Dear Sanusi; Write Again Like Yesterday -By Musa Kalim Gambo

Some of us in our mid 20s now grew up to find articles of Sanusi Lamido Sanusi in old copies of Daily Trust newspapers and Gamji blog. However, we wake up to the realization that that Lagos based Northern Nigerian intellectual who addressed issues with ‘fire and fury’, to borrow Micheal Wolff’s book title, is no longer with us, I mean his writings are no longer forthcoming.

Going through Sanusi’s writings, it is easy to identify a dramatic change; the Sanusi of the early 2000s has become a bit subtle in his criticism of conservative and retrogressive attitudes of the modern Northerner, or indeed Nigerian. With his ascension to the throne of his grandfather, Sanusi became a cat who used to be a wild tiger chasing bigger preys in the jungle, now reduced to a gentle cat chasing household rats. Alas, the rats chased him away.

Now that Sanusi has been liberated from that bondage, I mean the royal cage, as captured by Daily Trust’s cartoonist, Mustapha Bulama in his cartoon last week; it is time for Sanusi to pick that brutal pen of his again. It is time for Daily Trust to have SLS as a columnist again. We can have the might of his pen rekindle the fire of reform in us once again as it did to our uncles in the early 2000s. Despite those excited voices proposing that you join politics, and against this view you once shared in one of your articles, that;

“The dirt in Nigerian politics is not cleansed by preaching and by self-righteous indignation. It will be cleansed by getting in there and flushing it out by struggling to ensure the victory of good over evil. In this process, some compromises will have to be made.”

I believe you would make a better writer than a politician. You have made an attempt at the highest traditional institution in Kano, we all saw how it turned out. Compromise is not in your blood. And such temperament survives only in writers, not traditional rulers or politicians. As you once put it more clearly:

“But those unwilling to give and take cannot find relevance in any political dispensation. What is important is to keep in view our ideal – and to move relentlessly towards attaining it.”

Dear Sanusi, I am confident you would read this, and if you do, pick your pen, write again as you did in years past when I was in the kindergarten. That is where you stand a chance to inspire this generation and the ones yet to come, to take the path of sustainable growth and development for this beloved nation.

However, some critics argue that you no longer should be presenting theories for social reform since your lifestyle and choices are in conflict with such, that you are a symbol of the stereotypical Northern bourgeois. It doesn’t matter; the North still needs some moral alarm to consistently remind her of when to wake up from her seemingly endless slumber.

By the time you pick up that old pen of yours, I do not expect a memoir from you now or even a recount of your travails in that royal cage, now may be too early for that. The pen would be more effective if it spits its red inks on advocacy for good governance with specific emphasis on the provision of the enabling environment for peasant business endeavors to thrive. Now that your voice is well known, I know it won’t be ignored. Though I hear that you have never been on the side of the peasants as a sympathizer, but only as a critic. Some of my friends suggested that it was the reason your subjects did not riot when you were dethroned, though I saw a short clip of an aged woman who shed tears at your dethronement.

Dear Sanusi, you now have the time to preach as much as you can and practice accordingly. That is the way you can truly inspire positive change in the attitude of the Northerner and the Nigerian.

–Musa Kalim Gambo is former Secretary General of Creative Writers’ Club, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.