Sanusi Lamido Sanusi on Zoning

DIALOGUES WITH NIGERIA By Akin Osuntokun

By Nigerian standards, Northern Nigerian in particular, they don’t come more credible and enlightened as the 14th Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi. He exemplifies the elite self-preservation obligation of enlightened self interest. I admit that this is a problematic endorsement given the controversy he engendered by the less than candid role he played in setting up former President Goodluck Jonathan for failure at the general elections of 2015. If at all there was any validity to his damaging allegation of the wherewithal of a missing 20billion dollars under Jonathan, it was a grossly exaggerated accusation. Back in the day, we were buddies and he was one of seven friends who penned essays in my honour to commemorate the occasion of my fortieth birthday many years ago. Others were Odia Ofeimum, Kayode Samuel, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Adebayo Williams, Sina Odugbemi, Reuben Abati and the late Dotun Oni. The essays supplemented a compilation of selected articles from my Sunday column (which coincided with the heydays of the Sani Abacha dictatorship from 1996-1998) and the combination was published under the title ‘Beyond Abacha: Companion Essays’.

Not long after he took office as Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria the town was agog with speculations that he was on course to become the Emir of Kano whenever the throne became vacant. I told him that I dismissed such speculations on the grounds I couldn’t reconcile his restless and rebellious personality with such a sedate, sedentary and conservative occupation. To my utmost surprise he cut me short and protested ‘Iam o, I’am o’. If he was indeed interested, I couldn’t see anyone stopping him and so it transpired. He went on to inherit the throne and spent his entire reign proving my point he was not cut out for the restraint and ramparts of the theocratic monarchy. He replicated the reformist and confrontational legacy of his grandfather and as it was with the former so it became with the grandson. It was a jinx foretold. The qualitative difference between the experience of grandfather and grandson was the difference between the quality of Sir Ahmadu Bello as Premier of the Northern Region and that of Ganduje as Governor of Kano State. By the logic of deduction, to be removed from office by a public servant of Ganduje’s description is akin to a bestowal of a badge of honour.

If anyone qualifies as the conscience of the North today, Sanusi will rank among the top contenders but he got it wrong on the controversy over zoning when he argued that “I have always objected to this idea that we should focus on where the president comes from. We have got southern governors saying we want the presidency and some northern governors saying that they want it in the north. Have you noticed that nobody has given the name of what they want?

“This whole thing is to corner the presidency to one part of the country and the big masquerade will come out. And that is why at the end of the exercise, you end up as Nigeria… presented with two useless candidates. Those who want to be president should show their face either from the north or the south.

“Meanwhile, we have before us very serious issues. Why are we not talking about these issues?

“Give me a president from any part of the country who can deliver and we should vote for him. He is not taking the presidency to his home town.”

Well, unless Kingsley Moghalu, Oby Ezekwesili and Pat Utomi (to mention a few) are not worthy of mention. No one can claim there are no names associated with presidential aspiration going forward.

In the illumination of my lights, it is not zoning that tends to “produce two useless candidates” for Nigeria, it is the practice of Nigerian democracy that does-regardless of zoning. Without prejudice to the commendable leadership credentials and legacy of the first elected chief executive of Nigeria, Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa, it is no gainsaying that he was not in the league of his co-contestants for the same office namely Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe. Victor Ferkiss (in his scholarly review of the Nigerian classic- Background to Nigerian Nationalism by James Coleman) noted that “The central government will be headed not by Azikiwe or Awolowo, the leaders of its two most modernised and politically adept tribal-regional factions, but by a Moslem from the politically less-developed but more heavily populated North, who will preside over an interparty coalition. Nigeria presents an almost classic case of the establishment of a state prior to the existence of a real nation”.

The transition to the Second Republic and the 1979 presidential election was presaged by the instructive observation of the then military head of state, General Olusegun Obasanjo, that the best candidate may not win. He was saying nothing if he was not drawing a comparison among the presidential candidates. Again, without prejudice to the tolerant, genial and accommodating leadership quality of Alhaji Shehu Shagari, he was no match for the acknowledged leadership competence and experience of Awolowo and Azikiwe, yet he was elected President. Shagari did not even aspire to become President, all he wanted was to be elected a Senator but was railroaded to seeking the presidency for reasons that had nothing to do with optimal leadership quality.

On the contrary, when the logic of compensation determined the zoning of the Nigerian Presidency to the South-west, the two candidates that emerged, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo and Chief Olu Falae, could not by any stretch of imagination, be cited as ‘two useless candidates’. In the 2007 presidential election when the notion of zoning repeated itself, could anyone have regarded Alhaji Umaru Yar’Adua and General Muhammadu Buhari (not the latter day Buhari) as two useless candidates? Four years later, it was not zoning that resulted in the candidacies of President Goodluck Jonathan, Nuhu Ribadu, Muhammadu Buhari and Abubakar Shekarau. And whatever shortcomings that resulted from the outcome of the election, it cannot be attributed to zoning. The same inference can be made of the 2015 presidential election which essentially pitted Jonathan against Buhari. In the 2019 presidential election cycle and beyond the two dominant presidential candidates, Muhammadu Buhari and Atiku Abubakar, there was a legion of lesser known but superior candidates from both the North and South yet the Nigerian electorate of its own volition restricted its choice to Buhari and Abubakar. From this literature review of presidential elections since the independence of Nigeria there is no basis for the thesis of Sanusi that zoning, by itself, equals two useless candidates or the choice between the rock and the hard place.

At the universal and theoretical level, democracy does not offer the promise of good candidates. What it offers is participation and inclusion and that is why it is called representative democracy. Were democracy to be a guarantee for good governance and leadership, Donald Trump would never have emerged the President of the United States with a distinct possibility of being elected again in 2024. In recognition of its dysfunctional propensities, democracy is figuratively cited as the worst form of government to which no better alternative has been found. Scientifically, democracy assumes the worst case scenario in order to be rendered foolproof against the possibility of terrible end products. Therefore you do not proceed from the premise that good people like Barack Obama would be elected president. You proceed from the contrary assumption that bad people like Trump may be elected hence the need to anticipate and rein in such leaders with structural and institutional constraints like separation of powers and the principle of checks and balances. In the normal run of events the likelihood is that you are going to end up with both good and bad presidents. If you have a good one, all well and good, but if you make a bad call, you would have preempted and limit the capacity of a rogue and incompetent leader to damage society. This is why the constitution and the rules of the road are prerequisites that are prior to political leadership.

Inability to discern the nexus between the constitution and good/bad leadership has resulted in the standard refrain amongst Nigerians that the problem of Nigeria is the lack of good leadership simplicita. Which then begs the question of whether it is within our capacity to routinely ensure the emergence of good leadership. If we cannot, then rationality demands that we insure ourselves against bad leadership when it does emerge with containment strategies. This is the logic of Nigerians who today canvass and campaign that constitutional review and what is called restructuring (restoration of federalism) be prioritised over the next election (that may or may not produce the desired leadership). If the founding fathers of Nigeria were not mindless, there must be a reason why they resolved on federalism as the grand strategy for the attainment of the ultimate objective of Nigerian nationhood. The corollary is that the contravention of this grand strategy is bound to result in ruinous consequences of the likes that presently plague Nigeria. Indeed there would have been little or no need for the vexed issue of zoning the presidency were there an adherence to federalism in the first place. Zoning is a consequence of over-centralisation of power at the centre and a derivative of the elevation of the politics of consumption over the politics of development and self-sustenance. It is a practical stop gap measure pending the return to decentralisation.

A Decadent Nigerian Senate

“You have a simple issue of electronic transmission of results which is designed to make the electoral process fairer and you have people saying that they do not want it, shamelessly announcing to the country that they want to rig” – Sanusi Lamido Sanusi.

The Nigerian Senate confirmed its status as belonging in the hall of infamy when it voted against the electronic transmission of election results a while ago. There is no better interpretation of their sordid and profane behaviour than “shamelessly announcing to the world that they want to rig”. Their recent decision to reverse course on this primitive lapse should, in no way, detract from the conclusion it is only a political and social misfit who would contemplate this kind of rogue intervention in the first place. What a shame.