Wole Soyinka, playwright and Nobel laureate, says Abdullahi
Ganduje, governor of Kano state, lack friends who could have advised him
against the dethronement of Muhammadu Sanusi II.
On Monday, the government of Kano sacked Sanusi as emir of
Kano, and also sent him into exile in Awe, Nasarawa state.
Reacting, Soyinka narrated how a monarch in his home state
of Ogun was almost removed but for the intervention of the governor’s friends
who pleaded with him to give a second thought over the move.
Making a comparison of both cases, Soyinka described
Ganduje’s approach as crude and authoritarian.
“I was a participant, albeit on the sidelines, when a
similar scenario began to unfold in my own state, Ogun some years ago. The then
governor, on account of an imagined slight by one of the monarchs in his
domain, was actually poised – not virtually but physically – poised to sign the
dethronement and banishment order on that traditional ruler,” he said.
“His office was invaded by some of the panicked chiefs and
stalwarts of Ogun state who rushed to ward off the impending order. One of them
stopped at my home after the pacification session to narrate what had
transpired, and how some of them had actually gone on their knees to plead with
that governor to stay action. I was furious. I knew every detail of that
affair, had listened to a recording of the speech that was supposed to have
given this mighty offence. It was pure piffle!
“‘Why did you people plead with him? Don’t you realise you
were making him feel a god? You should have let him carry on, then we would see
what a cataclysm he had launched on the state!’
“The man, an independent businessman of absolute integrity,
and one of that governor’s intimate circle, smiled and said, ‘No, we couldn’t
do that. We are his friends. We were pleading with him to save him from
himself.’
“What a pity Ganduje lacked friends who could have saved him
from himself! Insofar as one can acknowledge certain valued elements in
traditional institutions, the man he thinks he has humiliated has demonstrated
that he is one of the greatest reformers even of the feudal order.
“That is beyond question, a position publicly manifested in
both act and pronouncements. By contrast, Ganduje’s conduct, apart from the
innate travesty of justice in this recent move, is on a par with the repudiated
colonial order, one that out-feudalized feudalism itself, and is synonymous
with authoritarianism of the crudest temper. The record shows, in this
particular instance, that it is one that embodies modernised cronyism and
alienated pomp and power – never mind the cosmetic gestures such as almajiri
reformation. It has proved one of the worst examples of a system that enables
even the least deserving to exercise arbitrary, unmerited authority that beggars
even the despotism of the most feudalistic traditional arrangements.”
Soyinka hailed Sanusi as an economist who sanitised the
banking sector when he was governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). He
said as an Islamic scholar, Sanusi was also one of the early warning voices
against religious extremism.
He said in a conversation about his visit to the palace,
Sanusi had sounded “much aware of the impending fall of the axe of vengefulness
and power primitivism. I can testify that he remained totally unfazed.”
He added “I do have the feeling that the palace gates of the
Kano emirate are not yet definitively slammed against this Islamic scholar,
royal scion and seasoned economist. It is just a feeling. Closed and bared, or
merely shut however, the doors of enlightened society remain wide open to
Muhammad Sanusi.”
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