By Farooq A. Kperogi Twitter: @farooqkperogi
The contest for royal supremacy between Muhammad Sanusi II and Aminu Ado Bayero took an explicitly ethnic turn a few days ago when Hashim Dungurawa, the Kano State chairman of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), said President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was protecting Bayero from deposition and humiliation by Kano’s NNPP government because of Bayero’s “Yoruba lineage”!
“If the President thinks he will use a few of his kinsmen in Kano and the alleged Bayero’s Yoruba lineage to continue to keep the deposed Emir Aminu Ado Bayero in the State, let him wait for 2027, we will show him that those people will not help him,” Dungurawa said.
By Dungurawa’s ethnic supremacist logic, Kano had a Yoruba emir from March 2020 to May 2024 since “lineage” means line of descent, which is traced patrilineally in most Nigerian societies, including Kano.
By the way, it was actually Muhammad Sanusi II who first covertly caused this whispering campaign to be created and amplified in 2020 in Kano in the aftermath of his deposition and the installation of Bayero as his successor. He did it to delegitimize Bayero.
Nor is this sort of atavistic ethnic baiting Sanusi’s first. For example, after former presidential spokesperson Garba Shehu characterized his Fulani supremacist, anti- Hausa (and anti-anyone who isn’t Fulani) article titled “The Fulani Factor in Nigerian Politics” as “Sanusi’s racist rubbish” in July 2000, he was so enraged that he lied in an Arewa House lecture that Garba Shehu’s parents were from Edo, as if Edo people were lesser humans.)
But what’s the basis for the astonishingly counterintuitive claim that Aminu Ado Bayero is a Yoruba man even though he is the spitting image of his later father, Ado Bayero?
Well, it’s because his mother, Hajia Maryam, who died in 2021, was the daughter of Zulkarnain “Sulu” Muhammadu Gambari, the 9th emir of Ilorin who died in 1992. In other words, she was the older sister of the current (11th) emir of Ilorin.
Although no Yoruba person regards the Ilorin ruling family as anything but Yoruba-speaking Fulani people, Sanusi and his ethnic supremacist supporters regard the family’s locational, linguistic, and possibly genetic, association with Yoruba people as a “stain” on the “purity” of their Fulani identity.
Never mind that Sanusi himself—and all emirs in the Northwest—have locational, linguistic, and genetic association with Hausa people, just like the Fulani emirs in Nupeland have locational, linguistic, and genetic association with the Nupe people. Or that ethnic cosmopolitanism is central to the originative imagination of the Dan Fodio caliphate.
The notion that Aminu Bayero is of “Yoruba lineage” because his mother was a Yoruba-speaking Ilorin Fulani princess is utter, misguided, counterproductive identitarian essentialism, that is, the pretense that there is such a thing primordial ethnic purism that is “unblemished” by interconnectedness with other identities.
The claim that Tinubu is protective of Aminu Ado Bayero (which, by the way, I resent because it has no basis in law since only governors can enthrone and dethrone traditional rulers) is particularly ironic because Ado Bayero was one of only a few traditional rulers (the other being the Sultan of Sokoto) who had the courage to tell Tinubu that his economic policies were strangulating the people.
In February this year, he told First Lady Remi Tinubu to let her husband know that ordinary people were in pain. “Although, we have several means of communicating to the government on our needs and requests, you are the surest way to tell the President the happenings in the country,” he said. “We get information daily that essential commodities and cost of living are high, and people are suffering, although it didn’t start with this government.”
How about the self-proclaimed “pure-bred” Fulani Sanusi who has encouraged his minions to play up the Yoruba ethnic “contamination” of Bayero as the reason Tinubu isn’t supporting him? Well, he is delighted with the current state of the economy and patted Tinubu on the back for removing subsidies from petrol.
“It’s injustice for anyone to blame the Tinubu administration for the current economic hardship because there is no other alternative than the removal of the fuel subsidy,” Sanusi said. “After all, Nigeria cannot even afford to pay the subsidy.”
He even went so far as to claim that the economy is in the toilet because Muhammadu Buhari resisted his counsel to “firmly and unequivocally eliminate fuel subsidies.” “The economy was poorly managed, and they [were] not willing to take advice,” he said.
A “Yoruba” emir was empathetic toward the suffering of his people and told a “fellow” Yoruba man, who is the president, the truth about the anguish his policies have caused people without fear of consequences, but an “undiluted” Fulani emir told the Yoruba president that his mass pauperization of people and the obliteration of their means of livelihood was all fine and dandy.
Yet the toadyish, sadistic “Fulani” emir who cheers while the people incinerate in infernal economic policies is causing his underlings to whisper that the truth-telling emir is being favored by the president out of a sense of ethnic solidarity.
Maybe the Sultan of Sokoto also secretly has tinctures of Yoruba (and possibly Kanuri) blood freely flowing in his veins that caused him to be defended and protected by the Tinubu presidency against a planned deposition Sokoto’s APC government for his alleged sympathies for the previous PDP government of Aminu Tambuwal.
“And to the Deputy Governor of Sokoto, I have a simple message for you: Yes, the Sultan is the Sultan of Sokoto, but he is much more than that; he represents an idea, he is an institution that all of us in this country need to jealousy guard, protect, promote, preserve and project for the growth of our nation,” Vice President Kashim Shettima said at North-West Peace and Security Summit in Katsina State on June 25.
The truth Sanusi and his defenders don’t want to confront is that he is a deeply unpopular person in Kano. He is the only past emir in living memory whose appointment as an emir sparked a violent, spontaneous mass revolt because he wasn’t on the shortlist of princes recommended for emirship by the kingmakers. Sanusi Ado Bayero, Aminu Ado Bayero’s older brother, was the choice of the kingmakers.
Most people know that one of the central pillars of support for Aminu Ado Bayero is a scion of old money in Kano who detests and resents Sanusi and who is extremely close to Tinubu. The NNPP people know this. They know that Bayero’s Ilorin maternal identity (which Tinubu and his people don’t recognize as “Yoruba”) is incidental to the issues.
They also know that Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso and Tinubu had struck a deal that required Kwankwaso to spare Bayero in exchange for a favorable Supreme Court judgment and a chance to serve as a minister in Tinubu’s cabinet. His betrayal of this deal by dethroning Bayero hurts Tinubu deeply.
More than this, though, the dangerous game of reactionary ethnic purism that Sanusi is playing and that his minions in the political arena are trying to instrumentalize for national political machinations would inflict incalculable injury on identity formation in the North.
The North, even the Muslim North, is an intricate tapestry of multiple ethnic identities. These identities are united by a higher, overarching glue. In the case of the Muslim North, that glue is Islam, which is causing an ethnogenesis to emerge from a mishmash of identities. To delegitimize or alienate a Kano emir because he traces maternal ancestry to the geographic fringe of the North communicates to the people from that place that they are unwanted, that they don’t belong.
It reminds me of the grave error of judgment that northern Muslim elites made during the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency, from which the North hasn’t recovered.
Obasanjo threw an opportunity for the North to really live up to its “one North, one people” mantra and it failed. Of all Nigeria’s former regions, the North is the only region that was ruled as one and that was unbroken until the regional structure was disbanded. Suddenly, because of Obasanjo’s appointments, a northerner who was a Christian was no longer a “northerner.” Even a northerner who was a Muslim (such as Ibrahim Ogohi) wasn’t a “northerner” unless he came from the Northwest or the Northeast.
Obasanjo was clearly smarter than northern leaders because he destroyed the myth the North cherishes about itself by testing it. Tinubu may be inadvertently doing the same thing to the emirate system. If you don’t manage your diversity well, a smart, competing outsider will always exploit it to divide and conquer you.
Farooq Kperogi, author and Professor of Journalism @KennesawState University, is a columnist with Nigerian Tribune