My reflections on Baba Ahmed Joda’s letter to Sanusi

I stumbled on a video clip of the Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II, at a public function a few days ago. I do not know what the function was or even how long ago it was held. I know it was held before his wretched dethronement by the Kano State government.

I listened to the emir pile up his sins of speaking the truth to the northern power elite. I found him doing what he does best – being a pain in you-know-where of the so-called northern establishment. He spoke from the heart about a once vibrant northern Nigeria turned into the wretched capital of the poor and the extreme poor in the country. He compared again, as he had done several times before, the level of poverty between the south-west and the north-west as well as the north-east.

Whereas the poverty level, he said, was 20 per cent in the south-west it was 80 per cent in both the north-west and the north-east. He accused the northern leadership of using the Islamic religion to suppress the education and the social and economic progress of their own people. He wondered why the predominantly Muslim areas are the worst hit by illiteracy and poverty and asked anyone who knew to tell him if this was in accordance with the teaching of the holy book.

This is not a review of the speech. I recall it because it set me thinking of the reaction of one of the northern leaders to his dethronement. The Daily Trust of March 12 published, at page 12, a letter to Sanusi by Baba Ahmed Joda, one of the federal super permanent secretaries in the Gowon military administration. Mallam Ahmed is perhaps today the most self-effacing northern leader I know. He has seen it all and done it all and but watches now with mounting concern the work of his generation of technocrats, the men whose wisdom and professionalism guided the military men through the treacherous waters of our national politics and made them keep a sense of fairness, justice and balance in managing our atomistic, multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation at some of its most trying times.

His letter was titled “Letter to my Son, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi.” In it, he felt he had a duty to say what needed to be said at this time in our country. I did not need to read between the lines to see that he has lost faith in the Nigerian system. This is what I find truly painful.

It takes a lot for a man like Joda to lose faith in a system he helped to build for the good of Northern Nigeria in particular and the nation in general. You cannot blame him. He continues to watch the system systematically bastardized by pretenders to fair, just and honest leadership. He did not write the letter “ to commiserate with” with the former emir, “because I know you must have known the likely consequences of the principled position you have taken.”

Baba Ahmed Joda made the point that a man who takes such a path in our country today sooner or later becomes a victim of the small minds who call the shots and who believe that the world begins and ends where their noses begin and end.

Some of the important points he made in the letter both intrigued and disturbed me. I have extrapolated five of them to show the depth of his pain and disappointment and his hope that Sanusi has it in him, in collaboration with northerners of like mind, to set in motion a process for freeing the region from its feudalistic shackles and re-position it as a progressive modern region. Here they are. The numbering is mine, not his.

1. “The reality we must face in Northern Nigeria is that the evil forces of feudalism that have kept us in bondage for so long are still there and fighting. You must have been the only voice that has been telling us this truth. These forces will fight you and you know it.”
2. “Your courage and your wide experience in many areas of endeavour place you in an excellent position to influence the effort to emancipate people who, for so long, have been subjugated and deprived by leaderships that are conservative and feudal; unable, unwilling and incapable of seeing the writing on the wall.”
3. “Leaderships that cannot understand or appreciate that this world we are in is a world that is led by knowledge, by science and technology; none of which (can) be achieved without sound education which we are denying our people.”
4. “I suggest to you that if you are contemplating the legal route to right the wrong that has been done to you, you should abandon the thought. The judiciary is not the way to go in this country when you are seeking justice. For evidence you have a living example in Jokolo, the Emir of Gwandu.”
5. “I believe it is possible for a platform to be created by you and people of like minds to propagate the ideas and the ideals that can emancipate Northern Nigeria from the shackles of the visionless leaderships that we have endured so long.”

I need add nothing more to these brilliant points. If you did not know, now you know why Sanusi had to go. The system had to be saved and protected. It permits no louse in its lock. It is always a dangerous undertaking to disturb the placidity of a system that has served and continues to serve some powerful vested interests. The right system is not one that serves the people but rather the one protects those narrow vested interests. As a character in one of the plays by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw put it, “the world with this side up is the world with the right side up.”

Sanusi thought he could challenge that and force the system to right itself and commit to a system that serves the people better. He was neither wrong nor naïve. The world owes much of its social progress to the men and women who have the courage to disagree and put their fate on the line for doing so. They do not always win but once they challenge a system, it may survive but it will never again be the same. The seed of change grows slowly but it grows surely.