Opinion

Monday Lines: Encounter With A Prophet [OPINION]

Published

1 year ago

April 3, 2023

Editor

By Lasisi Olagunju

Like Nigeria’s multiple-award winning poet, Professor Niyi Osundare, I am also “farmer-born, peasant-bred.” Like him, I “encountered dawn in the enchanted corridors of the forest.” A powerful pastor once came to our village with drums and flutes. It was supposed to be a one-off visit but that first arrival was a harvest of blessings for his ministry and so he made his coming a daily affair. Every day, Pastor came in the evening when men were back from the farm and women had finished their buying and selling. Pastor grew popular; he was reverred, feared and worshipped by almost everybody – and we were a community of majority Muslims. Some called him Pastor but for many, he was simply Wòlíì (prophet). He had with him girls who sang the songs he dictated. There were evening revivals at which Pastor offered buckets of stream water spiced with anointing oil as solution to every affliction of the body and soul.

One afternoon, Pastor came with a short cutlass. He looked around and declared every orange tree in the community possessed by evil spirits. If anyone ate from the fruits, Pastor said they would die. There was no house in our community without at least an orange tree beside it. “They must all fall,” Pastor decreed and the whole village rose to applaud him. It was the time of the year when the orange trees were heavily weighed down by hundreds of fruits waiting to ripen. But Pastor ignored the promise of the fruits as he led a song-and-dance execution procession. He touched the first tree with his short cutlass, longer cutlasses surfaced from his squad and, in three minutes, the tree was down with its unripe fruits. I stopped the basket I was weaving. Pastor did two more, then moved towards my father’s own orange tree. My heart beat out of rhythm, skipped a beat. I looked around me; I was alone. My father and my mother and siblings were all not at home. So, they would all come back and meet the orange tree fallen with all its unripe fruits dead and destroyed? What would I tell them I did when the ‘killer’ came with his cutlass?

Pastor did not need anyone’s go-ahead and asked for no one’s permission. He was the law, every head bowed before his spirit and spirituality. He got to our orange tree and lifted his short cutlass; then a voice rang out behind him: “If you touch that orange tree, you will be in trouble.” Pastor froze, his lifted hand lay still up there with the short cutlass. He looked round in search of the owner of that impudent voice. All song and dance stopped; all eyes turned and converged on me. Pastor followed the people’s eyes and spotted me – a teenager. It was my voice that rang that daring bell of rebellion. The words were heavier than my mouth, and bigger than my fragile frame. I was small; I had just left Modern School. Pastor’s eyes caught mine and I looked straight into his eyes. Did he see something? I did not know, but Pastor turned and quickly moved away from our house to other houses and other trees.

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By dusk that day, our orange tree was the only orange tree that stood in the entire village. But I became a pariah, an outcast. Everyone outside our home avoided me. Hours later that evening in our house, all family members sat, looking at me. They had all heard what I did. My eldest sister came for me with a sororal rebuke. “Why did you do that? You should have let them cut it. (Ò bá ti jé kí won ó gée)”, she said in a voice laden with fears of the consequences of my impudence.

“He did well,” my father cut her short. She was surprised. Father was not a man of many words but on that occasion, his words were even fewer. He looked at me, nodded. Was he proud of me? He didn’t say so. But I was happy; at least I was no longer alone.

That encouragement of several decades ago has followed my engagements with life. It has been all I need to confront all principalities whose ministry and politics and business thrive in cutting down trees with ripe and unripe fruits. So, what happened to Pastor? He came some more times and did one or two other things which changed his story. Finally, two of the girls in his singing party were found pregnant. It was pious pastor who did that wonder; his goat ate the yam. He was banished by the villagers; but it was too late.

What the villagers got from Pastor is what you get when man is cast as high as God. Men who compete with God endanger the living and abort the unborn. Our politics has bred a pride of such prophets who take down decency and subtlety and make all choices binary. They minimize the credibility of others to fill their own cup. Denigration, vilification and demonisation of the other side cauterize their own fears. The prophets have reared bands of unquestioning worshippers who are now grown, and drunk and becoming a scare and a threat to everyone.

Our political space is clogged by such cultic devotees, charged, sufficiently, to cut down all trunks unfortunate to catch the fancy of their lord’s short cutlasses. In maniacal silence, the bosses point their long knives at trees not in their grove; their captured audience responds with assailing cuts. There are wonderful ladies and gentlemen in the Obidient Movement, in the Atiku clan and in the Èmi l’ókàn emporium. But there are also in the parties really toxic characters, merchants of hate, who have ramped up their hideous trade in recent weeks. You find them among irascible Obidients and among irritable Èmi l’ókàn people. (The Atiku clan has been remarkably quiet). I encounter the good and the bad every week. One Obidient read only the first two paragraphs of one of my recent columns and flew at me in inexplicable rage. He won’t read any further than those two paragraphs but proceeded to send to me: “I spit on you, all of you Yoruba intellectuals.” What did I write that wasn’t fair to his party and therefore deserving of his scorn? The phlegm spitter could not be helped from his extremist political fanaticism. It worked him up. I prayed for him. I am not alone in that experience; everyone who hasn’t learnt to be silent and quiet in the face of Nigeria’s political misbehaviour is a victim. The political ‘idol’ worshippers in the West are not different from the devotees in the eastern temple. The western fanatics cannot imagine a Yoruba man not worshipping in their Lagos shrine. They wonder what kind of Yoruba person would not join their alleluia chorus. They have made sure that though elections are over, name-calling remains the name of the game. One loud man called an opposition contestant a descendant of slaves. There is an irony here. Records say at least one ancestor of that slave-shaming devotee was also from a family of returnee slaves from ‘Sarro’ (Sierra Leone).

I do not know what story books those who label others as bastards, aliens or descendants of slaves read in primary school, but my generation read the Alawiye series with tales that stay stuck. One of such stories is of the favoured first son of a rich man who insisted that his father must count his many slaves. He wanted to know how many they were to satisfy his curious ego. Why would this boy want this? You don’t tell a slave that he is a slave; it will humiliate him, father told son. Tí a bá ka erú, inú erú a bàjé (If we count slaves, slaves will be sad)”, the old man warned, but the son would not listen; he wanted to know how many slaves his father had and how rich the family was. He said anyone who wanted to be sad could wear the sack of sorrow; who cares? The big man succumbed finally and summoned all his children and assembled all his slaves. He gave them the background to what he was about to do and how he was reluctant to do it. Then, he moved to his well-dressed first son, placed his left hand on the boy’s right shoulder and told him softly: “You were the very first slave I bought.” Shocked, the ‘son’ who wanted to know all the bond men and women he would inherit from his father looked at his ‘father’s’ face to be sure he heard right. “I warned you but you did not listen.” The boy wept; and wept; and wept – the kind of sorrow you read in grace-to-grass stories. That is why it is not good to count slaves. If all slaves were counted in Lagos on March 18, many who harangued ‘outsiders’ would themselves be out of voting lines.

The desperation of the past one month has cut the cords of peace and amity in our society. There have been huge disappointments from unexpected quarters. And those who wreaked the havoc do not care. What matters is the gold bracelet and the fulfillment of whatever they’ve been promised.

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, we see politicians and their “vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself.” We feel their love for prophets – Macbeth’s three witches – who “can look into the seeds of time/And say which grain will grow and which will not.” Nigeria’s presidential princes have all heard strange voices with promises that lead straight to the throne. There is Macbeth in all of them. They’ve each got Glamis; they’ve got Cawdor; they believe, therefore, that “the greatest is behind.” That is why each claims the throne. But the ‘smartest’ among them in February followed the prophecy, snatched the scepter, and dared the losers to go to court. In this game of thrones, “fair is foul, and foul is fair.” That is the reason Nigeria won’t rest in the day, and thunder and lightning howl their best in wrecking the peace of the night. There is no retreat, there is no surrender and no plot is too grave to plot. Think again of the prophet of my village; he felled orange trees with thousands of unripe fruits just to prove his priesthood. Let no one go to bed this night – power contenders will fell any tree to prove that “the devil speak true.”

The battle has moved to the courtroom but our politicians are suspected to have camped the courts like convention delegates. Television, radio, newspaper and social media jurists, day and night, teach the courts what the law should be. They have seen the nakedness of judges and no longer see any big deal taking them to bed. And the courts have also fetishized and befriended politics and its benefits to our collective shame. The courts should be worried. I don’t know if they all read what one of the presidential candidates in the February 25 election, Rabiu Kwankwaso, said on Thursday in Abuja about them. He said: “Those asking people to go to court know that the courts are their homes.” Those are his words. Grave and foreboding; people at the receiving end will say insulting. But can we blame or fault him? Ghanaian writer, Ayi Kwei Armah, wrote that when the end is known at the beginning, then there is no more hope. I will be shocked if the courts trust themselves. No one does. They are to give justice. In this matter of our politics, what will be justice when litigants are being told, softly, by defendants that what happened before may still happen to their efforts because that is the tradition? And the courts are tradition keepers. Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls, addressed something similar. What was his point?: “If we never do anything which has not been done before, we shall never get anywhere. The law will stand still whilst the rest of the world goes on; and that will be bad for both.” The courts should be worried. “Our laws are being disregarded right and left. And the mobs are out” against the court itself because power flaunts its abduction of justice from those who are paid to give justice. And that is why even after cases have been filed in court, the ghost of Banquo still roams the street in unbidden anger. The implacable ghosts of Duncan and Banquo will not let King Macbeth enjoy his victory banquet. It will take more than a repeat visit to the Weird Sisters to still the storm.

News

OPINION: One Kano, Two Emirs

Published

21 hours ago

May 28, 2024

Editor

By Suyi Ayodele

There can be only one Oba (king) in a palace. That was how our forebears arranged our traditional settings. The saying in Yoruba that Oba kìí pé méjì láàfin, sùgbón ìjòyè lè pé méfà láàfin (there can be no two kings in a palace but there can be six chiefs), underscores the wisdom of our forebears. Modernity has since changed that. The Nigerian political class has further bastardised the setting. Nowadays, kings sleep as kings and wake up as commoners. Palaces used to be sacred in the days of our fathers. They are no more today! Nothing is sacrosanct anymore in our palaces. History has it that the first time an Oòni of Ife travelled out of his palace, all other obas in Yorubaland vacated their thrones until the Oòni returned. That is our culture; that is our tradition. Nowadays, kings travel from their domains to attend birthday gigs and other ludicrous social gatherings!

Today, our Obas, Emirs and Obis are all over the place chasing contracts and seeking favours from politicians. Monarchs wait for hours in the reception areas just to see common commissioners. Many wait at Government Houses endlessly to book appointments with the almighty governors. From the North to the South, East to West, occupants of our traditional stools are appointees of governors and influential politicians. Many monarchs who are without blue blood got to the thrones because they belong to the right political camp. A large number of them bought their ways to the palaces with good money. We have lost it with our traditional stools, and we may not get it right again; at least, not in this generation!

Kano has been in the news in the last five days. There are two Emirs of Kano in that ancient city now. The two occupy the section of the palace they could grab before the other came. And they did that at the dead of the night. In my place, a man does not enter his house through the window. Emirs of Kano are entering their palaces through the windows, and in the dead of the night. The night is reserved for thieves, the wicked ones and Our Mothers. But Royals now choose the stillness of the night to climb their forebears’ thrones! Kano will never be the same again. This is not a curse, but the reality of the situation now in that commercial city. We have our politicians to thank for that. When a town changes monarchs the way a nursing mother changes diapers, the town cannot be the same again. We have histories to back up this assertion.

One day in August 1967, Oba Muhamadu Olanipekun, the Zaki of Arigidi Akoko, Ondo State, woke up to a huge noise by his palace. He quickly dressed up. So did his Olori. One of the palace guards rushed into the inner chamber to inform Kabiyesi about the noise. A huge crowd had gathered to attack the palace. That was the second of such in three months; the May 1967 rebellion having been successfully repelled. Zaki was enraged. He went to the inner chamber and came out holding the powers Arigidi gave to him when he was enthroned. A man dies but once. Kabiyesi would not be disgraced twice by the same people. Enough is enough! But the Olori had a different idea. She went on her knees, chanting Kabiyesi’s praise names. She told the Oba the enormous powers he was holding. She affirmed the potency of the wand in the king’s hands. She said Kabiyesi could destroy the entire people if he wished. That was why he was their Zaki. Then she added a caveat. If Kabiyesi used the power he was holding, he would be like the fabled hunter, who killed an elephant with his fila (cap). She told Kabiyesi the wise saying of the elders: ojó kan ni òkìkí ode a fi fìlà p’erin (the fame of the hunter who kills an elephant with his cap lasts but one day). She besought Kabiyesi to leave the palace.

She assured His Majesty that in years to come, the same people would come begging him to come back to the throne. Reason prevailed. Kabiyesi went back to the inner recesses of his ancestors to break kola nuts. Olori went outside to meet the people. She begged that the Zaki should be allowed to leave the palace in peace. The people agreed. Kabiyesi and his household departed. A few loyalists from Imo and Agbaluku Quarters of the town joined those from Arigidi Oja Quarters (royal family) to follow Zaki Olanipekun out of town. The mob set the palace ablaze! All attempts to install a new Zaki from outside the Arigidi Oja quarters were unsuccessful. The town drifted. Development became stalled and stunted. Twenty-five years later, the elders of Arigidi Akoko came together. They needed development in the town. But first, the injustice of the past must be corrected. They sent for Zaki Muhamadu Olanipekun. They begged for forgiveness. In 1992, just as his Olori predicted 25 years earlier, the Arigidi people brought back their Zaki to the throne. A visit to Arigidi Akoko today shows that a town can only develop when there is peace.

Ooni Ogboru was the forebear of the Giesi ruling house of Ile-Ife. He was on the throne for over 70 years, according to history. His chiefs got pissed off because he had stayed too long on the throne. They wanted fresh blood. So, they conspired and got Ooni Ogboru dethroned. They did that by asking the old monarch to come to Atiba Square to see an object. As soon as the Ooni got to the square, they shut the palace doors against him. The old monarch knew that there would be repercussions for the treachery. He did not fight. Rather, he relocated to a place known as Ife-Odan, and he settled down with his family members and loyal subjects who followed him. Rejoicing that they had gotten rid of the old monarch, the chiefs appointed a new Ooni. But calamity struck, not once, multiple times! In six months, six different Oonis, or Ooni designates died! Nobody knew what killed them. Emissaries were sent to Kabiyesi, Ooni Ogboru to come back to the throne. The old man refused. Instead, he sent his son, Giesi to be the next Ooni. That was when the town began to enjoy stability.

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Before Ooni Ogboru, there was Alaafin of Oyo, Alaafin Ajuan or Ajaka, who was also dethroned. The people accused him of being too peaceful. They needed an Oba who would be a warmonger. They chased Alafin Ajaka out and banished him to Igbodo. Sango, his younger brother, was installed as Alaafin. And for seven years, Alaafin Sango showed the people what is known in the street parlance as shege. For the seven years he was on the throne, the entire Oyo Kingdom fought battles upon battles. The oba was too restless. At his death, Sango was deified, till date. The people then made a comparison. They knew the peaceful era of Ajaka was more desirable. So, they sent for him and crowned him Alaafin for the second time. But then, Ajaka had become a changed man. According to The Rev. Samuel Johnson’s account of the second reign of Ajaka, the Alaafin waged about 1,060 wars! (See The History of the Yorubas, page 175-183).

One of the ‘current’ Emirs of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi II, also known as Muhammadu Sanusi II or Khalifa Sanusi II, became the Emir of Kano on June 8, 2014. He succeeded his late great-uncle, Ado Bayero. Due to his inability to control his tongue; as he carried on the way he was when he was the Governor, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the government of Abdullahi Umar Ganduje dethroned him on March 9, 2020. His cousin, Aminu Ado Bayero, was enthroned in his stead. The dethronement of Sanusi Lamido Sanusi II followed that of his grandfather, Mohammadu Sanusi I, who was deposed in 1963, having reigned as the Emir of Kano for just nine years. The beneficiary of that deposition was Sanusi I’s brother, Ado Bayero. It was therefore not shocking, when upon the dethronement of Sanusi Lamido Sanusi II in 2020, his nephew, Aminu Ado Bayero, was appointed the Emir. In Kano, it has always been the case of Gambari pa Fulani, ko lejo ninu (when a Hausa man kills a Fulani man, there is no case).

Ever since the June 9, 2020, removal of Sanusi Lamido Sanusi II as the Emir of Kano, the city has been on the edge. A section of the city loyal to the deposed emir never left anyone in doubt that it would do anything possible to bring back the former CBN governor to the throne. The opportunity came when in the 2023 governorship election in the state, Ganduje could not win the state for his All Progressives Congress (APC), and the state slipped into the hands of Ganduje’s estranged godfather, Rabiu Kwankwanso’s New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), and Abba Kabir Yusuf became the governor. From May 29, 2023, the new governor, Yusuf, has dedicated his energy and state resources to undoing everything Ganduje did in his eight years. One of such was the last Friday event when the governor signed the bill passed by the Kano State House of Assembly, abolishing the five new emirates Ganduje created in 2020, into law. By that singular act, Aminu Ado Bayero ceased to be the Emir of Kano and Sanusi Lamido Sanusi II, who was dethroned as the 14th Emir of Kano, was returned as the 16th Emir of Kano. Since Friday, May 24, 2024, till date, Kano has been on edge. Ado Bayero, obviously backed by shielded federal power, also returned to Kano as the Emir. In Kano today, while Sanusi Lamido Sanusi II occupies the main palace in the city (Gidan Rumfa Palace), Bayero occupies the Nasarawa Palace in the same city! The question to ask is: who is the authentic Emir of Kano?

While the next few months would, no doubt, witness a lot of legal fireworks in Kano and other courts across the northern state, one thing that is certain is that wherever the pendulum swings, the Kano throne has lost its virginity! The sacredness of that throne is lost, I daresay, forever. I do not know why Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, who accepted his dethronement in 2020 with equanimity, fought behind the scenes to come back. I equally wouldn’t know why Aminu Ado Bayero would abandon the doctrine of his faith that Allah gives, and Allah takes, to want to do a fight-to-finish in this matter. All that my mind tells me is that there is something enticing about the Kano throne that the royals are not telling us. Why are royals not behaving as nobles again? Wherever Ganduje is today, I need someone to tell him that the legs of the corpse he buried four years ago are sticking out of the grave!

News

OPINION: Kano’s Midnight Kingdom

Published

2 days ago

May 27, 2024

Editor

By Lasisi Olagunju

Today, those whose ancestors snatched Kano are fighting each other over the city and their spoils. The Yoruba would look at their drama and sing for them the song of Ambrose Campbell/ Ebenezer Obey: Eni rí nkan he tó fé kú torí è/ Owó eni tó ti so nù nko? I won’t translate this!

Their victims are taking sides. I shake my head for them. May I never be found on either side of siblings feuding over whose turn it is to loot me.

“Emir Sanusi II should be referred to as the 59th Emir of Kano (and) not the 16th – unless the history of Kano started after Dan Fodio’s Jihad and imposition of Emir Sulaimanu in 1807.” With these words, Journalist Jafaar Jafaar on Friday started an online war which is still raging as I write this. So, two wars are being fought simultaneously on and over Kano. The first is the game of thrones between brother and brother over the city’s kingship and its pricey palace. The second war is on social media being fiercely fought between a conquered people and their conquerors over when the history of the city started.

Jafaar, a Hausa, maintained that “from King Bagauda in the 10th century to Muhammadu Alwali in 1805, there were at least 42 Habe/Hausa rulers documented by history that ruled Kano.” He went on to claim that most of the symbols of authority of today’s Emir of Kano predated the Jihad and the ascendancy of Fulani rulership of the city. The charge and the pushback have been enormous online. Whatever is the fate of the Hausa of Kano today was foretold and it is recorded in their history.

Kano’s monarchy has a very well documented history. The best known by historians is ‘The Kano Chronicle’ – a list of rulers of Kano since the establishment of the Bagauda Dynasty in 998 AD. Long before Bagauda and his tribe of adventurers entered Kano, history says the founding ‘chief’ was a man called Barbushe. He was credited with enormous strength and spirituality – a man who could look very far and see tomorrow. The Kano Chronicle describes this strange man’s own ancestor, Dalla, as “a black man of great stature and might; a hunter who slew elephants with his stick and carried them on his head about nine miles…”

One day, spirit-possessed Barbushe told his people that in the coming years they would lose everything they had to a stranger.

“A man shall come to this land with an army and will gain mastery over us,” he told the people of Kano.

If it was today, those people would snap their fingers over their heads and reject the prophecy. Barbushe’s people did not snap any finger, but they voiced their rejection in their own way. They told him: “Why do you say this? It is an evil saying.”

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The seer kept his peace; he ignored them. Then continued. He told the people that if their conqueror “comes not in your time, assuredly, he will come in the time of your children, and will conquer all in this country, and forget you and yours and exalt himself and his people for years to come.”

The Kano Chronicle said the people were exceedingly downcast because they knew their leader told the truth of a future of slavery awaiting them. They believed him and asked: “What can we do to avert this great calamity?”

He replied them: “There is no cure but resignation.” Then “they resigned themselves” and have remained in that state of resignation till today.

It is a long story. My source is H.R. Palmer’s ‘The Kano Chronicle’ published in 1908. The prophecy is on page 64. You may read that portion and others and match that history with whatever is happening to these people today.

I remembered Barbushe’s prophecy when I saw the Hausa journalist and his online army asking questions and referring to their own ancestors as the ‘Habe’ rulers of Kano. The 19th century Fulani (and their successors) called any people they conquered ‘Habe’.

The Hausa think the altered, contemporary king list of Kano city is rigged against their ancestors. They think it robs them of their royal and cultural essence. The people who enslaved them reset the calendar and the clock of their history. Their existence started with their defeat. Their fate is classic in how not to surrender to fate. Could the 1804 Jihad of Dan Fodio and its spread to Kano be the fulfillment of that promise of eternal subjugation; a rulership which history predicted would misgovern them “till they become of no account”? The prediction, and everything around it, even its myth and legend, appear to have come with a fatal ring of prescient finality wound around these people. Their resignation is proof that there is no medicine against destiny and no armour against fate.

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Students of Kano history would have no problem identifying successive emirs of the city as snacks of power. In some cases, governors munch, chew, and swallow them. Some other times, they try and fail. On January 1, 1954, Premier Ahmadu Bello installed his “close personal friend”, Muhammad Sanusi, as emir of Kano. The man succeeded his father, Abdullahi Bayero. But in August 1963, the friendship was over. Sanusi was dethroned even despite opposition from the federal. On June 8, 2014, Sanusi’s grandson, Lamido, became emir despite opposition from Abuja and its forces. He was there for six years and was dethroned by a governor who was deputy governor when he was enthroned. Last week, Lamido’s destiny brought him back to the throne even in the face of a blitzkrieg from federal forces.

Emirs are riverside reeds, precarious at all times. In 1982, Governor Abubakar Rimi had a big issue with the Emir of Kano and, in an interview, he described the emir as “nothing, nothing, nothing but a public person.” He said the emir was “holding a public office” and was “being paid from public funds” and his “appointment is at the pleasure of the governor of the state.” He said the emir “can be dismissed, removed, interdicted, suspended if he commits an offence.” Rimi said there was “nothing unique about Ado Bayero, the Emir of Kano… believe me, if he commits any offence which will make it necessary for us to remove him, we will remove him and we will sleep soundly.” His listeners shivered. The PRP governor proceeded from there to plot the sack of the emir “for failing to fulfill government orders or to show due respect to the State Governor.” There was opposition from the streets with thousands shouting: “we don’t want the governor; we want the emir.” Ado Bayero survived that coup and soon ate the exit cake of Governor Rimi. The opposite appears to be the case now with Bayero’s son, Aminu.

Perhaps, more importantly, the Kano case has just confirmed to us that the country now has judges without borders; they sit anywhere -in the air and at sea, in their wives’ beds and on their concubines’ laps. They work 24 hours; they operate with the speed of light such that cases can be filed at 11pm and judgment delivered at 12 midnight while the other party is sleeping. Whatever they do is valid. It stands. There is no control again; the steering wheel is rusted and stiff. The state backs its carefully selected judges with everything it has –guns, threats, excuses, lightning and thunder.

The case should strengthen us to double down on our insistence that Nigeria is a federation and must be so governed. A Nigerian Federal High Court sat in the United States of America and plunged a knife into the tendons of Kano chieftaincy. And we are excusing the perfidy with lexis and structure of e-judiciary. You would think under our laws, chieftaincy matters are state and local government matters. That is what our law says but the offshore judge did not think it was necessary to respect that law. Popular comedian, Mr Macaroni, would ask: “Are you normal?” We are not.

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Section 251 of our constitution clearly states what areas the Federal High Court has jurisdiction over. The section has three subsections. Subsection 1 gives that court jurisdiction on matters relating to the revenue of the government of the federation and allied matters. It lists those matters. Subsection 2 gives it “jurisdiction and powers in respect of treason, treasonable felony and allied offences.” Subsection 3 gives the court powers to hear cases “in respect of criminal causes and matters in respect of which jurisdiction is conferred by subsection (1) of this section.” Nowhere in that section or anywhere in the constitution is the Federal High Court empowered to sit over chieftaincy matters. Yet, a judge who was not even in the country, assumed jurisdiction under the cover of midnight darkness in the Kano emirship tussle and, aided by candies of impunity, signed an injunction. That judge is, very soon, going to the Court of Appeal on promotion. One day, he will become the Chief Justice of Nigeria.

Power and its allure rob society of order. In William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’, we see how man with power enjoys the anonymity conferred on him by darkness. We see how control is lost and he strays calmly from goodness to savagery. America’s second president, John Adams, in March 1801, stayed up till midnight of the eve of his last night in office creating courts and signing appointment memos of his friends and supporters as judges to fill his freshly minted courts. US history remembers those judges harshly as “midnight judges.” The court ruling at the centre of Kano’s emirship logjam walked in from the United States at midnight on Thursday. The reinstated emir, Muhammadu Sanusi II, jogged into the palace midnight on Friday. The deposed emir, Aminu Ado Bayero, sneaked into the city under the canopy of darkness before dawn on Saturday. The security forces of the federal government soon filed out and took embarrassing positions. The hinge of their involvement was the tokunbo court order from a midnight judge who sat across the seas. Our courts no longer dread darkness and its forbidden fruits; they have become like hired killers, their fingers stained with the blood of justice.

Yet, the judiciary had seen better days – even in the so-called dark days before the white man came with his civilisation. There was a time in Kano when what distinguished judges were learning and piety. Sulyman, emir of Kano from 1807 to 1819, had a very tough mother and an upright alkali (judge). The emir’s mother was found on a particular day ill-treating a private citizen. She was charged for it at the court of Alkali Yusuf al-Hausi. The court found the queen mother guilty and pronounced corporal punishment. Emir Sulyman could neither shield nor save his mother – she served her sentence. Thirty-six years later, Emir ‘Abd Allah Maje Karofi took over the throne of Kano and was there till 1882. At a point during his reign, the emir bought a horse from a Tuareg and refused to pay despite repeated demands. The Tuareg took his case to court and Alkali Ahmad Rufa’i found the king guilty. The king’s punishment was an order that the emir’s confidant named Kasheka, who represented him in court, be seized and sold into slavery to settle the debt. A shaken Emir Karofi quickly arranged for the money and paid his creditor, the Tuareg. My source for these stories is Professor Tijjani Naniya’s ‘The Dilemma of the Ulama in a Colonial Society’ published in the Journal of Islamic Studies in 1993.

The period of those judgments was a time when kings feared and respected the law. It was an era when judges knew the law and applied it as they should, entertaining neither fear nor favour. Today’s judge would jail the creditor and shout rankadede to the debtor-king. The jungle of our judiciary has matured and the beasts grown in all departments.

In my moments of devotion and meditation, I watch wild animals on TV channels. Right before me is a vulture, hyena and lion sizing one another up over a banquet of skunked meat. What we witnessed between Thursday and Saturday night in Kano was exactly that. Beastly fights over meals are a natural feature of life in the jungle. Bayero was dethroned and Sanusi enthroned. Enthronement and dethronement are not strange with monarchies. It didn’t start today in Kano and elsewhere; it won’t end with this Kano matter. How did Sanusi become emir in June 2014? Was he the favourite of the kingmakers? Aminu Ado Bayero, the dethroned emir, how did he get the throne four years ago? General Ibrahim Babangida once said that the moment you get into power through a coup, you should expect that a coup would be staged against you one day. It is delusional not to accept this. It is like Napoleon thinking his revolution would be the last. Russian writer, Yevgeny Zamyatin, says exactly this in his novel ‘We’ – described by a reviewer as “a prediction of the natural conclusions of totalitarianism.” It was from ‘We’ that George Orwell pinched the whole idea of his monumental ‘1984’. In “We” is the warning to all who stand but who think their stability is forever: “How can there be a final revolution? There is no final one. The number of revolutions is infinite.” One era will be succeeded by another era just as one preceded it. There is no goodnight in power politics. Sanusi is back; Bayero is out, but may yet come back. There is no end to snatching and running away with power.

The author, Dr. Lasisi Olagunju is the Saturday Editor of Nigerian Tribune, and a columnist in the same newspaper. This article was first published by the paper (Nigerian Tribune). It is published here with his permission.

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OPINION: My Pension, Your Pension In the Hands Of ‘Lagos’

Published

1 week ago

May 21, 2024

Editor

By Suyi Ayodele

Lagos does not have restraints when it comes to spending money. His first name is Nínál’owó (Money is meant to be spent). His middle name is Gbogbo ejò jíjeni (All snakes are edible). But I won’t keep quiet while he puts my future in the incinerator of his ways. Lagos is like an agbara ojo (erosion). Yoruba elders say àgbàrá òjò ò’lóhun ò nílé wó, onílé ni ò nì gbà fun (the mission of erosion is to destroy the building; it is the owner that will resist it).

The Yoruba word for spendthrift is àpà. There is Arungún (ruiner of inheritance) sitting very close to àpà. Both are relations of ikán (termites) in Yoruba semiotic. No matter the semantic shift exercise one carries out on each of them, they give the same meaning; denotatively and connotatively. Àpà is a waster. Arungún, otherwise known as Omo òsì (child of misery) is a destroyer of inheritance or estate. He is a typical reverser of fortune. Nothing is too precious for an àpà or an arungún to destroy. Termites eat up anything, no matter how precious.

There is an Ekiti folk song that warns of the activities of an arungún. The song warns of the implications of leaving one’s inheritance in the hands of a waster. Èhìn ayé enin/ kò se fi sílè fún omo òsì (One should not leave one’s estate for a waster child). No parent prays to have such a child to inherit his or her estate. No matter how many years it took the parents to build their estates, once such are inherited by an arungún, the estates go into ruins within a short period.

Years ago, an elderly man, a senior journalist, pointed at a telecommunications mast on Ugbague Street, Benin, to me. “You see that mast over there, Suyi”, he said. I followed the direction of his pointed finger and affirmed. He continued: “Will you believe me if I tell you that that plot of land and all the plots that have now turned to market once belonged to an Esama of Benin Kingdom?” I answered that it was not possible. My little knowledge of Benin chieftaincy matters tells me that only the wealthiest becomes the Esama of Benin. The elderly fellow affirmed that, and added that the owner of the property was once a wealthy man and was conferred with the title of Esama by the reigning Omo N’Oba then.

But upon his death, his arungún children sold off the estate the man had such that nobody could remember that their forebear was once the richest man in the Kingdom. The elderly fellow told me the story behind the ruinous heritage of the once prosperous Esama. I reserve that story for another time when we would have the time and space to discuss it. Pray you don’t have an arungún to inherit your estates; they leave such in ruins! Terrible!

Arungún omo abound in our localities. We have wasted estates of once prosperous parents in our neighbourhoods. Nothing can be worse than for people to say the family of Mr. Làkásègbé was once wealthy. Once an arungún manages an estate, the siblings end up as paupers! Because of an arungún, children of butchers beg for bones, and those of the wealthy roam the streets in abject poverty. Nigeria has been unfortunate with its arungún leaders, especially those we have had since the collapse of the First Republic. From the North to the South; from the West to the East, all the legacies left behind by the founding fathers of the country have been laid waste by the arungún children who took over leadership positions.

Nigeria is a typical example of a family once in wealth but now in poverty. Our case is not because our natural resources have dried up. No. God has blessed us more than many prosperous countries of the world. We have many other natural resources that we have not even tapped. Our problem lies in the fact that we have had termites as leaders. We have been unfortunate to have wasters in the helms of our affairs, at virtually all levels of government. We are a nation led by leaders who don’t save for the future. We have been ruled and ruined by those who eat the yam tubers and the seedlings for future planting seasons. They are the type called òjusu jègùn (he who eats both the yam and the sprouting seedlings) in my native tongue. The elders of my place, again, say an òjusu jègùn has eaten the next harvest (òjusu jegùn; àmódún ló je).

Nigeria is the only country where people work in the civil service for over three decades and retire into penury. We are not known to pay gratuities to retirees at the point of their disengagements from public service. Many of them die without collecting their gratuities. While Kayode Fayemi was governor of Ekiti State, he came up with a ‘novel’ solution to gratuity payment. He asked retirees willing to get their entitlements to let go of as much as 25 percent of their gratuities, otherwise, they will wait till only-God-knows-when! The last set of retirees in the state who got their entitlements were those who retired in March 2014. In the last 10 years, no retiree in Ekiti State has been paid his gratuity. Worst hit are local government and primary school teachers’ retirees, who have not been paid gratuities since 2012! The same thing goes for the monthly stipends to retirees known as pension. Stories abound about how senior citizens die on the queues while waiting to collect their pension. These are people who spent their youthful years serving their fatherland!

To address the problem, the administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo introduced the Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS), in 2003. Under the scheme, both the employers and the employees are compelled to contribute a certain percentage of the employees’ salaries to the fund on a monthly basis. The funds are also placed in the hands of independent financial institutions known as Pension Fund Operators (PenOP) to manage. The beauty of this scheme is that while government intervention in the management of pension is eliminated, employees in the private sector (corporate bodies), who were hitherto at the mercy of their shylock employers, are also accommodated.

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Speaking recently at a meeting with PenOP, Obasanjo said that one of the major reasons for the pension reform was his pain at seeing so many pensioners queuing up to collect their pensions, especially during his first term in office. The retired General stressed that he was particularly pained to see military men who had served the nation, spending hours or days to collect their pensions. “With this in mind, we resolved to see how the government could make pension management and administration private sector driven and more in line with global best practices. I was pleasantly surprised at the growth of the pension assets over the last 20 years as my administration instituted the pension reforms, and pushed to have a bill to reform the way pension administration was done in Nigeria. They did not think that the assets would grow this quickly and have the positive effect it has had so far.” The former president enthused. In the last 20 years, the funds in the various pension accounts, contributed by workers in the public and those in the private sectors, have grown to over N20 trillion. That is how leaders grow estates. That is how forebears take care of the future. But hand over such an inheritance to an arungún omo, the people will be in pain afterwards.

The over N20 trillion in the pension funds account is the next nectar that the Lagos man in charge of our affairs is targeting to lick in the name of building infrastructure. Having drained all the available resources, the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration is taking his predatoriness to the pension account. To many of us, we don’t find this behaviour strange given the fact that it fits perfectly to the financial identikit of President Tinubu as a Nínál’owó. Expectedly, since the Tinubu administration, through its Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Mr.Wale Edun, muted the idea of taking the owó ojú eégún (money kept in the masquerade’s grove), hell has been let loose on the government. Also, many groups, obviously members of the government’s Hallelujah orchestra, have been unleashed on the media space to defend the government.

Former Vice President and presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, while reacting to the development said that the move is “illegal”, as “there is NO free Pension Funds that is more than 5% of the total value of the nation’s pension fund for Mr. Edun to fiddle with.” Atiku, who was with Obasanjo when the pension reforms that resulted in the over N20 trillion being coveted by Tinubu and his Lagos boys warned: “Even at that, this move must be halted immediately! It is a misguided initiative that could lead to disastrous consequences on the lives of Nigeria’s hardworking men and women who toiled and saved and who now survive on their pensions having retired from service. It is another attempt to perpetrate illegality by the Federal Government. The government must be cautioned to act strictly within the provisions of the Pension Reform Act of 2014 (PRA 2014), along with the revised Regulation on Investment of Pension Assets issued by the National Pension Commission (PenCom). In particular, the Federal Government must not act contrary to the provisions of the extant Regulation on investment limits to wit: Pension Funds can invest no more than 5% of total pension funds’ assets in infrastructure investments.”

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As it is wont to do, the Tinubu government unleashed his attack Rottweilers on Atiku and every other person that has risen against the intending daylight robbery of the pension funds. One of such nondescript groups, the Independent Media and Policy Initiative (IMPI), equally led by one Niyi Akinsiju, I am told he played the same under President Muhammadu Buhari, said that by voicing his opinion against the move to use the pension funds for infrastructural developments, Atiku had merely become “a government critic and opposition leader.” One wonders what Atiku is expected to do if he could not criticise bad government initiatives! The group quoted sections 5.1, 5.2 and 5.15 of the Pension Reform Act, 2014, to justify why the light-fingered Federal Government of Tinubu could dip its filthy hands into the pension pockets and spend the funds therein. Ridiculously, IMPI assured Nigerians that after tampering with the funds, the government would guarantee its safety on the jejune argument that the “…FGN issued securities are considered as the safest of all investments in domestic debt market because it is backed by the ‘full faith and credit’ of the Federal Government, and as such it is classified as a risk-free debt instrument.” Nonsense! Balderdash!! Bunkum!!!

It baffles me why some people deliberately choose to be fatuous. If the Federal Government could guarantee the safety of the pensions, why was the need for the pension reform in the first instance? Where was this Akinsiju of a mould, when pensioners were dying in their hundreds on the queues waiting for their pensions? Is he that ignorant to note that what this wastrel government intends to spend belongs to workers in both the public and the private sectors? That the pension funds belong to workers of the government’s civil services and those from the infamous AFAMACO JOB (work without pay) of Benin? Can Akinsiju and those in his caste tell Nigerians how many of those things committed to this government in the last one year it has been able to secure? Can he tell us how this government met our economy and how low it has taken it? What was the cost of living before Tinubu came on May 29, 2023, and what is the cost of living now? How on earth would anyone want to commit the future of hapless Nigerian workers both in the public and private sectors to the hands of these thriftless individuals who spare nothing? How long would our leaders behave like common arungún and we would clap for them?

I have no doubt that this government is both deaf and dumb. I suspect also that compassion is in abysmally short supply in this era. I am equally of the strong opinion that neither President Tinubu, nor his boys and hangers-on, have any soupcon of respect for the Nigerian masses. But I want to quickly tell them that the pension fund is the life and last hope of many Nigerians currently working in the private and public sectors. If I were Tinubu, I would not touch their money!