How are the mighty fallen!
My initial reaction to this shock announcement is summarised in in one word: Perfidy !
Perfidy, committed by the powers that be.
Since his coronation as His Holiness the Emir of Kano, we have grown to like, respect, admire, appreciate and venerate both the dignity of the office and the office-holder Muhammadu Sanusi II as the second most important Muslim Leader in Nigeria, second only to the Sultan of Sokoto
My initial reaction was, who has the power to "dethrone" the Emir of Kano"?
Who has arrogated to himself/ herself/ themselves that kind of power?
Indeed, my first reaction was la hawla wala quwwata illa billah !
Because the idea of "dethroning" His Highness the Emir of Kano was as patently absurd as reading in the UK Guardian on the 1st of April (April Fool's Day) or any other day in the year, God forbid, that some drunken Nigerian governor, sailor, mad president or incompetent prime minister, some humbug like Robert Mugabe in drag disguise or reeling in a drunken stupor, still bristling with illusions of grandeur and showing the last signs of his Napoleonic complex, a resurrected His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular - in his tepid imagination had announced that he had just "dethroned" Her Majesty Queen Elisabeth II or the Archbishop of Canterbury or indeed His Holiness Pope Francis 1, on some spurious, nonsense, personal, whimsical grounds.
The dethronement of the Emir of Kano, now a fait accompli is a tragedy of more than Shakespearean proportions and the one particular fault – if indeed in that position he had any, must have been the perception among the sleepy, go-slow arch-conservative intelligentsia who obviously bear him malice because they see in him a modernist - and the danger was very clearly written – was writ large, and that's what we all read - as reported - Muhammadu Sanusi II's far-ranging comments when " he moderated a paper titled 'The role of universities in nation-building' presented by Dr Usman Bugaji at the maiden convocation of the Federal University, Gusau " at which the Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido said , " Polygamy is causing poverty and backwardness in the Muslim North"
No doubt, this critique coming from the Emir, must have drawn some bad blood. His advocacy that education is the sine qua non for the much-needed accelerated development of the mostly Muslim North, has obviously not further endeared him to the power brokers up there.
The arch-Muslim conservatives and traditionalist must have seen the Emir's critique of wanton polygamy as an attack on the cherished right of a man to have more than one wife, a very important Islamic value. From that point on and even before that when he said that the unprotected should have the right to protect themselves against Boko Haram we must assume that from that point on he must have fallen foul of some of the more traditional powers that be. The last straw could have been his allegedly supporting a PDP politician when it's Buhari's APC that is in power – and even before that, as Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, the-powers-that-be didn't like it when he raised the alarm that $ 20 Billion was missing from the state treasury.
And now we see the result, the cumulative result of all this catching up with him finally: his unceremonious dethronement.
May Allah subhanahu wa ta'alaI reward for all the good that he has done, forgive him his faults and grant him more sabr and even more iman. May the Almighty's continued guidance and protection, Insha'Allah, as he continues along the honourable path of ihdinas siraatal mustaqeem
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