Even though President Muhammadu Buhari has denied any role in the ordeal of former Kano Emir Muhammadu Sanusi, stakeholders are unrelenting in pointing out that he should stop his security operatives from being used to detain the deposed traditional ruler.
Besides, Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, yesterday rated the protagonist and antagonist in the Kano royal crisis. In an article, ‘For Whom The Gates Open Wide’, Soyinka said the conduct of Kano State Governor Umar Ganduje, “apart from the innate travesty of justice in this recent move, is on a par with the repudiated colonial order, one that out-feudalised feudalism itself, and is synonymous with authoritarianism of the crudest temper.” He noted that Ganduje’s action “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.”
He describes Ganduje as a protagonist of a ‘progressive’ order that enjoys near-absolute immunity, thus, “even when it has disgraced its status and violated its oath of office, caught literally with its pants down in open defecation, it can still pretend to act in the interest of progress, modernity and public well being. Such are the ironies raised by the purported dethronement of the Emir of Kano, Mohammed Sanusi, with one stroke of a pen!”
On the contrary, Soyinka praised the strides of the former emir. He writes: “Emir Sanusi was a one-man EFCC sanitisations 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.”
Soyinka said he did not have the feeling that the palace gates of the Kano emirate had been “definitively slammed against this Islamic scholar, royal scion and seasoned economist. It is just a feeling. Closed and barred, or merely shut however, the doors of enlightened society remain wide open to Muhammad Sanusi.”
Source: Guardian Newspaper.
