*’ Kano emirate existed before Nigeria’
*Says Democracy is flawed but better
*’ I had a happier life in Lagos with my friends, publishing my book, doing my PhD
By Dapo Akinrefon Originally published in Vanguard
What are those practical lessons that you learned, while away from the throne that you would like to bring to bear now that you have been reinstated as emir, to move the emirate to the next level?
Well, as you know, life is always a continuous process of learning and relearning. And for me, I had always believed as they say that we should not waste a crisis, and my crisis presented an opportunity for me to do something else. In the last four years, I have not been idle, I just completed writing a PhD. thesis at the University of London, a week before I returned to Kano. I will be going back next month to conclude some things because I will be graduating in September. Let us just take that as an example. The thesis I wrote was on the codification of Islamic Family Law as an instrument of social reform.
This was one of my major projects as you know, as an emir, trying to codify Islamic law to deal with several issues around child marriage, domestic violence, child spacing basically women and children’s rights, and so on. And because I did a PhD on the subject matter, some of the things I learned made me rethink some of the premises upon which we are passing that law and if I am to reconstitute the committee, I will have different areas of emphasis and I have a different understanding of some of the issues now.
So, I will give an example; we always talk about child marriage as a problem and we think that the solution is to have a law that says that every girl must reach the age of 18 before she gets married, but the reality is that the solution is in what you came to Kano to do yesterday. You have to be at the schools, you have to provide them with what they are going to do. We did some research, and we found out that within Kano City and its environs, we don’t have child marriage because there are schools all over.
Parents can send their children to school, they can go to secondary school, and they have teachers. If you go to the villages and there are no schools and a girl is 11 or 16 years old, and there are no schools and teachers and nothing to do, the father marries her off. It is not religion. It is not a culture. It is just a failure of the state to provide development.
So, many of the things that we have taken as either religious misunderstanding or culture are issues of governance and development and the failure of the state. We want to have a minimum age like the Arab states, fine, but do we register a birth? If we don’t start registering everybody, how do we know the age of the child, and how do we enforce that in a court of law? These are just some of the examples. Part of my work was that I gathered data from nine Sharia courts from the three Senatorial Districts in Kano and asked, what are the major marital problems faced by women in Kano? We started from the premise of what is a global discourse on the problem because every society has its issues. Do you know what we discovered? More than 40 percent of all the court cases have to do with men not providing maintenance for their families. It is poverty.
Men are not providing food or accommodations, or they have divorced the women and are not taking care of the children. So, many of these socio-cultural problems have their roots in economics and therefore, this whole issue of providing an education, especially for women, and providing them an opportunity to earn a living, is the solution. So, when we write the law, we must bear in mind these things. Now, some of the things I have seen in the speech of the governor are the kind of things that other states had said in the past because my thesis also did a comparative analysis with Morocco.
What do they do in Morocco? They built the schools; they invested in school transportation just like we are now talking about school transportation. The girls would be moved from villages to the nearest schools. They also invested in school feeding, and they equally provided financial support to the poorest families who were ready to send their sons and daughters to school.
So, they don’t need to earn a living to send their kids to school. If a parent is below a certain poverty line, and he allows his daughter to go to school, the government will still have to give him some money, so that he does not have to marry his daughter off. He doesn’t also have to get her to trade. She goes to school, and the parents get some compensation for sending her to school. Now, allow the girls to get an education and earn a living at the end. For me, the PhD was a major eye opener and like I said earlier, I am not the kind of person who just sits in one place and says okay now that I am not emir, let me sit until I become something else, no, I do something with my time and I have moved.
For me, I knew I was on transition; I was a governor of the Central Bank. I was told to move. People have jobs, and they resign, former this or that is nothing. I moved on, but now, God decreed that I must come back. It is a new transition. But I have improved myself, when I finish my PhD hopefully, I will approach Bayero University to grant me the opportunity to once in a while go and give academic lectures, and postgraduate seminars on Islamic law, but I would not have the time to give a full course or mark. However, all this research and data that I had gathered in Kano needs to be shared with the younger generation. The second thing is that we need to realize that we are in a very difficult place as a country because of many years of economic mismanagement and you all know that for the past 10 years, I have been talking about it. People are talking about NNPC and all revenues and the dollar, but look, how long have I been talking about this? 2011, 2012, 2013, this was exactly what we were trying to avoid. I was listening to the debate about subsidies, and I remembered that I said people don’t know what an economic crisis is until they get into one, and that is what we are in now. Crimes, this is exactly what we knew would happen. Food becomes unaffordable, people’s income gets wiped out, and wages can no longer get people anywhere. This is why the management of the economy is crucial. What can I do? I advise the government as much as I can, on how to manage resources, and also see to the best of my ability how to get the private sector to come in to build the economy because the government alone cannot do everything. It is fantastic for the 30 percent budget on education. We also need the private sector to come in. We need to build infrastructure, even in the educational sector.
Kano has produced two richest Nigerians, maybe two richest Africans, we need to start to seriously talk to those people to come and invest in education and skills in Kano. So, part of my job as emir is to call these citizens of Kano and other well-meaning Nigerians to see how they can come in and address these problems. For me a transition is a transition, I have never been hounded by an office, and not being in Kano has never stopped me from continuing to do service because, at the end of the day, that is what matters, not the title.
How are you going to galvanize and collaborate with other traditional rulers across the federation to build the nation despite the mismanagement of our diversity?
I am very grateful to God that the traditional institutions in Nigeria have a very rich representation of people with experience from diverse backgrounds. I know that many people outside just look at us as relics of the past culture. But look at it, Sultan of Sokoto was a General, the Shehu of Borno was a permanent Secretary, the Etsu Nupe was a General, the Emir of Zuru was a General, the Emir of Zazzau was an Ambassador, I was the Governor of Central Bank, Emir of Fika, DSS, Oba of Lagos, AIG of Police, Oba of Benin Ambassador, Obi of Onitsha, a banker. The reality is that whichever way you look, security or academia, we have that wealth. That also goes into the quality of advice that we offer. So, for us, we see ourselves as partners to the government in how to give the best advice based on our experience and how to manage things.
I will give you an example from my experience in Kano the last time, the previous government wanted to borrow $1.8 billion from China to build 75 kilometers of rail and the forex then was N197 to a dollar, and as a trained economist and former governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, I could see the growth in money supply and I was sure that the Naira was not going to remain in that artificial level of N200 for a long time. Part of my job was to advise the government, to look at the amount of money you want to borrow. If the naira depreciates to N500 to the dollar, this money will become N1 trillion. Your internally generated revenue is not up to N20 billion. You will need about N100 billion per annum just to service the debt. It is not sustainable, if you go down this part, you are going to leave Kano with an unsustainable burden for the next 30, to 40 years, and generation after generation, the government will not be able to earn enough to service the debt. This was advice I gave quietly, three, four, and five times, and the government refused to listen. Some people told me then that my job was to advise, and I had advised, so if they did not do it, I should just keep quiet. For me, I could not sit in all conscience and allow that to happen because the government would go, and for the next 40 years, our children and grandchildren would suffer for it. Today, if that loan had been taken, this government would not be able to even pay salaries. So, with all these 30 percent educational budgets, the money would not be there because the money would be going to service debt and look at the exchange rate today, N1500 for a dollar, which means that the money would have become N3 trillion to build 75 kilometers of rail.
In the end, I took the nuclear option of going public to stop it, and that was how I almost lost my throne.
But for me, if I had remained on the throne by keeping quiet and for the next 40 years, the government could not provide employment, education, healthcare, infrastructure, and the like, it would have thrown Kano into a crisis, so it was not worth it. I think that part of the challenges that we have is this whole issue of where we draw the line. We have to give advice, sometimes on minor issues, and even when the government gives deaf ears and we are not happy, we can ignore it. But there are fundamental existential issues that we have to have the courage as the conscience of the people because we are the ones who will be here, the government is there for just four or eight years if we live long enough like our predecessors, 50 years, so we have to think about the lives of these children. I think that when Governors understand that we are partners and we advise them based on our experience and they respect it, we will generally get along very well. An assumption is that we are all working for the same people.
We have a situation where the focus is different, I am interested in the people while somebody is doing something else. So we have these challenges and the rest, we don’t have a constitutional role, but so long as the people love us and respect us. I mean, you come out here every day, and you see hundreds of people coming to pay homage. I don’t give them money, I don’t give contracts, I don’t give employment and I can not jail anybody, so what are they coming for, just love. What do I owe them, I did not create them, but God placed me in this position and gave me honor. The least I can do for them is to speak up for them. Or you have an election and the people vote, we tell politicians that public office is not a human right, nobody has the human right to be a president or governor or senator or councillor. The right is for the people to vote for who they want. It is the people who have the right. If you elect a governor and somebody takes it and gives it to someone else, it is not the rights of the governor that was taken. It was the right of the people who voted. If they vote for X, if they make a mistake, after four years they will correct it themselves.
But if you take it from X and give it to Y, it is not the right of X that you took. It is the people’s rights you took. When I, as Emir, come out and say “Gentlemen, my people have voted, all I am asking is let them have the person they voted for.” As far as I am concerned, I am not in politics. I am not supporting a political party, and I am not supporting a candidate. I am supporting my people. I am defending the rights of my people to choose their leader. If that leader is good, I think. If, after four years, the leader turns bad, we vote for somebody else.
For me, I think that my understanding of my role is such that if I am unable to promote the interest of my people, then I don’t want the job. I would rather leave than be part of a process that, according to my conscience, would damage the very people who come and greet me and who love me. What do I say to God on the day of judgment if I am part of a process of making their lives difficult? It is a bit of something manufactured by the previous government. The people of Kano never asked to be divided. In parts of this country, you have had emirates created and kingdoms. If you go to Kaduna State at one time, you have everything under Zaria. You had huge Christian minorities, and different ethnic groups and chieftains were created for them. It made sense if they felt that they did not want to be under the emirate or under what they saw as…but Kano is a largely homogeneous society. If you see the Christians in Kano, they are parts of us; they don’t say they want to leave us.
There was an issue where people went and burnt a church. I went to the church and brought out my money to rebuild the church. We are one people, and nobody asked for it. What we are dealing with is a situation where somebody divides the emirate and, naturally, when you create these things, some people get more privileges. They didn’t ask for it, but they have enjoyed it for four years. When they lose it, it is a problem. But the problem is not what happened today. It is what happened four years ago. If it had not been done, we would not be in this situation today. We are one family, but somebody comes and divides us up. When people enjoy it for four years and he takes it away from them, it becomes a problem. This is a kingdom that has existed. In my first term, I was the 57th Emir. If you add my cousin and me, I am the 59th. In that period, we had an expansion, the only time a part of Kano was taken out was when Jigawa State was created because Jigawa State put together Kazaure Emirate, Hadejia Emirate, and Gumel Emirate were not big enough to make a viable state, and Hadejia and Gumel people wanted a state. So, part of Kano was carved out, and these were the two emirates of Dutse and Ringim. As a family, we were all hurt.
People need to understand what this government did because people don’t understand. You don’t create emirs of people. Somebody who, for a thousand years, has never been under you. Somebody now decrees that this is your king. How? Take Bichi. As a town, Bichi was run by a village head for centuries. It only became a district under the British. The first British head of Bichi was Abdullahi Bayero in the 1930s. Right now, there is one in Bichi called Sarkin Bichi. He is the king of the town of Bichi.
Historically, Sarkin Bichi reported to a district head in Dawakin Tofa. Now you make a law and say you have created an Emir in Bichi, and the Dawakin Tofa should report in Bichi. Do you understand?
You now say they should go and report not to Kano but to an emirate that you created in Bichi. How? You make a law and say these are the kingmakers in Kano. In all our history, we had four traditional kingmakers. Because you like a particular individual, you just decided, as a governor, that we now have five kingmakers. Out of nowhere, you create a kingmaker position for an individual. You are dealing with Kano, not me. It is not about me as a person; it is about our history and our culture. How does he become a kingmaker? How did the family of the other four become kingmakers? When they went and waged the Jihad, they came and risked their lives. Our families produce emirs, and those four choose the Emir. We are not superior to them. We are all parts of the Jihad, and they agreed to peace. We don’t want to have three, four, five ruling houses. We will allow you. We will choose Emir, but we will decide who becomes Emir. These are the four, and these are the rights they claim for themselves, for their contributions to the Jihad. How does somebody now take Mr. A and create a fifth kingmaker from another family? What right do you have to join those four? What did you do that gave you the right to be a kingmaker? You have different lines in the family. Then you have a law that puts in just one line. Do you know that based on the law three out of the four kingmakers that we had, based on that law, three of them were not even qualified? Because they didn’t even understand who the king-making families were, they came and took one person and said descendants of two different people.
Check the different emirates made. If you go to the ramp, there are two or three ruling houses.
Emirate creation was an assault on our system
I am making this point so you understand that this is not about me versus somebody. This was an entire assault on a system. Even if you want to do it, if it has been well-motivated, if the people of Rano, or the other people want an emirate and the state government says they want to, there is a way of doing it. You sit down, ask who the ruling families are, and look at the history. This is how you do it, this is the process, and you do it in line with our culture and tradition. The Kano emirate was not created by the Nigerian constitution. The emirate existed before Nigeria. The Kano emirate existed before the Sokoto Jihad. Even Uthman Danfodio did not create the emirate. All that happened was that some of his disciples waged a Jihad in Kano and conquered Kano, but Kano was in existence. You will never find a law in the Nigerian constitution that created the Kano emirate. So, how does a State Assembly get the constitutional right to amend something that was not created by the Constitution and does not even exist in the Constitution? The laws you will see are the emir’s appointment and deposition law. It already presumes that there is an emirate, but how do you appoint an Emir? Therefore, when he wanted to create these emirates, he could not find the laws to amend. He started by amending the emir’s appointment and devolution law, which the court struck down.
So, he had to do something out of nothing and created emirates, new emirates that never existed. Something called a Kano emirate with eight local governments has not existed in our 1000 years of history. The same thing with the Bichi emirate, none of them existed in 1000 years of history. A new governor comes and says this is an attack on our system and an attack on our collective history. We have to deal with it.
That is all that happened. It was not targeted at any individual, at any family, at any person.
Reconciling members of the royal family
The people who were beneficiaries were hurt, and it is not their fault, managing it, I think, is for all of us as citizens of Kano.
As members of the royal family, it is for all of us to look at the big picture and see that what has been done has been done to restore the glory of our emirate and to protect our history and customs.
For me, even now that I am here, only God knows how long I will be here. I can die tomorrow. Another governor can come tomorrow and say he has removed me. It doesn’t matter, but I am happy if he doesn’t touch the emirate. I am happy that I will not leave a history that it was during my time that this 1000 years of history was destroyed. I am grateful to this government and this assembly that they have corrected that for me. That we have the emirate and restore it to what it was, that insha’Allah, when I die or when I leave, the person who inherits will inherit what we have. It is about the system, not about me or any individual.
I don’t have a fundamental right to be an Emir. I am one of hundreds of princes. God chose me, and if God says I should leave, I take it that God knows better than me why I had to leave. Let us say I go to court. Let’s assume that we have a justice system where the State High Court would say “no.”
I just got a letter that says: “You are dethroned for insubordination.” I had never been queried for insubordination; the details of the insubordination were not given. I had not been given any chance to defend myself.
So, it was clear that the state and the federal governments had both decided that it was time for me to go. Let’s assume that the court said to come back. Do you think I was looking forward to working with that (Ganduje) government? In the last three years of that government, would I have been happy working with that government? You are under a governor, and the law gives him the power to be on top of you, and he has said he doesn’t like you. He has made it clear he doesn’t like you.
If I come, he will just make my life miserable. One fake story after the other, one social media insult, and in my position, I can not respond. For me, I had a happier life in Lagos with my friends, publishing my book, doing my PhD, doing my UN work, doing my Tijania work than sitting here in a constant fight with the government.
Second, look at the Emir of Gwandu. He was removed under Obasanjo. How many years now? Almost 20 years. The State High Court said he was illegally removed and returned him. There was an appeal. The Court of Appeal said he was illegally removed and should be returned. It’s at the Supreme Court, which has not yet ruled. Do I have 20 years trying to fight in court to get back to the throne? For me, I was Emir for six years, alhamdulillah. I have done what I did.
The only reason I would have gone to court was if they had removed me on an allegation that harmed my reputation. The only currency I have is my integrity. If they accused me of fraud or something, I would have had to go to court to clear my name. But they said insubordination.
The government was asked to give examples of insubordination. He said that sometimes he (Sanusi) is invited to meetings but he doesn’t come. For every well-meaning Nigerian ago saw that news, I don’t even need to defend myself because if you are going to depose an Emir and the only reason you can have is that you invite him for some meetings and he doesn’t come, then nobody takes you seriously.
Everybody knows that this was not a reason. I always felt that if it was God’s will that I would come back, I would come back. I went to court to challenge their attempt to keep me in exile and under house arrest. I didn’t go to court to challenge the removal. I didn’t even have to. It was self-evident on the face of it, that it was just a political act.
His take on the economy
I have sat on the seat of the Governor of the Central Bank, and when you are on that seat, you have a lot of information that people don’t have outside.
I’m reluctant to make a quick judgment on what the CBN is doing because I don’t have the information or the data that they have. The only thing I advise is always caution, when you are recapitalizing banks and you are raising that huge amount of capital in a narrow market, you need to be careful not to make the timelines too short because we had the same experience under Governor Charles Soludo where, in an attempt to raise N25 billion, we had a lot of bubble capital which later led to a sector crisis.
So, there is a lot of capital sitting in the banks that they could realize by simply turning that dollar into Naira and taking that profit that goes into the capital. I think that there is a conversation going on.
I do talk to the CBN governor, but I have not discussed this particular issue with him. I do have a direct conversation with the governor, the deputy governor, the finance minister, the president, and the vice president; I would rather not make public comments on these issues because of my views and the advice, I give them privately.
The only reason in the last government I was making public comments was either I was invited to give a lecture on the economy and I had to give my view or I felt that the advice given was not listened to or the path taken was too dangerous for some of us to keep quiet. History will not forgive us.
If I start talking today, they will say, “Where were you when they were doing it?” So, some of us had to speak up so that history would record that we at least spoke when we should speak. It is very easy when someone leaves office for people to come and abuse him. Many people who are talking about them today defended him when he was there. They could not talk. On the CBN or the economy, Wale Edun is my friend; these guys are my friends, so I would rather not say anything.
Democracy at 25
I think we have a democracy, I think it is a process in which we keep making progress and sometimes reversals, and we have to go back forward. My views are known. I think several fundamental structure issues need to be addressed. I will give you an example. Take the cost of governance. The constitution we have makes it impossible for us not to have a high cost of governance. You are a small country, you have a president and a vice president, and the constitution says you must have at least 37 ministers. You have 109 senators and 360 members of the House of Representatives. We have 36 states, each one with a governor, a deputy governor, commissioners, advisers, and special advisers, then, we have 774 local government areas each one with a chairman, councilor, secretary, and vice chairman.
Take the cost of that, their salaries, their allowances, their staff, and you will know that the bulk of the revenue that comes to this country will be consumed by this. We have to ask ourselves.
Controversially, I will say, “Why do you need to have elections at the local governments?” You are a federation of states and if you started from there, why don’t you just allow the state governor to appoint the administrators of the local governments, and competent civil servants to give them a project and take development there? Politicians will not like it. If the state governors were to take a director in the civil service to go and run a local government, that would be a much higher quality than many of the elected. How many states have you seen where the ruling party doesn’t get 100 percent of the seats? It is a farce.
Regionalism or parliamentary government
Even if you talk about the money, the state governors will take the money and spend it the way they want. To be honest, we need to ask why we need a bi-cameral legislature. Why do you need two houses in Abuja? Why not one? Why must we have a minister from every state even if we don’t need him? Why?
I think there are several things we can do to address those structures because at the end of the day, if you allow the state governors to run, the thing with devolution is we have 36 states, if only half of the governors are good, at least half of Nigeria has a good government. There is too much power at the center, too much of the resources. The center does not do primary education or primary healthcare, and that is where the vast majority of Nigerians are. Shouldn’t those resources come to the state? Instead of everybody going to Abuja, what is happening in Abuja? There are several issues that we need to look at. And also simple constitutionalism and federalism, just even the respect of separation of separation of power. If you take the example of what is happening in Kano today, chieftaincy matter is 100 percent a state matter.
What is the involvement of the federal government in chieftaincy matters? We have the rules, and we also have to be able to abide by the rules that we have. Politicians say we want to have an election, let them be honest enough to say, “Let us allow it to work.” Today, if you have an election, Sanusi Bature wins the election and INEC declares another person as governor. Who should we be suing? Is it his party or INEC? We should start suing INEC because INEC declares.
We should hold INEC responsible. It is their result. You start suing the electoral body that didn’t apply its rules and let INEC be defending itself in all these elections. There are certain simple things that we can do to improve our democracy.
I still have memories of Nigeria during military rule. As bad or as faulty as democracy is, I would rather have that than military rule.
For example, I was suspended by President Jonathan as CBN governor, and I was removed by Ganduje.
If it was a military government, I would have been shot. Or they could have carried me and put me under Decree 2 in prison without allowing me to go to court. Democracy is flawed but is better than what we have. There is no perfect system, but we can at least be perfect with ourselves and respect what we have agreed on a constitution and work on it.
We had a parliamentary system in the First Republic. What happened? At the end of the day, it is the humans that operate the system. People talk about regions. Initially, the regions we had in this country were North, East, and West, and then it became NorthEast and MidWest. Where did the creation called six geo-political zones come from historically? We can keep dividing and subdividing this country and thinking of ourselves, but are we really honest? Are these regions?
If you go to the Niger Delta, since when did the Itsekiri stop fighting wars against the Ijaw? Since when did we become homogeneous?
It was the Sokoto Jihad that brought us together. From the Sokoto caliphate, we became Northerners, from Northerners, we became Nigerians.
When I was in King’s College, I grew up under Yakubu Gowon in a country where Nigerians were thinking like Nigerians. What happened? Political leadership is the one that exploits regional and ethnic identities as part of the struggle for political office.
When they get there, they all sit together. If you look at the president’s cabinet, what do you have? You have everybody from every state. You have Christians, you have Muslims, you have Northerners and Southerners. Why are they not fighting one another in there? The elites are irresponsible.
I don’t think that pandering to these elites by saying the solution is going to a regional system of government. How do we go regional? In Yorubaland, there are Ijebu, Ekiti, Ijesha, Owo, and Egba since when did they become one? Right there between Ife and Modakeke, they were killing each other. It is not about that. It is not a solution. How many parts are you going to slice this country to get a homogenous country? How? With all the intermarriages and education, I am not sure that is a solution, and I think people have this dream that can only be sold by blocking out history.
We had a regional system in the First Republic. How did it end? We had a parliamentary system in the First Republic. How did it end? I am not talking about the coup; I am talking about the crisis that led to the coup. Before Nzeogu, forget Ironsi. How was the system before they came? Is there any documentary evidence that that system was fundamentally better than what we have?
We can’t shift responsibilities away from human beings, the people who are responsible for operating the system. If you go to the Senate and the House of Representatives, and you are there for 16 years and you have never passed a bill, you don’t even know that your job is to be a lawmaker.
You are going to the House of Reps because you want to buy a car and allowances. You want to be in Abuja and get contracts. How would the system ever work? If the President brings a budget and the National Assembly, which is supposed to do appropriation, says we will approve everything if you also approve X for us, how will the system work? When legislators are doing constituency projects, why should a legislator be building hospitals and schools with money from the government? If you do it personally that is fine, but under our constitution, where do legislators have this role of being entitled to being given a budget to come and build schools and hospitals that are supposed to be done by governors and ministers? Where? We have not operated the constitution that we have properly, and we don’t understand our roles. If you want to build schools, go and contest for governor or chairman of local government because if you go to the assembly, you are there to pass a law.
Whether it is parliamentary or presidential, at the end of the day, if we don’t understand what our roles are in a democracy, then it is never going to work.
How would you like to be remembered?
How would I like to be remembered? All I hope for and all I pray for is that when I leave this world when people remember me, they will not be cursing me, but they will pray for me. How that happens, I don’t know.
But my prayer is that the people of Nigeria and Kano will remember me and say, he was a good man, God have mercy on him. When you are in a leadership position, you will end up in one or two ways – everybody is cursing you, blaming you, I don’t want that. How I want to be remembered is that I would like to leave this world and have the people who I leave behind remember me and pray for me for good.