Nobel laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka, has weighed in on the dethronement of Lamido Sanusi as emir of Kano, saying Governor Abdullahi Ganduje lacks real friends who should have advised him against sacking the monarch.
Mr. Sanusi was dethroned on Monday for alleged insubordination to the Kano State Government and sent into exile in Kano.
In a statement he personally signed on Thursday, Soyinka said Governor Ganduje’s action showed he lacked friends who would have “saved him from himself!”
According to the 85-year-old, Sanusi has demonstrated greater refinement than his persecutors.
“Insofar as one can acknowledge certain valued elements in traditional institutions, the man he (Ganduje) thinks he has humiliated has demonstrated that he is one of the greatest reformers even of the feudal order. That is beyond question, a position publicly manifested in both act and pronouncements.
“By contrast, Ganduje’s conduct, apart from the innate travesty of justice in this recent move, is on a par with the repudiated colonial order, one that out-feudalized feudalism itself, and is synonymous with authoritarianism of the crudest temper.
“The record shows, in this particular instance, that it is one that embodies modernized cronyism and alienated pomp and power – never mind the cosmetic gestures such as almajiri reformation.
“It has proved one of the worst examples of a system that enables even the least deserving to exercise arbitrary, unmerited authority that beggars even the despotism of the most feudalistic traditional arrangements,” Soyinka said.
Recounting Sanusi’s tenure as Central Bank of Nigeria governor, the playwright added that the ousted monarch was “a one-man EFCC (Economic and Financial Crimes Commission) sanitizations squad in the banking system taking on the powerful corrupters of that institution.
“Unblinking, he trod on the interests of powerful beneficiaries of a worm-infested sector and, in the process, created permanent enemies.
“By contrast, confidence in immunity has catapulted his tormentor to the ranks of the most notorious public faces of the disorder that Sanusi strove to eradicate.
“Obviously, vengeance lay in wait, and he was not unaware of it. The signs were omnipresent and Sanusi acknowledged their imminence. I know this for a fact.”
On a positive note, he said, “I do have the feeling that the palace gates of the Kano emirate are not yet definitively slammed against this Islamic scholar, royal scion and seasoned economist. It is just a feeling.
“Closed and bared, or merely shut however, the doors of enlightened society remain wide open to Muhammad Sanusi.”
