Do you ever wonder at the arrogance of men who think they alone exist in the universe?
Two circumstantial advantages make this columnist privileged to appreciate the royal umbrage of the Kano Emirate against Air Peace. The leading indigenous airline in a recent incident declined to bend the rule for my lord temporal [spiritual too].
Like the Air Peace proprietor, the journalist comes from the southeast cultural background. He also cut his professional teeth in Kano, living and working in the ancient city for years.
The business drive of Air Peace is well known and so understandable. When an Igbo man sets up a business, a capital-intensive enterprise like air freighting, not even his darling wife dares to stand in his way of profit-making. The situation could be worse if the business is in a stress zone such as Nigeria of today.
As a journalist who spent some years in Kano, I also appreciate the Emirate’s anger at a perceived disrespect of the royalty. As a budding journalist with the Triumph newspapers in the 1970s, I was privileged to cover the Emir’s Palace as a support reporter for a period. Then I saw the Kano royalty in its unvarnished splendour. The Emir is treated like a god. An Emir’s spittle, for instance, is not expected to touch the ground, for somebody among the royal guards must open his agbada to prevent it from landing on the ground.
Able-bodied men are hired and placed on remuneration just to be showering praises on the man on the throne. Their talents and achievements are measured by their ability to praise and sing the King to the high heavens. If the Emir takes the wrong steps, somebody among the palace guards will go in for it.
If you do not share the same background what they do will sound draconian and exploitative. Coming from the South East, what I saw sounded strange to me then, but my northern colleagues appeared to even enjoy the sight of it. So, for me, as the Air Peace/Emirate dispute blew up and is ballooning, I can imagine where the problem lies.
From their varying settings, both parties to the dispute were damn right. An Igbo man’s respect for traditional institutions is certainly not on the same level. No wonder colonial masters instituted paramount leaders in Eastern Nigeria. Today, there are more than 2,000 traditional rulers in the five states of the region while Kano State nearly pulled down the house the other day for splitting the Emirate. The mistake that was common to the two parties to the dispute was in not recognizing that they both have common ground.
Air Peace forgot to appreciate that in this clime you must recognize the absurdity of the persons you are sharing the ground with as part of public relations brunt to bear in every business, especially an elitist one like in flying people and cargo.
The Kano royals, in their characteristic arrogance, failed to factor in that the Emir is a traditional ruler in one of the nation’s 36 states. Administratively and by protocol, he reports to the Chairman of Kano Municipal Council. On the contrary, Air Peace management and the staff members are not their subjects and are in private business. Their relationship is purely commerce-driven and the airline serves Kano people along with other Nigerians some of whom neither know Kano nor its Emir.
From a business perspective, the airline shouldn’t be arrogant to any customer at all, let alone a VIP who is highly regarded by his subjects and their customers. What is on display here is just the dimensions of arrogance from both parties.
The feuding parties have prices to pay if they insist on being right. Air Peace has some customers and image perception to tackle. In the marketing parlance, the customer is always right and this presupposes that even when they go wrong you need to overlook it because of the consequences of stretching your right. In business, being obstinate in self-righteousness could be harmful to an extent. When you massage the ego of the man who is in the wrong, you are not turning his error into right, you are just showing the shrewdness in you as an entrepreneur.
For this, the airline would have apologised not for being wrong but for treating their customers as kings more so when the character involved is a king for real. The argument of the airline in defence of their refusal to delay their flight is sound and meets the standard best practice in the aviation sector. Rather than punishment as the Emirate requested, the aviation regulators should commend them for sticking to the rule no matter who is involved. But the public relations of it as it relates to the Emir and his subjects stick. A business enterprise that deals with the public should not allow pride to cause the withholding of any money coming to them,
An apology to the royalty after explaining their position would not have diminished the airline, it would only have marked them out as business gurus who can take the rubbish for their money. But on the side of the haughty Prince Isa Bayero who has been issuing all the irritating threats including mobilising Kano people against the airline, his arrogance does not stand in the face of reason. He exhibited so much arrogance and selfishness in his threat and missed the point in his argument. He did not factor in the passengers inside the flight that he wanted to delay. Neither did he spare a thought for what they would miss by such a delay. He was only interested in himself. A good leader accommodates others’ interests while pushing his own.
The Prince, in his threat, forgot to factor in the implications to the Emirate and city of Kano. Threatening to mobilise Kano people against an airline that committed no infraction is a short way of scaring investors. No investor would want to operate in an environment where international best practices are compromised just to accommodate an overbearing king. Such megalomania has far-reaching implications for development in the ancient city. The chief harm of arrogance is that it considers itself perfect and that’s where the Kano Prince belongs by his utterances. He fell victim to the evils of self-importance and did not consider other passengers. Aagam Shah reminds us in a situation like this, “There is a thin line between confidence and arrogance. It’s called humility. Confidence smiles, arrogance smirks.” The operatives of both the airline and the Emirate lacked humility.
Recall that two weeks ago in this space, this columnist warned of the hurdle to one Nigeria posed by the threat to life issued to one Adamawa State-based Igbo investor, Vincent Umeh, for daring to buy a house close to a Deputy Commissioner of Police Ibrahim Baba Zango.
As was pointed out, what was holding Nigeria’s development down more than anything else was too much attachment to sentiment, whether religious or traditional. It bears repetition that Sokoto Caliphate was founded in the 18th Century whereas Dubai in the United Arab Emirates was a desert 50 years ago. Now, Dubai is the global destination for anything modern. The snail-pace development in Kano, the northern Nigeria commercial nerve centre, is due largely to too much fixation on dogma of whatever hue.
There is a very close similarity in the attitude of Isa Bayero, the Kano Emirate protocol man, and DCP Baba Zango. There are some traces of truculent arrogance and intolerance exhibited in the two northern personages. Another commonality of the two incidents is that they are antithetical to development. One key way to attract investment from outside to an environment is enthroning ease of doing business. If refusing to delay a flight by one hour for a late-coming passenger irrespective of who is involved could attract all these outbursts, Kano certainly cannot merit being investor-friendly.
The real reason public institutions are collapsing even where private ones are thriving is this type of attitude from the Kano Emirate. Imagine if that airline belonged to the Kano Emirate or the Kano State government, that airline could wait for as long as the Emir desired, but its effect will show in the books.
The message from this conversation is that management of ego is important in relating with one another, whether in political, social or economic terms. This hullabaloo was avoidable if the airline and the Emirate had applied caution in sticking to their rights. The Emirate in sticking to being pampered as a customer failed to take into consideration the interest of other passengers who also deserve pampering.
In sticking to the rule, the airline forgot the inevitability of the customer as the king of the business. All said and done, Nigerian leaders must begin to face the reality that businesses must be run in the best set of international standards because we share the space with others. It’s when this is done that we can begin to claim civilization.
