditional ruler with whom a state governor is not pleased. He too would be put through the wrenching grill of humiliation, dethroned and banished to an outpost where he would neither be seen nor heard for the rest of his life. We must rise to moderate the intoxication of power and save honest men from humiliation in the hands of lesser men.

We must recognise these as trying times for our traditional institution. An institution that should be the bulwark against the poison of politics and the thieving, morally depraved politicians, is itself now a victim of the political poison and the venality of our politics of bigmanism. Most of our politicians who beat the paths to the palaces of traditional rulers and induce them to invent and confer meaningless chieftaincy titles on them, tend to believe that this is what the institution is worth today. This, of course, is the age of vanity with the vain seeking to clothe themselves with the silk of respectability. Each time a traditional ruler exchanges such a title for the steaming bowl of yam pottage, he invariably diminishes his throne and creates room for politicians to treat him as an object worth less than the title he bestows on the rich but undeserving men.

Reactions to the dethronement and banishment of Sanusi have centred largely on the unfair, unjust and the barbaric action of the governor. Sanusi is the loser here but the matter is beyond him. It raises a very fundamental question about the place of the traditional institution in our form of government. It is a question we need to address now to determine what role the institution should play – and allow it to play it.

Our traditional institution is older than our western democracy. Before democracy was, it was, and was the only form of governance we knew. It served us well. The colonial authorities recognised this and brought the institution into its governance orbit. They introduced the indirect system of regional administration to give our traditional rulers a voice in how we were governed. Up to the time of the military intrusion in our national politics each region maintained a house of chiefs created during the colonial administration to ensure that the traditional institution continued to give wise counsel to the politicians in an advisory capacity. Our politicians fail to recognise this.

The systematic erosion of the voice and power of our traditional rulers began when the generals decided that they must be insulated from politics and confine themselves to being the custodians of our culture and tradition. There must have a logic to that but it was patently warped. The institution, being a system of human administration, is essentially political. A traditional ruler is elected by the kingmakers in the same way that a president or a state governor is elected through the instrumentality of a political party. It seems odd to expect people who hold political offices not to play politics.

It led this: our traditional institution is mothballed. Neither the 1979 constitution nor the current one, both of which were midwifed by the generals, spared a thought for the role of the traditional institution in government. It was a grievous mistake and grievously the nation is paying the price. This constitutional silence was exploited by President Buhari to excuse his decision not to help make peace between Sanusi and Ganduje and prevent Sanusi’s dethronement with obvious implications for peace in Kano State. If we must rescue the institution from the muck of its irrelevance and make it relevant to our form of government, we must begin by admitting the unsettling fact that it is largely in a mess today. It would take more than cosmetics to clean it up. To begin with, we must accept that fewer things are worse than the powerlessness of the powerful.

(To be concluded)