Demolishing Abba Yusuf

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The Kano State governor, Mr. Abba Kabir Yusuf, is having himself a ball at the moment undoing virtually everything his predecessor, Dr. Abdullahi Ganduje, did. In the early hours of Wednesday this week, Mr. Yusuf brought down the N160 million roundabout built by Ganduje in 2017 and located close to the Kano Government House. Apparently, Mr. Yusuf, an engineer, didn’t want to leave anything to chance; he just had to be there to engineer the destruction. Prior to the Wednesday episode, His Excellency had demolished shops built by the fence of the Sani Abacha Stadium at Kofar Mata, GSS Kofar Nasarawa and buildings by GGSS Dukawuya, Goron Dutse. Three people were rescued critically injured and a body was found buried under the rubble of Daula Hotel, a structure that Yusuf yanked off in his bid to bring “sanity” to the city.”

The outrage that followed Yusuf’s wayward Wednesday was severe, and so the Secretary to the State Government, Abdullahi Baffa, cocked his gun. The monument, he averred, was pulled down because it carried a Christian symbol. Hear him: “The design in the roundabout is blocking road users’ front view because of its size. Secondly, if you use a drone shot of the aerial view of the monument (sic), you will see a sign of a cross and in Kano we are 99.9 per cent if not 100 per cent Muslims (and) you cannot put a cross sign in the front of a Government House.”

Actually, Yusuf’s vendetta did not begin on May 29. Prior to his inauguration, he had invented the illegal Office of the Governor-Elect and threatened fire and brimstone. And on May 29, with the dictator installed in the office he could not wait to occupy, darkness descended upon Kano in the form of a red cap capping off buffoonery.

If, per the literary critic Benedict Ibitokun, all criticism is self-criticism, then Yusuf’s demolition jamboree is nothing but the demolition of himself, the unmasking of his troubled persona. Yusuf exults in his erosion of Ganduje’s influence, but it is his image that he is really destroying in the eyes of decent people. Mr. Yusuf does not fool me with his crusading rhetoric: I happen to have studied a bit of history and literature and he strikes me as a dangerous and destructive individual on a vendetta mission. And so, like General Sam does in Achebe’s Anthills, he preaches a senseless sermon about “the security of the state” while needlessly badmouthing and destroying the projects of his predecessor in a state where, going by electoral figures, the opposition is just as plenteous as his Kwankwassiya horde. On assuming office, Yusuf declared war on his predecessor knowing the proclivity of political pirates to profit from chaos. The binary dichotomy that Yusuf is trying to set up between Ganduje and himself is false; you cannot persuade me that a man on a vendetta mission has anything of value for anyone. Yusuf can rage and rant all he wants; it changes nothing.

Nigeria’s political class is so crass. The moment an individual is pronounced governor-elect, he starts seeing himself as the man in charge, issuing proclamations and edicts. The real governor cannot do anything else without his approval, or he will make a great show of reversing the action(s) once in charge. If this ugly trend continues, a governor is going to clamp a governor-elect in jail very soon. This is a clime where a power-drunk governor has just revoked the licence of a university owned by his state, and where a governor personally drove a bulldozer and brought down the residence of his political rival.Many of the country’s governors act like drunken sailors.

It is clear that Yusuf has no sense of decency, and certainly no sense of history. His project in his first days in office is to destroy anything Ganduje. I suppose he will also uproot the iconic bridges Ganduje built. Now, Ganduje was captured on tape stuffing dollars in his robe and I do not hold him aloft as a model of decency. But as a writer I always strive to give Jack his jacket and I must declare that Ganduje had great infrastructure projects. Yusuf, with his blind, tyrannical, religiously insensitive and doctrinaire philosophy that consists in mobilizing young, deprived citizens for elections and parading red caps as the face of civilization, is going to set Kano on fire in his blind rage.

Folks, these individuals are not leaders by any stretch of the imagination. They do not care if the house collapses on people as long as they can feed their depraved cravings. They seek more power amid enormous power. They are adherents of Arthur Nzeribe’s theory about the essence of politics being the pursuit of power. Their mentality is warped, reflecting their background of bigotry.

Here I have to laugh; what Abba thinks to be a sign of the cross is not one at all. From the Cross perspective, it is a design that is so out of shape as to invite the strictest of censure. But if the sign of the Cross, a tiny dot on the wall, was the problem, then why not wipe it off instead of demolishing the entire structure that cost a fortune to put up? And is Abba suggesting that the Christians in Kano State, even if they are only 10 in number, cannot have a representation in public monuments? If so, why would anyone take issue with Nyesom Wike describing Rivers State as a Christian state? Wike is no more Christian than a hound, but the point is that he shares the same destructive and despotic attributes as Abba.

It is time we let these charlatans know that it was time and chance that gave them power: they are not more intelligent, and certainly not more educated, than the rest of us. They are mere products of Nigeria’s warped leadership recruitment process, a fitting symbol of our national miasma. If Nigeria of today had half the quality of a decent clime, most of these guys would be nothing more than shoe-shiners and hewers of wood. They are spectacularly incompetent, eerily incoherent, ideologically vacuous and morally crippled. But surrounded by wealth not backed up by a history of hard work, a rich supply of women and wine, and fawning aides, they talk like lunatics and act like demons. They demolish houses to inflict pain on their opponents. Yusuf acts like his predecessor was Lucifer and he is Kano’s Rescue Angel but available evidence portrays him as a mistake.

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