Idowu Akinlotan

NEITHER the Kano State government nor the deposed Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II acted wisely in the messy traditional and political affairs that culminated in last week’s dethronement saga in the state. The matter could have been better handled. But both parties chose to approach it lackadaisically. The dethronement, it must be admitted, was a long time coming; but suddenly on Monday, almost like a bolt from the blue, the Kano State government announced the deposition of the 14th Fulani emir of Kano. In less than one week, however, the sting had been taken out of the deposition bite. Unwilling to let due process run its course, the state sealed the emir’s fate while investigations were yet to run their course, hurried him out of the palace, and banished him to Nasarawa State. The state of course falsely denied the banishment part of the affair, passing that unseemly buck to security agencies who were themselves flustered by the whole saga. But few doubted that the affair was unavoidable.

No governor and no emir had been so unready for the consequences of a loudly proclaimed and acclaimed deposition. The deposed emir hugged monarchical martyrdom with a characteristic frenzy that puzzled his admirers and supporters, and mystified the governor, Abdullahi Ganduje. Barely a few years after mounting the famous stool of the Kano traditional throne, Emir Sanusi had boxed himself into becoming a radical whose ideology showed neither clarity nor consistency. All that was evident is that he regularly cocked a snook at the governor, baited him to do his worse, and despite repeated moves to broker peace with the governor, felt he owed more to his brazen and provocative ideas than to his traditional oath and subordination to modern political authority. He was a modern intellectual lounging on a very ancient and traditional stool. Balancing the demands of the two became for him an ordeal.

Emir Sanusi’s nearly six years on the throne taxed his character and mental fortitude to the limit. He is supremely confident in his intellectual ability, and constantly backs it with deft oratorical deployments. It is not often that a man possesses these virtues in abundance. Nor is it all the time that a man, possessing such gifts, adds to them an almost uncanny ability to circulate with unmatched aplomb among the country’s leading business, political and intellectual elite. And as if nature is partial to him, it then further endows him with a fervour and bellicosity that help him to market his ideas and, when necessary, put gloss on his habitual inconsistencies and contradictions. He was fallible, as his more than five years on the Kano throne showed, but his bravura performance, his boldness, and his defiance lead his opponents to either abandon their positions or question their own standing and logic.

It is fair to say Dr Ganduje was more intimidated by Emir Sanusi’s defiance than by his own inadequacies and foibles as a governor. But only the deposed emir can answer why, with such exaggerated sense of accomplishment, he nonetheless preferred to push his luck so far to the point of finally embracing martyrdom. In the last three years of his reign, he pushed that luck to its elastic limit. He was never the most scrupulous of professionals, particularly in the finance sector where he made his name, and he felt continually restricted by the rules and guidelines of the sector that nurtured him to public acclaim. But just as a feeling of ennui began to sweep over him, he resorted, as was his custom, to brinkmanship that mixed elements of hubris with insolence and a lack of reflection.

Many analysts have suggested that the deposed emir could have managed the throne differently and far better than he did, and to a different and perhaps pleasant outcome. No one debarred him from ventilating his ideas and flaunting his oratorical gifts, but even he ought to know that the country’s traditional stools lack the executive powers they used to have centuries ago. He could challenge the retrogressive and feudal systems that have hobbled and ossified the North, but who says he should wave his radical manifesto so irreverently and sometimes so flippantly under the nose of the ruling elite. He was expected to be mindful of the idiosyncrasies of the throne and the expansive countervailing powers of the government, and to sensibly navigate the rapids and waterfalls which he must encounter from year to year. But he clearly lacked both the patience and the wisdom to ensure his own survival and the well-being of the monarchy. His ideas and his style may be modern, but nothing says they were also expedient. He is an intellectual, but he obviously listens only to his own counsels, failing to study the leadership styles statesmen before him so solidly projected.

The problem then with Emir Sanusi, quite like his grandfather who was also deposed as emir, was his lack of moderation, inability to understand and manage the governor, and failure to coax Kano’s complex system to his worldview. His deposition was not inevitable. He made and prided himself a martyr and hastened his own fall. He probably sees the deposition as liberating, allowing him the leeway and platform a popular rebel like him needs to propagate his ideas and showcase his oratory. He can almost swear beneath his breath that he would make his traducers in Kano and elsewhere pay for their hypocrisy, since he would no longer be constrained from letting them have a piece of his fiery mind. But if he were to suddenly acquire the wisdom he failed to project on the Kano traditional throne, he would ensure that nothing he says or does should reflect the malice and lack of moderation common to plebeians.

Emir Sanusi simply wished himself into martyrdom because he was not as endowed with wisdom as he is endowed with a great intellect. His nemesis, Dr Ganduje, who is the public face of a conniving and now suspected state government, is even less wise. Emir Sanusi had a very large ego; but deposed, he has nothing left to fear or lose. The governor on the other hand lives in a glass house. By deposing the emir, and running a government of doubtful ethical soundness, he has thrown more than a thousand stones. He will not be spared. Wisdom should have dictated to him to keep the emir close to him pissing out than kick him out and risk his prolonged pissing in. Dr Ganduje will soon find out that investigating and publishing details of Emir Sanusi’s alleged financial infractions will pale into insignificance beside his own alleged contractual shenanigans.

The Hausa-Fulani North against which Emir Sanusi directed much of his diatribe is regarded by many as ultra-conservative, meaning that he was a regional misfit in their midst. It is also suggested that by the time of his deposition, the emir had so lost favour with the region’s traditional and political elite that it was near impossible to save him despite the best efforts of the former military head of state, Abdulsalami Abubakar. There is little doubt that his admonitions and criticisms nettled the elite, and a significant number of northern leaders couldn’t care less if the emir stayed on the throne or was deposed. But Kano is a little different, for the Hausa-Fulani North is not an unbroken vista of conservatism or reaction. Kano has been a long-standing bastion of radical politics, sometimes violently opposed to the region’s dominant ideology. The state was, therefore, an unlikely candidate to smother the seemingly radical philosophy of Emir Sanusi. But even Kano had grown weary of the fiery monarch, and had begun to long for some normality, regardless of the support major political players like former governor Rabiu Kwankwaso gave him. The state may be largely radical, but it is almost evenly split between the country’s two dominant political parties, a partisanship undifferentiated by style, morality or ideology.

Radicalism or conservatism played little or no role in Emir Sanusi’s deposition. Dr Ganduje cannot be ideologically categorised, especially given the ethical morass in which he has allegedly immersed himself. Indeed, the resignation with which Kano indigenes acquiesced to the deposition should illustrate to the deposed emir the quandary in which he threw Kano by his immoderate actions and statements, not to say the infinite contradictions that dog his monarchy and person. Kano, like any other city which has experienced deposition, will survive and retain its cultural, religious and political flavour. The deposition will have little consequence. Emir Sanusi instinctively knows this and has sensed the futility of challenging the action of the state government. He will thus move on sure-footedly to the next phase of his life, and he will more likely flourish than fade away, for he is immensely gifted. The same cannot be said of Dr Ganduje. He has done little to lay a solid foundation for his political future; and while the Hausa-Fulani dichotomy that sometimes constitutes an undertow to northern politics may still be noticeable or even produce some ripples now and again, his fate will be determined by forces and factors totally unrelated to that subtle cultural contrast.

There are conspiracy theories about the future of Emir Sanusi, particularly relating to a possible interest in the presidency, say in 2023. It will not happen. The tragic silhouette through which the Buhari presidency is viewed today has gingered abundant caution in Nigerians regarding how they assess their aspiring leaders. Neither the immoderate Emir Sanusi, despite his vaunted intellect and robustness, nor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna, despite his boisterousness and intelligence, possesses the vision, temper and democratic credentials needed to found and drive a modern nation. The deposed emir will furiously mine the goldfield availed him by a blundering Dr Ganduje, and he will get a lot of recognition in Nigeria and some parts of the world. But he is unlikely to be able to shake off the vices that made his deposition urgent and possible. There is more to being a traditional ruler, just as there is more to being the leader of a nation. As both Emir Sanusi and President Buhari have shown in Kano traditional affairs and All Progressives Congress (APC) affairs respectively, it takes so much to be a leader that neither feigned radicalism nor disguised lethargy can satisfy the prerequisites.

By Idowu Akinlotan

Five days before he marked his 83rd birthday, ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo delivered a scathing assessment of the health of Nigeria, particularly its political condition.

Speaking at the first memorial lecture held in honour of Frederick Fasehun, founder of the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC), Chief Obasanjo asked the ruling elite to heed the agitation for restructuring if the country was not to disintegrate.

Many Nigerians have been astounded both by the occasion on which the former president made his remarks, an event hosted by an organisation which he did his best to exterminate during his presidency, and by the subject of restructuring, which he also previously scorned.

Beyond indulging his capacity to criticise, it should, however, worry him that his legacies, just like after 1979, have been virtually destroyed.

But analysts must wade through the kitchen midden of his ideas to find and apply his more enduring suggestions.

On his thoughts about a new Nigerian constitution, particularly the subject of restructuring, this column will discount the militating factors of his person, ideas, style and leadership failings.

The column will look at his main suggestion, for it was made, it is clear, in good faith and with dreadful forebodings.

The presidency may disparage his suggestion, but that would not lessen its force and relevance. Chief Obasanjo’s presidency may also not be the best the country could have had, and his achievements might be questionable and controversial, but he undoubtedly performed far better than his successors in terms of fostering a democratic spirit and managing the economy without the obsession for debt accumulation that has entranced his successors.

It is true he was directly and indirectly responsible for the succession of bad and incompetent leaders the country has been saddled with since his exit, but the choice of being great leaders, despite their inauspicious beginnings, rested with those successors.

If they were intrinsically competent, if they felt challenged by the weight of being president, if they learnt any lesson at all from other countries and by reading the accounts of great leaders, despite the flawed manner of their elections, Chief Obasanjo’s successors should have felt challenged to rise to greatness.

That they have underperformed and in fact belittled governance and destroyed the county’s modest gains is a reflection of their vacuity and incompetence.

Chief Obasanjo stands accused of many things, but he has also managed often to succinctly capture the mood of the country.

According to him: “President Goodluck Jonathan’s effort of a National Conference did not even get to the National Assembly.

Today, the agitation has moved up to restructuring — thanks to Buhari’s administration and its impunity and all. With the fractional political division, poor management of the economy, the non-protecting security and the politics of uncertainty in the land, we should not allow restructuring agitation to degenerate to self-determination.

There is still a window of opportunity for us to nip in the bud a possible and indeed likely agitation for self determination that will be violent and destructive…”

Chief Obasanjo is right that the high level of impunity in the country seems to suggest that members of the ruling elite imagine that if it comes to war, the outcome is predictable.

Using the Nigerian civil war as a test case, he dispels the fanciful notion that  war could be predicted with accuracy.

His warnings are apt, and his observations, including psychoanalysing the present ruling elite, are unimpeachable. They can listen to him, assuming they are so blind that they cannot read the signs of fragmentation playing out under their nose.

Or they can choose to ignore and describe him as a disreputable and frustrated old man. The choice is theirs. They must live, and possibly perish, with their choice.

By Idowu Akinlotan

The clumsy pretext latched on to by a few leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC) to overthrow Adams Oshiomhole, chairman of the party, is mainly his inflexibility. Stretched a little further, the pretext is his refusal to be malleable to certain interests. Having lost their common enemies personified by Senator Bukola Saraki and company, party leaders have proved to everyone that while adversity drove them to frantic animosity, peace will in fact reinforce their grudges and poison their relationships. It is now clear that more separate them than unite them. So, the long knives are out, and the party is at daggers drawn; and it will not matter what Mr Oshiomhole has done or not done. His enemies want him out before 2023 because they cannot guarantee his neutrality; and if they can get rid of him now, it will be a bonus. But they are simply being juvenile and tactless.

The animosity between Mr Oshiomhole and his enemies came to a head last week when, using the illegal and atrocious template deployed to unseat former Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) Walter Onnoghen, some party leaders waltzed into an Abuja High Court to, incredibly, secure a misused and misapplied injunction against him at the interlocutory stage without hearing from him. Ordered to stop parading himself as chairman of the party, he was immediately barred from having access to the party headquarters because the police had been primed to barricade the party’s offices. It was a synchronised plot by a party that is evidently headless. Cut to the chase, Mr Oshiomhole’s enemies, led by Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State, are not interested in the legality or otherwise of their actions and court processes. They want the party chairman out; they will not be dissuaded by any law or process.

Most APC governors either support their chairman or are indifferent. Only a few are unalterably opposed to him. With Dr Fayemi as the arrowhead of the plot, and ably supported by Kebbi State governor, Abubakar Atiku-Bagudu, and egged on by the fulminating Edo State governor, Godwin Obaseki, the plotters hope to railroad a decision against Mr Oshiomhole and make his exit sure and irreversible. While the president dithers, the plotters will do their utmost to delay the Court of Appeal decision on the matter — a decision expected to favour the party chairman — and stampede the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) into finally unhorsing Mr Oshiomhole. Neither the plotters nor the party can lawfully accomplish their goals in the short run. They will, therefore, make a recourse to illegality, and damn the consequences. There is no question that the Abuja High Court judge who granted the prayers of the complainants against the APC chairman misapplied the law. The only question that remains is whether the appellate court will do justice on time.

Should Mr Oshiomhole survive this plot, his enemies will not relent. They have been too indulged by the party and its leaders to care a hoot what shenanigans they concoct, and have been somewhat encouraged by the vacillation, detachment and spinelessness of the presidency. What is, therefore, not guaranteed is whether after surviving this latest putsch Mr Oshiomhole will become more conciliatory or intransigent. The APC chairman, despite his bullishness and lack of tact, is a better politician than his enemies. He rants and raves, and can sometimes be unsparing, but he is infinitely more gregarious, more accessible, more affable, and more politically ethical than the Machiavellians who have brought out the long knives against him. Inordinate pressure is being brought to bear on the president to abandon Mr Oshiomhole. Sometimes the president seems to buckle, and at other times, unsure of tomorrow, he snaps out of his lethargy and hesitantly backs the chairman. Had the president been as resolute as Dr Fayemi and his co-rebels have been openly rebellious against the principles of natural justice and the guidelines of the party, there would be no question what fate awaited Mr Oshiomhole.

Nothing is sure for the APC chairman. A few plotters within his party have instigated the judiciary and the police against him. So far, neither he nor anyone who has observed the APC can be sure how the intrigues will play out or which way the cat jumps. His face, never previously rosy or chubby, now looks drawn, and the didactic expression that often suffused his visage has yielded to abject melancholy. He has not lost his sense of humour or the regular but eclectic resort to the sophomoric theology of his youth, but he has become increasingly desperate, beleaguered and a little disoriented. He still has support, in fact more support within the party than his enemies, but he is becoming inexpert at sizing up that support, and has often exaggerated the number of his opponents. He knows instinctively that he has largely done what is right by the party, much more than his enemies, but he has become cavalier about the ethics to which he and his party have subscribed, and has lost the arithmetical candour that had before now made him accomplished in gauging his support base.

No one can immediately tell how long it will be before the APC finally implodes, as this column has repeatedly warned. But there is hardly anyone who does not understand the elements of the misunderstanding tearing the party apart. Put simply, the problem of the APC is the fight between some governors who seek to have the chairman at their beck and call, and others in the party who simply want a firm, sensible and fairly ideological chairman. The politics of 2023 is merely tangential, despite its seeming centrality. Former party chairman John Odigie-Oyegun was the darling of many of the party’s governors, but he was too malleable to be of any use in imposing discipline on the party, and too embarrassingly eager to please his sponsors. Mr Oshiomhole, on the other hand, met an almost disused and sundered party, and has struggled valiantly, sometimes presumptuously, to rebuild the party’s foundations and system. To his enemies within the party, he seems to have embarked on needless revanchism. Nothing was lost, and no political territories were surrendered to the opposition, moaned the nostalgic governors. The battle line was, therefore, drawn, with one side looking to the past, and the other looking to the future.

Edo, Kebbi, Kaduna and Ekiti APC may cast their lot with the plotters to unhorse Mr Oshiomhole, but the rest of the APC states seem to be wary of the fanaticism of their colleagues, and are thus unsure how to proceed. But while his preferences remain clear, Kaduna’s Nasir el-Rufai has surprisingly been more muted than Ekiti’s Dr Fayemi. The plotters have numbered Ondo’s Rotimi Akeredolu among themselves, insisting that Mr Oshiomhole was his enemy, but he has pussyfooted considerably, sometimes running with the hare and hunting with the hound. Edo’s Mr Obaseki is embittered, having felt humiliated by the APC chairman. But the Edo governor is at bottom an anti-democrat himself, and possesses the natural instinct of a tyrant. It is no tribute to Mr Oshiomhole that he backed him without a deep assessment of his character and democratic leaning. It is now impossible to reconcile Mr Obaseki with Mr Oshiomhole. Indeed, there should be no reconciliation; not because malice has inexplicably become a virtue, but because it is abundantly clear that opposition and enmity have brought out the true colour and personality of Mr Obaseki. And both that colour and personality are obnoxious.

No one knows exactly why Dr Fayemi has become the arrowhead of the revolt against the APC chairman. Is it because of the rumoured interest of the governor in the 2023 presidential election, in which it is said he would want to run on a joint ticket with Mallam el-Rufai? Or is it simply one of political pragmatism in which he is ideologically and in principle opposed to the manner Mr Oshiomhole runs the party? There may be elements of both factors in his struggle against the APC chairman. But unknown to many in his party, among the governors, and even in the presidency, Dr Fayemi does not need an antagonistic object to help coalesce his fratricidal and regicidal tendencies. He is a true and gifted Machiavellian. Moments after he won the Ekiti governorship in his first term, he struck an isolationist path, alienated those who voted for him or backed him, and reposed all his hopes and ambitions on his boundless energy and gifted intellect, believing that both would handsomely fetch him his goals. He of course miscalculated.

In understanding and explaining the turmoil in the APC, it is insufficient to focus only on Mr Oshiomhole’s weaknesses, as obvious and as grating as they are. Due attention must be paid much more to Dr Fayemi’s proclivities and countervailing actions. The Ekiti governor is the most ardent exponent of realpolitik in Nigeria today. No one practices it as avidly as he does. He has almost completely emptied his politics of the restraining influence of scruples and the ethics and humanity that give form and substance to leadership and relationships. The ‘equanimity’ with which he resigned himself to the disgraceful judicial victory of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the Ekiti South senatorial tussle has left many watchers of Ekiti politics befuddled, not to say the victim himself, Dayo Adeyeye. It must baffle many that the same votes discounted for Sen Adeyeye were counted for the other elections in that district. Nigerians have focused excessively on the feisty and voluble Mallam el-Rufai, describing him as a tyrant. But he is at least not a closet Machiavellian. Nigerians have now seen Mr Obaseki as unworthy of the throne he is sitting on, because they recognise that he is completely destitute of any democratic instinct, not just because he opposed Mr Oshiomhole. Ekiti people know Dr Fayemi, and showed it in their votes for him, repudiating him once in favour of the unfit Ayo Fayose, and giving him a worrying victory in his second term. Many people find Dr Fayemi inscrutable, particularly because of his realpolitik and his incredible capacity to be politically cold-blooded. They have chosen to focus on his oratorical skills and admirable intellect, not to say the curious manner he has deployed his iconoclasm in reflection of his Yoruba worldview of bowing to no idol.

If the Court of Appeal does not pussyfoot as it did during the presidency’s infamous and immoral battle against Justice Onnoghen, and APC NEC manages against all expectations to develop cold feet, Mr Oshiomhole might get a reprieve and go on to neutralise his enemies’ plots. But if the APC NEC moves with indecent haste and the courts connive at the ongoing heresy, the battle would be lost and a new regime could be enthroned in APC sooner than anyone imagined. But win or lose, both sides in the APC war know that victory will come only when one side is truly vanquished. If that victory comes without the party imploding, then, perhaps the gods have smiled on the party. But that rosy outcome is unlikely, for the gods are themselves unpredictable and their fearsome reputation for rage did not come by happenstance.