Sanusi vs Bayero: The Politicisation Of Traditional Rulership In Nigeria

 By Olu Fasan

There is aparadox in the relationship between politicians and traditional rulers in Nigeria. Before elections, prominent presidential and gubernatorial candidates queue to pay homage to traditional rulers and solicit their blessing.

*Sanusi 

But after elections, the agency changes hands: a traditional ruler must walk on eggshells to avoid being dethroned. Like the Pope, traditional rulers have “soft” power, but state governors possess “hard” power. Adolf Hitler famously threatened the Pope. Nigerian state governors are little Hitlers who exercise crude executive power. The latest victim of such crudity is the deposed Emir of Kano, Aminu Ado Bayero, who is replaced by a previous victim, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi.

Who Will Tell Nigerians That Misgovernment Distributes Its Pains Without Discrimination?

 By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye  

“What luck for rulers that men do not think.” ― Adolf Hitler

Many Nigerians are stuck with zero experience of what it means to live in a decently run society. Laden with a long history of mostly inept, insensitive and less-than patriotic leaders, it seems abnormal to expect any bit of improvement in their daily existence from any government. Massive infrastructural decay due to criminal neglect and regular   reports of primitive accumulations of illicit wealth by wayward and light-fingered public officers have since lost their capacities to shock Nigerian masses. 

*Buhari and Tinubu 

In fact, most people have since adjusted their lives to perennially absorb the vicious impacts of these debilitating vices. They only extract some bit of cold comfort from continually reassuring themselves that they are in such a hopeless and helpless situation where these excruciating fallouts of leadership failure will remain the resilient, inseparable companions they are condemned to perpetually coexist with – which will always be there to severely hurt their country and diminish their joy, peace and fulfillment.   

Those who lack personal resources to obtain some form of alleviation for themselves and their families resign themselves to fate hoping that they would be able to sustain the capacity to continue enduring these searing rewards of successive rudderless leaderships – which will remain their perpetual sources of torments. 

Even the Nigerians who reside in well-ordered societies, where leaders are accountable and basic amenities are meticulously provided and maintained, once they touch down on Nigerian soil automatically adjust their minds to endure the excruciating realities of life in Nigeria. They only derive some consolation from the fact that they would soon jet out again to where sanity and orderly existence are taken for granted.    

And so, when it is election season and this set of disenchanted and disoriented Nigerians are ready to vote, they do not even bother to interrogate the character, antecedents, hollow promises and other antics of the candidates having concluded that they are all the same – members of the same cult of corruption and ineptitude; rather they would seek to extract some ephemeral emotional satiation from lending their support to a candidate  who shares the same ethnic or religious identity with them. At least, they can always derive some comfort (or even animation) from the fact that their “brother” or “sister” had also joined the rampaging band of locusts, and that their votes had helped to achieve that “feat” for their own people! 

Some others will eagerly accept contaminated crumbs from the tables of these same callous, thieving politicians who have cruelly impoverished them and mortgaged the future of their children and go all out to promote and mobilize voters and even fight for them to ensure they capture elective offices to continue their boundless looting of the public treasury.

Unfortunately, in Nigeria of today, the bad, shattering news is that there is hardly any green vegetation left anywhere again for the locusts to swoop on and devour! What we have all over the place are long stretches of excruciating aridity which only rewards with poverty and hardship all that are unlucky to have Nigeria as their home at this time, except the treasury looters and their accomplices. 

A few months before the expiration of the Muhammadu Buhari regime, the London-based Economic Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research and analysis division of the Economist Group, told the world what most people already knew, namely, that Nigeria’s “debt service payments in the first four months of 2022 totalled N1.9trn, which was greater than its total revenue of N1.6trn, according to the 2023‑2025 Medium-Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy Paper (MTEF/FSP) draft presented by the Finance, Budget and National Planning Minister, Zainab Ahmed, on July 21st.” 

In plain language, what we were told was that the amount being spent to service the huge debts accumulated by the Buhari regime, as a result of reckless borrowings, including the USD1.96 billion foreign loan for the construction of an undesirable rail line from Nigeria to Niger Republic, had far exceeded our country’s income, forcing Nigeria into the perilous state of compounding its debt burden by borrowing more money to service debts! 

Also, the Excess Crude Account (ECA), Nigeria’s savings for the rainy day, which stood at $2.1 billion when Buhari became president, instead of increasing, had by June 2022 been brutally reduced to $35.7 million. By July of the same year, it plunged further down to $376,655. It would be a huge surprise to hear that as much as one cent remained by the time the Buhari regime exited power on May 29, 2023. 

And so clearly at sea as to how to get Nigeria out of the sticky pit it was willfully dragged into on his watch, Buhari sought to derive revolting animation from playing the profligate big brother out there, dolling out USD$1 million to Afghanistan and approving N1.14 billion for the purchase of posh SUVs for Niger Republic to “strengthen their security operations” while the country he pretended to be ruling was scarily submerged in worsening insecurity. No wonder he threatened the other day to escape to Niger Republic if anyone disturbed him in his palatial country home in Daura, Katsina State. 

 For about eight months last year, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) was on strike due to very poor working conditions, and hapless parents were forced to watch the unsightly and devastating spectacle of their children’s future being toyed with by insensitive politicians whose own children were mostly studying in quality schools and colleges in better managed countries of the world. 

When will Nigerians realize that each time they are deluded by politicians   into allowing primordial sentiments to dictate their choices during elections, that they are only empowering their sworn enemies to continue their perpetual impoverishment and continuous devaluation of their lives and those of even their unborn offspring?  Shortly after the elections, the politicians they had naively adopted as their “native idols” will hurriedly converge with their “bitter opponents” of a few days ago to plan how to share the nation’s resources, thumbing their delicate noses at their so-called supporters who had foolishly cultivated lasting enmities with neighbours and friends with whom they had enjoyed many years of cordial, beneficial relationships while campaigning and even fighting to rig in their “brother” or “sister” whom they have never met and might never meet? 

Until Nigerians decide that only competent and patriotic managers should be allowed to take over the leadership of Nigeria at the national, state and council levels and steer the country away from its determined path of disaster, Nigeria, already miserably broke and prostrate, will fail beyond what anyone had thought was possible in a country ruled by human beings. 

By the way, how do candidates even emerge in Nigeria? Are they chosen on merit? Does anyone among their party delegates bother about their capacity and character? At the national conventions of the two faces Nigeria’s terminal affliction, the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the delegates that voted to choose their presidential candidates for the 2023 elections were reportedly bought soul and body with crispy wads of US dollars – an unwholesome indulgence that unleashed further hurt on the economy. This was apart from the hundreds of millions of naira earlier squandered to purchase nomination forms and sort out other logistics. 

Now, after investing all these millions of dollars and billions of naira to secure their parties’ tickets alone and then more billions to prosecute the campaigns and buy votes from willfully impoverished Nigerians who are ready and eager to sell their future to assuage their hunger, what would be the first mission of such candidates once any of them captures power? But will Nigerians learn anything from this gloomy reality and apply themselves to wisdom in future elections for their own good?   

If Nigerians continue to allow themselves to be deluded every now and again by ethically bankrupt politicians to discard character and competence and vote on the basis of ethnicity or religion or both, they will all be here to continue suffering the consequences of their tragic decisions. 

A new government is in town now and the cost of living has gone to the skies as poor Nigerians are asked to make sacrifices while those in power swim in obscene opulence. Since many adult Nigerians were born, every new government has asked them to tighten their belts in order to enjoy a rosy tomorrow; but can anyone point to at least one single benefit that such punitive measures inflicted on the hapless people ever brought? 

What we usually see is that after sometime, things would get worse and more sacrifices would be demanded. This will continue until the particular regime quits power and the new one will come in with a reworded version of the same deceptive language: suffer today and enjoy tomorrow! A pie in the sky meant to tantalize and delude the unwary and tragically naïve people who have stubbornly refused to learn from their past mistakes! 

 Each time Nigerians go to the polls with the wrong reasons and vote or rig in mostly corrupt and incompetent candidates, all they have done is to help the perpetuation of the unimaginable suffering they are currently writhing under. Yet, despite this self-hurting preference, many of them still wallow in the grand illusion that a patriotic and competent administration will emerge to lighten their burdens and mitigate their sufferings. But is it not foolish to continue to plant mango trees every season and expect them to produce apples? How can a people persist in the fatal indulgence of   stubbornly eating and drinking poison and yet expecting to live and flourish?    

Indeed, the excruciating pains of corruption and incompetence in leaders at all levels have no tribal marks. They do not unleash their torments with any discrimination. They viciously attack everyone irrespective of his or her place of origin, voting preference or even the tribal marks of the new misruler they have helped to enthrone.  

Nigerians from Katsina, Buhari’s home state, or even the entire North that persistently gave him the loudly trumpeted twelve-million votes, can attest to this. Their region received the lion share of the boundless insecurity and excruciating poverty that distinguished Buhari’s eight-year nightmare.    

*Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye, a journalist and writer, is the author of the book, “Nigeria: Why Looting May Not Stop” (scruples2006@yahoo.com; twitter:@ugowrite)

 

I Found Love In A Death Camp!

 By Herman Rosenblat                                      (Nazi Concentration Camp Survivor)

The sky was gloomy that morning as we waited anxiously. All the men, women and children of Piotrkow's Jewish ghetto had been herded into a square. Word had gotten around that we were being moved. My father had only recently died from typhus, which had run rampant through the crowded ghetto. My greatest fear was that our family would be separated.  

          *Herman Rosenblat in 2008 with his wife, Roma

'Whatever you do,' Isidore, my eldest brother, whispered to me, 'don't tell them your age. Say you're sixteen.  

'I was tall for a boy of 11, so I could pull it off. That way I might be deemed valuable as a worker.  

An SS man approached me, boots clicking against the cobblestones…He looked me up and down, and then asked my age.  

'Sixteen,' I said. He directed me to the left, where my three brothers and other healthy young men already stood.  

27 Years In The Hangman’s Noose

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

One of the enduring tropes of human comeback and survival is associated with Fyodor Dostoevsky who gained reprieve from execution at the last minute. 

Yet, the glistering success of the Russian writer in his post-near-death epoch would not have effectively obviated the ordeal of the pall of an imminent death that hung over him before his sudden freedom.

*Clinton Kanu 

But quite unlike Dostoevsky, that tragic hiatus was not short-lived in the case of a Nigerian citizen Clinton Kanu. In 1992, at the age of 29 when he brimmed with the hope of conquering the world, Kanu was sentenced to death for murder. Kanu’s ordeal began when his in-laws were accused of stealing a generator and fluorescent tubes.

Believe APC Govt, You’ll Believe Anything!

By Reno Omokri

There is only one thing worse than the show of shame that took place at the National Assembly on Tuesday, August 7, 2018, when the Buhari administration laid siege on the National Assembly. The one thing worse than that despicable is the attempt by the executive to spin the whole thing as a conspiracy between Senate President, Bukola Saraki and the bow sacked DSS Boss, Lawal Daura. 

Oshiomhole and Buhari 

If you believe that tale, then I can assure you that you will believe anything. So preposterous is the allegation that I would have wondered why anyone will tell such a monumental lie. And then it hit me. The tactic now being employed by the Buhari administration to spin the National Assembly siege as a conspiracy between Senate President Bukola Saraki and the now disgraced DSS Director General, Lawal Daura is known as the Big Lie. 

Nigeria And The Silent Majority

By Simon Abah

The founder of this newspaper refused to be silent in the face of governmental-wrong, even when a despot thought it best to cashier him on the long questing route for peace. In spite of his exit to the land of permanent silence years after, his newsprint has maintained its streak of excellence, it publishes well researched materials and avoids sycophantic news reporting, is wholly and strictly without fail, a national paper which approbates to no region or individuals.

I wish Nigerians aren’t known for silence in the face of wrong and tackle governmental persons for accountability, for nationalism. If this were the case, the politicians from the regions where these herdsmen come from would have been pushed into taking action with governments to end the barbarity, after all cattle rearing, established as a thriving economy for herdsmen with a substantial workforce, servicing the whole country wouldn’t be considered positive if brigands go about killing people in whatever guise. 

That Danjuma’s Significant Outburst

By Sufuyan Ojeifo

We mean to hold our own.  I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire, said the indefatigable Prime Minister of Britain during World War 11, Winston Churchill, in 1942. But unfortunately, that was what he was compelled to do as recounted by Peter Clarke in his book titled: The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire. In a rave review of the book, Allan Massie surmised that Churchill rightly dominated the book as he was shown, warts and all, from the drawing on the diaries of Alan Alanbooke and Sir Alec Cadogan, as infuriating, often boring, sometimes wandering, arriving at meetings without having read his briefing papers, often unrealistic in his demands, hell to work with.

*Gen Danjuma

Curiously, the more Churchill’s weaknesses were exposed, the more splendid he seemed. According to Massie, If at times Alanbrooke and others wondered how they could win the war with him, they all knew it would have been impossible without him.  To be sure, Churchill, soldier, writer and politician, was one of Britain’s greatest heroes, particularly remembered for his indomitable spirit while leading Great Britain to victory in World War 11.  Churchill wrote his war memoirs and titled the last volume: Triumph and Tragedy. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 among other great accomplishments.

Nigeria's Unending Leadership Crisis

By Dan Amor

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo's recent bombing of President Muhammadu Buhari does not make him a better candidate for national heroism. After all, the outcome of his letter to former President Goodluck Jonathan is the person whom he has just attacked. If care is not taken, the next president in 2019 might even be worse than Buhari. This is not a death wish for my beloved country. Never. Far from it!

*Babangida, Buhari, Obasanjo, Shagari and Jonathan

But Nigeria is a nation of experts without roots. We are always creating tacticians who are blind to strategy and strategists who cannot even take a step. And when the culture has finished its work the institutions handcuff the infirmity. But what is at the centre of the panic which is our national culture since we are not yet free to choose our leaders? Seeing how ineligible dunces who don’t even understand the secret of their private appeal, talk-less of what the nation needs jostle for power, I realize all over again that Nigeria is an unhappy contract between the Rich and the Poor. It is not that Nigeria is altogether hideous, it is even by degrees pleasant, but for an honest observer, there is never any salt in the wind.

Corruption And Aisha Buhari’s Testimony

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

It is increasingly becoming obvious that the President Muhammadu Buhari government is chafing under the affliction of a one-week-one-scandal syndrome. Unless they are irrevocably befuddled by their partisanship, Buhari’s loyalists who have been consumed with the notion of his unrivalled integrity would not fail to observe the dark atmosphere of corruption in which the administration is immersed. But of course, while most of these loyalists are apologising for allowing themselves to be used to pave the way for the Buhari presidency, there are some who would counter that those who accuse the government of corruption are the shellacked members of the opposition. After all, the Kachikwu-Baru affair which is the latest scandal in the Buhari government has not been declared by a competent court as an unimpeachable case of corruption.

*Aisha Buhari 

But the evidence of financial sleaze such unalloyed believers in the integrity of the Buhari government may not be able to dispute is no longer from the members of the opposition and other citizens whose moral sensibilities are daily affronted by corruption cases. Now, the evidence is from an unlikely quarter. It is from Aisha Buhari, the wife of the president. Just a week after the nation was scandalised by the $25 billion heist in the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) which has no rival in the alleged financial misdeeds committed by the Goodluck Jonathan government, Mrs. Buhari alerted us to the possible mismanagement of over N4 billion at the Aso Rock Clinic in less than two years. She was shocked that despite this allocation, the clinic did not have a single syringe. Mrs. Buhari’s alarm came shortly after her daughter Zahra was outraged at the lack of syringe and common drugs like paracetamol at the clinic. 

No, Don’t Re-Arrest Nnamdi Kanu

By Paul Onomuakpokpo  

In a seeming bid to ward off the increasing threats to the stability of the country, the government is floundering from one absurd measure to another. From deploying its security apparatuses to monitor the social media, it has moved on to rein in hate speech by proposing a bill in this regard. No much alarm should be triggered if the government luxuriates in the obliviousness of the inability of these frenzied measures to stave off the dissolution of the people’s union if it fails to reckon with more enduring and acceptable solutions that the citizens have generously proposed.

*Nnamdi Kanu

But we must not ignore the augury of a looming tragedy we are now confronted with in the government’s latest move to sustain the nation’s unity. This is the bid by the government to re-arrest the leader of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) Nnamdi Kanu. Kanu might have impudently breached some of the conditions for his freedom from incarceration. He might have been found rhapsodising before his hundreds of supporters and putative security personnel about his republic of unrivalled equality and thereby violating the condition that he must not be in a crowd of more than 10 people. He might be considered to have continued on the path of heating up the polity by insisting on his prising a Biafra Republic from Nigeria and securing the support of some Igbo youths who evidently swoon over the prospect of freedom from the stranglehold of their implacable tormentors. He might have been a threat to the state by declaring that no election would take place in Anambra as long as the Biafra question remains unresolved. But these apparent offences do not validate the government’s quest to re-arrest him in view of the rash of grim consequences that such a move would precipitate. 

Castro And The Politics Of Deification

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Since the contemporary world is streaked with political leaders who ruthlessly betray their people’s trust, humanity is not infrequently afflicted with amnesia that compels it to hanker after its torturous past. That was a past when the rule of the strong man was the norm.

*Castro 

Yes, such strong men recorded lofty achievements. Some not only enlarged the territories of their countries through the conquest of other lands, they exceptionally improved the standard of living of their citizens. But in most cases when their caprices became the rules, the regime of brutality that was often manifested in the torture, tears and death of citizens besmeared their glorious interludes of achievements. Through Genghis Khan, Charlemagne, Alexander, Chairman Mao to Adolf Hitler, humanity has witnessed strong men whose single-handed pursuit of their visions led to the development of their nations. But such people saw themselves as the sole repositories of the patriotism and wisdom that could place their nations on a stellar pedestal of development.

But we often dismiss the accompanying brutality as an inevitable upshot of their quest for development of their nations. Thus, for instance, we often refer to how through rarefied leadership, Lee Kuan Yew transformed Singapore from a third world country to a first world nation. It was the same notion of strong men as better leaders that herded the Nigerian citizens into electing Muhammadu Buhari who is now floundering. As far as we are concerned, the suppression of dissent that accompanies the regime of a strong man pales into insignificance in the face of the miracles of development wrought by astute leadership. Yet, we must insist that something is wrong with the progress that would abridge the rights and claim the lives of a significant proportion of the members of the society.

What is clear as most people look back at the life and times of Fidel Castro is that they swoon over the development he brought to Cuba. There is the linear narrative of his transformation of Cuba, a tiny North American country of about 11 million people, to a formidable force that could call the bluff of arrogant powers like the United States that embargoed it. After successfully routing Fulgencio Batista who had trapped Cuba under his military jackboots, Castro opened a new vista of development in his country. His era was that of unprecedented improvement in literacy and medicine. But all this tends to blur Castro’s ruthlessness that bordered on misanthropy that mocked the terror of medieval potentates.