By Farooq Kperogi

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 in order to delegitimize him.

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 human.)

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 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.

May be 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 by 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,” 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 has not 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, like you’ve just shown here.

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.

By Olumide Babalola

About 7 years ago, I engaged the highly cerebral Folabi Kuti,SAN on a discussion bordering on the technicality of libel suits especially the tricky nature of “reputation” and the potency of justification/truth as a defence. Many cases where the victims’ feelings and emotions have been severely hurt by others’ reckless publications have been lost or won on the defence of truth. Hence, once the author of an allegedly libelous statement can establish truth, then they are let off the hook and the subject of such statements are left in the cold even where such intrusive stories do not benefit the public.

In my ongoing research at the University of Portsmouth, I have discovered that it is the Nigerian Lawyers’ (understandable) widespread fixation on defamation as the only civil cause of action addressing reckless statements that has stunted the growth of other relevant viable causes of action. For context, our jurisprudence on the right to privacy remains so underdeveloped that the courts have (un)consciously declined to expound the law of privacy on some few occasions presenting such opportunities. (See Nwachukwu v Nwachukwu (2018) LPELR–44696 (SC) where the Supreme Court dismissed an alleged invasion of privacy of home as a matrimonial cause; Madu v Neboh (2001) FWLR (Pt. 52) 2271 where a tenant’s claim of invasion of home by the landlord’s reprehensible removal of his roof was squarely dismissed as a tenancy matter etc.

Privacy inherently protects four interests to wit: (a) intrusion upon seclusion (b) appropriation of name or likeness (c) publication of embarrassing private facts (d) publicity in a false light, but the Nigerian judiciary has only had the opportunity to pronounce on two. Publication of embarrassing facts and false lights have never (to my knowledge) been introduced to the Nigerian courts until last year when my Firm attempted altering the status quo by filing some suits on invasion of privacy by publicity in a false light. This privacy interest is violated when a defendant publishes a statement which: (a.) Gives the plaintiff an unwanted publicity

(b.) The publicity is reckless and false (c.) A reasonable person will find it offensive (d.) injurious to self-respect, dignity and individual integrity. Expectedly, two of those suits were dismissed by the same judge who (understandably) expressed bewilderment at the “strange” cause of action thus:

“I do not understand how the applicant and her counsel were able to arrive at the action filed and the arguments canvassed in support of the action. In any event, the action is totally misconceived, and it is lacking in merit and substance…”

There are no existing Nigerian precedents, hence it will take more than the usual “My Lord, it is trite law” arguments to convince a court of first instance to identify such an unused cause of action under the law of privacy given the terse provision of section 37 of the Constitution. Suffice to add that we have gone ahead to appeal the two decisions and we have already filed our appellant’s brief in one of them.

Happily, in Suit No. LD/14893MFHR/2023 between Adewale v Olamilekan, judgment was delivered on the 2nd day of July 2024 when Justice O. Sule-Amzat of the High Court of Lagos State historically ruled that:

“The right to privacy protects an indivudual from the invasion of his/her privacy by anyone., it protects an individual from the public disclosure of embarrassing facts and it also prevents the appropriation of an individual’s name or likeness for commercial use. The kernel of the provision of section 37 is in my considered view, that the privacy of a citizen of Nigeria shall not be violated. It can be said to mean the right to be free from public attention or the right not to have others intrude into one’s private space uninvited or without one’s approval. It means to be able to stay away or apart from others without observation or intrusion.”

In the case, a blogger published a false story about a movie actress’s relationship using her name and and picture. Instead of suing for defamation, we opted for invasion of privacy by publicity in a false light and thereby invited the court to make the pronouncement above.

Conclusion

This decision (to the best of my knowledge) represents Nigerian court’s first identification of publication of embarrasing facts as a form of invasion  of privacy. It is hoped that such a progressive decision forms the basis for the further development of our privacy jurisprudence both by lawyers and the judex.

The trauma of a faltering economy on many, resulting in suicides and dramatic protests, finally indicates our crisis of now is an existential one. Can politics now give way to truth and let thinking take front row in how we face our major policy challenge of the moment.

The desperation of removing duties on some food imports and turning to imports to feed the people is an approach-avoidance conflict that needs to be managed carefully lest it spell doom for the future. Why?

Right now things are as bad as we have been pointing to and bad enough for a rush to food imports which may be an imperative of reality but is quite capable of damaging future capacity to produce and grow the economy.

Think of this. What killed the Cocoa, Palm produce and Groundnut exports in which Nigeria led the world at Independence? Poor trade policy manifested in exchange rates made Naira income for cash crop farmers in the early 1980s unappealing.

So the people left the farms to become messengers in NNPC and construction workers. When oil price volatility meant construction companies could not be paid on time or paid at all they retrenched workers. These laborers who were former farmers could not return to the farms. That’s how we became a monoculture economy. Academic analysis of that would say Dutch disease came with those farmers moving to the then more attractive none-tradable goods sector like construction.

Other sectors suffered atrophy and we became dependent on just Oil revenues. By the way Indonesia managed similar circumstances differently back then and benefitted from being more sensible.

For several years the fear of herdsmen has kept many from going to farm. Even as they are losing their farming skills as a result of this long lay off we begin to consume the drug of food importation when we lack the foreign currency to pay for the imports. We will borrow to buy imported food. So we not only risk unsustainable food provision strategy but the further compounding of our looming debt crisis.

As the current account deficit grows with our importing more and not earning foreign currency we become more vulnerable to currency speculators and the Naira will go the way of the Zim dollar, Ask Zimbabweans. Or when George Soros went after Malaysian Ringit (RM) in 1997. So do we let our people starve because the famine we predicted is now real?

I do not write as a theorist or armchair critic but as an actual player.

I have lost whole farm output three times over the last decade to herders in Delta State. On one occasion the farm which bloomed such that the Uduaghan government PR documentary to showcase agriculture, by Lola Alakija, filmed it, was burnt by the herders after feeding their cattle fat. I took my losses with no insurance and moved from where Obasanjo farms now got allocated to a location around my hometown. Last year I sold Tomatoes and other vegetables as I will this year. Many who suffered loss as I did then did not try again.

I followed the politics of the strategic grains reserve and knew they were a joke and shared same with Prof. Murtala Sagagi who was assisting then Minister of Agriculture Sani Nanono. The bright economist was so frustrated, he quit the Advisor job.

I tried a market response to what was a beckoning food, agricultural export and value chain development from our factor endowments crises by designing an integrated produce city.

The concept was to create an aggregation point where produce from several states could arrive into this Commodities Exchange with a preservation park that can be an alternative strategic reserve of the type they call licenced Warehouses in Turkey. The central market point there being the wholesale produce market that aggregates the produce from these farmers saving them much of the 60 percent post harvest loss of their effort. Added to the concept was an Industrial park where some added value to the produce could take place. That rounded up the IPC value intervention. But corruption meant we were proceeding from our savings as reckless disbursement of monies to grow the sector went to cronies. Millions of Naira in business plans failed to produce the loans or development support agency grants.

I knew this day of food shortages was coming and hoped my commercial response could add social value but alas the day had come before our efforts got the needed traction. I can either live in the selfish mode that I can at least feed myself from my farm or be a citizen and broach the truth of the challenge I saw from afar.

So how do we solve the famine crisis that confronts us now without damaging the future?

In January I had suggested we create local armies, Forest Rangers to police fertile areas where legumes that are harvested in three months would be grown as a national emergency. The rangers would provide assurance of safety to farmers who will receive inputs as loans with incentives so that by now harvesting would be taking place.

In addition to this support to local farmers I proposed an Operation Feed the Nation (OFN) type scheme where young graduate farmers would get one hectare each with input loans and a farm management company provide extension support with training in new farm methods.

Had good judgment moved us in this direction we could have averted the emerging emergency. If we throw our gates wide open to imports now it will take our Asian friends little time to dump produce in a way that we may never recover.

Now that our hardness of hearing has brought us here the option may be to have a controlled opening up to ease the pressure and move rapidly to sensible industrial policy to stimulate agriculture for food security and the value added exports in value chains in which we aim to be dominant players.

In all this the biggest problem is corruption.

In a soon to to published State of the Motherland report the new tribe collating work of its policy cohort, health care, infrastructure, public accountability and Ubuntu cohorts deepens the conversation on how to deal with the grandmother of cripplers of progress in Nigeria, corruption. Prescriptions there may include how to dismantle and rework our most corrupt institutions, the Customs Service, the FIRS, and the Police. It will contain insights into how corruption compounds the food crisis.

Consider how many food and produce export companies are filing for bankruptcy because of Customs activities at the ports; or how much is lost in a trailer bringing food from the Manila to Lagos because of police checkpoints and you see how values punish us as a people. Until we admit that values shape human progress and that we are in a collapse of culture we may journey from one panic policy to another as we increase poverty and deepen misery.

Patrick Okedinachi Utomi, Political Economist and Professor at the Lagos Business School is servant of the servants of the Chiefs of the New Tribe.