11th March, 2020
Senior lawyer and rights activist Mike Ozekhome said Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II was dethroned because he committed a ‘a mortal sin’, as he consistently railed against the archaic style of governance of the northern elite.
Ozekhome said the northern elite despite the criticisms of Sanusi, have continued their obnoxious policies of repression, retrogression, subjugation, oppression and marginalisation of the vast majority of their people.
In an article, in which Ozekhome examined the constitutionality and legality of both the removal and the banishment of the emir, Ozekhome said he saw the Emir’s fall coming and he had forewarned about the possibility.
Ozekhome said he was not surprised that Governor Abdullahi Ganduje dethroned the Emir.
“I saw it coming and I had said so in an earlier write-up, where I had condemned the balkanisation of the centuries-long revered Kano Emirate into four segmented Emirates out of political exigency and crass opportunism by a rampaging Governor. After all, a fruit does not fall far away from the mother-tree.
“Governor Ganduje is merely following the examples in acts of impunity and lawlessness he learnt from the Federal government at the centre”, he said.
“The reasons the Emir came under the hammer are quite simple and very well known. Emir Sanusi has continuously preached modernity as against the archaic style of governance of the Northern elites who have continued their obnoxious policies of repression, retrogression, subjugation, oppression and marginalisation of the vast majority of their people.
“He has spoken vehemently against the Almajiri system that turns children and the youths unto the streets in their thousands as able-bodied beggars.
“He has unrepentantly frowned at the girl-child marriage and labour. He has, now and again, lampooned the Northern elites for inflicting untold hardship on the people of the North.
“He has courageously preached the dire necessity for education as a sure liberator of his people from the doldrums of ignorance and wretchedness.
“The elites, no doubt, gaped, with awe and shock, at this fire-eating, no-nonsense intellectual Emir, whom they believed was hiding under his royal turban and robes to de-robe the Northern elites of their mystical, but firm, grip on power and its intoxicating effect as an aphrodisiac.
“They believed Emir Sanusi was opening up their smelly flanks to the outside world, to be laughed at, to be scorned, to be derided, and to be opened to vitriolic attack by the hoi-polloi whose eyes may be opened to begin to question their years of enslavement and impoverishment.
“This is the “mortal sin” committed by Emir Sanusi. And lo and behold, they resolved, through the instrumentality of Governor Ganduje, that Emir Sanusi must be stopped dead on the tracks before he committed more havoc”.