A tale of two princes
It is the best of times; it is the worst of times. Without doubt, we live in a time of great wisdom but it is unfortunately also the age of the stupid. We live in a kingdom of obsessive puritanism but have descended into diabolical incredulity. It is definitely the season of Light, but Darkness […]
It is the best of times; it is the worst of times. Without doubt, we live in a time of great wisdom but it is unfortunately also the age of the stupid. We live in a kingdom of obsessive puritanism but have descended into diabolical incredulity. It is definitely the season of Light, but Darkness still rules the length of the shaft to this light. It is the dawn of hope, but it is also the winter of despair… we were all going direct to Heaven, but we are also going direct the other way.
We live in a time that could have been scripted by Charles Dickens in a plot that chronicles the ghastly turmoil of Western Europe in the last mile of the 1700s. Some of the noisiest elite of Naijaland insist on being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
There is an audio clip making the rounds in which the reinstated emir of Kano, HRH Muhammadu Sanusi II, was purportedly bellyaching about the failures and inability of the Kano State government to put its foot down and get the job done with respect to his restoration. For the past few weeks, Kano has been embroiled in an epic struggle between Muhammadu Sanusi and the deposed Aminu Ado Bayero, each of them presiding over a separate court less than five kilometres apart, with the deposed emir less than two kilometres to the Government House.
About a week or so ago, I drove past the palace in Mandawari and was turned back by policemen and teargas around Kwalli. There were thugs smashing cars and beating up passersby and for a moment I thought this was it, the city will burn to the ground.
- Family of late OPC founder, Fasehun, protests Tinubu’s Democracy Day speech
- FG approves concurrent running of NCE, degree programmes in FCEs
The things that happen these days are a thing of legend. I for one would have sworn that such an event, with the prestige of the Kano monarchy at the center, was a fantasy before it actually took place. That a king of Kano could be deposed so easily, that the highly revered Sanusi II would be caught dead in a less-than-pristine web of dirty politics was shocking. It was incredulous too, that the deposed emir would be smuggled back into Kano and shielded by federal might, and that a state governor could issue an arrest order against even an ex-emir of Kano, and that said deposed emir could choose the path of confrontation that puts Kano on the edge of a cataclysm, that puts countless lives in danger, that risks a destruction of unquantifiable proportion.
The tragicomedy unfolding in Kano presents a nuanced view of the disturbing political entropy accompanying the seeming paralysis of the fledgling Tinubu administration and the larger Nigerian polity. During the period preceding the Buhari revolution, SLS was a household name. He was a champion of the common man against the the aristocracy that has abused its power and brought suffering to the people. Charles Dickens, in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, described how this plays “on inanimate natures as well as on the men and women who cultivated it, a prevalent tendency… towards a dejected disposition to give up, and wither away.” However, while Dickens criticised the social injustice and suffering created by the old system of
European states, he also shows the horrors perpetuated by the Revolution. In describing the fall of the Bastille, the contemporary symbol of French royal tyranny, Dickens paints a vivid picture of “the remorseless sea of turbulently swaying shapes, voices of vengeance and faces hardened in the furnaces of suffering until the touch of pity could make no mark on them.”I have no way of verifying whether or not the audio clip mentioned is authentic, but it would be heartbreaking if it is.
SLS, himself a product and part of the aristocracy before ascending the ancient throne of Kano, became an instant hero by taking on the corruption of the reigning government when he held sway as the CBN governor.
By the time Sanusi II became monarch, Nigeria, and especially his immediate domain, was plagued by a myriad of problems with social and class injustices. In the time before and after the Buhari revolution, Sanusi II used his high offices at the CBN and later the Kano Emirate to offer constructive, even if pedantic, critique of both the conditions that would culminate in catastrophe, as a warning to the Nigerian people. He predicted the severe economic hardship that confronted Nigeria and its long suffering people afterwards, connecting the cold and selfish behaviour of the aristocracy. On a political and also a personal level, the Sanusi family has been punished for more than one generation by the political establishment for more or less the same offenses.
I remember being in my boss’s office when I first heard of the dethronement of Muhammadu Sanusi II. My boss, Daniel Oghojafor, was a die-hard fan; he was born, bred and buttered in Kano. Even though he was an Urhobo man, his family home was in Kano. Oga Daniel was a decent and goodhearted man, who like most Nigerians of that hue, wanted the best for Kano, where he is from, for Delta State where his parents come from, and for Nigeria, the land we will live and die in.
That day, Oga Daniel was livid with anger against someone unable to complete a task assigned to them that day. I saw the other side of my soft-spoken boss. Myself, and another female colleague, had to stay back to go through the reporting template for an impact assessment study of a World Bank assisted project under implementation in Kano and a few other states across the country and the conversation soon veered off into the mechanics of northern Nigerian social structures–and like we regularly did, we argued about why we, “northern Nigerians” were the beginning and end of our own problems. It amounted to treason in his books that anyone could so much as contemplate the banishment of a prince of Sanusi’s stature from relevance. We were together in the office when the news broke. Oga Daniel certainly lacked the auxiliary consciousness that understands the cultural intricacies and complexities of the Northern Nigerian political and historical realities and that tends to distort the way one processed facts. Mr. Dan believed that we were going to heaven with Sanusi II as emir; and now that he was being restored after having been deposed, he thought we are heading the other way.
It is more palatable to argue that there is no emir in Kano than to say that there are two. If there is no emir, then there are two princes at daggers drawn and it gives me
no joy to argue that neither of them now deserves the throne of Kano. They represent a dynastic order established by the founder and patron saint of the old Sokoto Empire of which Kano was the crown jewel, Uthman Danfodio, quoting a prophetic tradition, that anyone who openly showed their desire for a throne is not qualified for it.
Today, there is no emir in Kano. Not only that, but a part of me says there won’t be one for another generation because no matter who prevails among these princes, there still won’t be an emir in Kano.
My humble opinion.