By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
Governor Abdullahi “Gandollar” Ganduje is no doubt a contemptibly
philistine monster of avarice and debauchery who dethroned Sanusi Lamido Sanusi
as Emir of Kano because he couldn’t stomach the former emir’s disapproval of the
electoral fraud that brought him to power.
There is also no doubt that Sanusi’s unrelenting public censures
of the rotten, if time-honored, cultural quiddities of the Muslim North discomfited
many people who are invested in the status quo, and this became one of the convenient
bases for his ouster.
But Sanusi isn’t nearly the victim he has been cracked up to
be by his admirers and defenders. First, he rode to the Kano emirship in 2014 on
the crest of a wave of emotions stirred by partisan politics and came down from
it the same way.
Even though he wasn’t initially on the shortlist of Kano’s
kingmakers, APC's Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso (who is now in PDP) made Sanusi emir
in 2014 to spite PDP’s President Goodluck Jonathan and shield Sanusi from the consequences
of his unmasking of multi-billion-dollar corruption at the NNPC. Apart from his
unceremonious removal as CBN governor for his whistle blowing, he was going to
face other untoward retributions from the Jonathan administration, but his
appointment as emir put paid to it.
Now, Sanusi lost his emirship to the same partisan politics
that got it for him in the first place. In an ironic twist, he was made emir by
an APC government for making privileged revelations that disadvantaged a PDP
government, and was removed as an emir by an APC government for his overt and
covert acts that could have benefited the PDP in 2019.
In other words, Sanusi’s emirship was molded in the crucible
of partisan politics and was dissolved in it.
Nonetheless, Sanusi, given his intellectual sophistication
and pretenses to being an advocate of egalitarianism, had no business being an emir.
Monarchy is way past its sell-by date not just in Nigeria but everywhere. It’s an anachronistic, vestigial remnant
of a primitive past that invests authority on people by mere accident of
heredity. Any authority that is inherited and not earned, in my opinion, is
beneath contempt.
Emirship isn’t only a primeval anomaly in a modern world, it
is, in fact, un-Islamic. In Islam, leadership is derived from knowledge and the
consensus of consultative assemblies of communities called the Shura, not from heredity.
Monarchies in the
Muslim North, which have constituted themselves into parasitic, decadent drains
on the society but which pretend to be Islamic, are grotesque perversions of
the religion they purport to represent. Anyone, not least one who makes pious
noises about equality, that is denied the unfair privileges of monarchy is no
victim.
Most importantly, though, Sanusi embodies a jarring disconnect
between high-minded ideals and lived reality. He rails against child marriage in
public but married a teenager upon becoming an emir. When the late Pius Adesanmi
called him out, he told him to “grow a brain.” He suddenly became the patron
saint of conservative Muslim cultural values.
He expended considerable intellectual energies critiquing polygamy
among poor Muslim men, but he is married to four wives. His defense, of course,
would be that he can afford it, and poor Muslim men can’t. Fair enough. But
transaction-oriented reformists lead by example.
Fidel Castro, for example, stopped smoking when he campaigned
against it. It would be nice to say to poor, polygamous Muslim men, “Why are
you, a poor man, married to four wives when Sanusi, a wealthy man and an emir,
is married to just one wife?”
That would have had a much higher impact than his preachments.
In spite of their moral failings, Buhari, Abba Kyari, and Mamman Daura would be
much more effective campaigners against disabling polygamy by poor Muslim men
than Sanusi can ever be because they are monogamists even when they can afford to
marry four wives.
This is a legitimate critique since Sanusi has a choice to
not call out poor Muslim men who marry more wives than they can afford since
polygamy is animated by libidinal greed, which is insensitive to financial
means.
Sanusi habitually fulminates against the enormous and
inexorably escalating poverty in the north, but even though he is an immensely affluent
person, he has not instituted any systematic mechanism to tackle the scourge of
poverty in the region in his own little way.
Instead, he spends hundreds of billions of naira to decorate
the emir’s palace, buy exotic horses, and luxuriate in opulent sartorial regality.
And, although, he exposed humongous corruption during
Goodluck Jonathan’s administration and dollar racketeering during Buhari’s
regime, he is himself an indefensibly corrupt and profligate person. In two
well-researched investigative pieces in 2017, Daily Nigeria’s Jaafar Jaafar
chronicled Sanusi’s mind-boggling corruption as emir of Kano, which apparently
didn’t abate until he was dethroned.
Sanusi was ostensibly a Marxist when he studied economics at
ABU, which explains why he exhibits flashes of radicalism in his public oratory,
but he is, in reality, an out-of-touch, unfeeling, feudal, neoliberal elitist
who is contemptuous, and insensitive to the suffering, of poor people.
He supported Jonathan’s petrol price hike in 2012 and even
wondered why poor people were protesting since they had no cars, and generators,
according to him, were powered by diesel, not petrol!
When his attention was
brought to the fact that only “subsidized” and privileged “big men” like him
use diesel-powered generators, he backed down and apologized. But I found it
remarkably telling that until 2012 Sanusi had no clue that the majority of
Nigerians used petrol-powered generators to get electricity.
In a September 1, 2012 column titled, "Sanusi Lamido Sanusi’s Unwanted 5000 Naira Notes," I noted that Sanusi was "one of
the most insensitive, out-of-touch bureaucrats to ever walk Nigeria’s corridors
of power."
Again, in my December 10, 2016 article titled,
"Dangerous Fine Print in Emir Sanusi's Prescription for Buhari," I
wrote: "If you are a poor or economically insecure middle-class person who
is writhing in pain amid this economic downturn, don’t be deceived into
thinking that Emir Sanusi is on your side. He is not. His disagreements with
Buhari have nothing to do with you or your plight. If he has his way, you would
be dead by now because the IMF/World Bank neoliberal theology he evangelizes
has no care for poor, vulnerable people."
On April 6, 2017, I wrote a Facebook status update that
anticipated Sanusi’s dethronement and predicted that he might be president after
his dethronement. I wrote:
“Did you pick up on the cryptic but devastating critique of
Kano State Governor Ganduje’s government in Emir Sanusi’s wildly trending
Kaduna speech? That’s gotta hurt. Remember that the power to appoint and
dethrone traditional rulers rests exclusively with state governors. Now,
pissing off the federal government AND the state government AND an entire
region’s conservative cultural elites with bitter, uncomfortable truth-telling
is a lethally combustible mix.
“I make no pretenses to possessing oracular powers (because
I don't), but I predict that, like his grandfather, Emir Sanusi II will be
deposed. But, unlike his grandfather, he may end up becoming Nigeria’s
president after his dethronement. Kano’s loss would then be Nigeria’s gain
which, in a strangely circuitous way, would also be Kano’s gain since Kano is
part of Nigeria.
“Sanusi shouldn’t be Kano’s emir; he should be Nigeria’s
president. I have strong disagreements with the neoliberal orthodoxy he
subscribes to, but it would be nice to have a truly informed and educated man
as president for once.”
Now, do I still want Sanusi to be Nigeria’s president? I am
not too sure anymore. First, I doubt that the forces that got him out of the
throne would allow him to become president, but should he decide to run for president
in 2023, people who will vote for him should realize that he is neither a saint
nor a victim.
