Royal Farts And Farces -By Ike Willie-Nwobu

Kano, that ancient city, is becoming the playground for an ancient artifice to play out with messy consequences for the people who have long submitted to the revered monarchy and wider implications for the traditional institution in Nigeria.

As the lights of leadership have dwindled in Nigeria, darkness has been swift in its descent, cloaking many aspects of the society in thick and lengthening shadows. This has become true for even the traditional institution and everything it represents.
As Nigeria’s do-nothing state governors cruise through the carousel of power they abuse chillingly and nonchalantly, they have not left the traditional institutions alone.

In 2020, five years into his reign as governor, Umar Ganduje who is now the National Chairman of the All Progressives Country, a blind party leading a blinkered country, as governor, took the unprecedented step of deposing and exiling Muhammadu Sanusi II who had been installed as the emir of Kano in 2014. While the state government hurriedly and hastily drew up a list of the offenses that had done for the emir, Nigerians far removed from the ancient commercial city knew that Nigeria’s political commerce, that nauseating trade in power and politics had consumed the monarch. But Ganduje was undeterred. He further defied long-standing tradition by balkanizing the ancient emirate and appointing more emirs. His goal was clear: he not only wanted Muhammadu Sanusi II out of office, he wanted to make it impossible for the emirate to remain the same structurally.

When the transience of power finally chewed him up in 2023 and spat out Nasir Yusuf Gawuna, his stooge who lost the 2023 governorship election to Abba Kabir Yusuf of the NNPP, his decisions to banish Sanusi and restructure the emirate was reversed. A protracted litigation has since followed. Given the nature of such matters in Nigeria, it is clear that it will not end anytime soon.

What has happened in Kano State is that an ancient emirate has become the object of filthy politics by politicians.

To massage their oversized egos, and flex their repulsive muscles, Nigerian politicians march anywhere and throw match sticks on anything. In recent tears, the traditional institution has become their favourite stomping ground. And why not?

For years, the traditional institution as vital and as strategic as it is to the lives of people has steadily let slip its mystique and power. This gradual deterioration which has resulted from the corruption of politics is a symptomatic of the loss of values society has largely undergone through years of decay at all levels.

The loss of face for traditional institutions, which even more than governments constitute the bastion of values, customs, and traditions which hold a society together, is catastrophic by any standard. It is why the government must watch the interference. Traditional institutions should be considered too sacred for the puerile politics of politicians for whom everything is unchecked political profiteering.

But, history and reality, suggests that traditional stools will not be spared the abominable bottoms of those who have neither respect for traditions nor themselves as a matter of fact. Agents of destabilization now target traditional institutions as a matter of political strategy. The result is out in the open for all to see.

The lot now falls on those who are subject to traditional institutions to protect that which they hold in high esteem.

Perhaps, if traditional institutions can reinvent themselves, they can force all comers to play their cards by the rules. But reinvention is almost impossible, especially in these days when everything and everyone has a price.

Ike Willie-Nwobu
Ikewilly9@gmail.com