Emir Sanusi’s quid pro quo for his friends turned fiends

EMIR of Kano Muhammadu Sanusi II on Wednesday became an involuntary, if narcissistic and self-important, humorist who embodied the age-old wisecrack that says when you put a crown on a clown, he turns the palace into a circus and reduces royalty to a comedy show.

At the 21st Memorial Lecture of Chief Gani Fawehinmi in Lagos, he provoked a burst of hearty laughter in me when he said although he endorses the soul-crushing economic reforms of his “friends” in the Tinubu administration, he wouldn’t defend those “reforms” because the people in the administration have failed to requite his friendship. You can’t make this stuff up!

“I have chosen not to speak on the economy, or reforms or to explain anything because if I explain it, it will help this government,” he said. “But I don’t want to help this government. They are my friends, but if they don’t behave like friends, I won’t behave like a friend.”

That is the literal characterization of what’s called quid pro quo, which is Latin for “this for that,” “something for something,” or a “favor for a favor.” In colloquial English, it’s called “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

When an adult of Sanusi’s learning, symbolic stature, and social status publicly, even if slyly, solicits a quid pro quo of you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours with a government whose suffocating policies he approves, the act inspires laughter because it is uncharacteristically juvenile and desperate.

Nonetheless, we need to unpack the fallacies and underlying assumptions in Sanusi’sabsurdly self-conceited  egotism.

He said, “I can give a few points here about what we are going through and how it was predictable and avoidable. But I am not going to do that.”

Well, he has actually done that multiple times in the past. In fact, he did it during the very speech where he claimed he wouldn’t. By saying, “What we are going through today is at least, in part, a necessary consequence of decades of irresponsible management. People were warning that if we continued the way that we were going, this is how we would end up, but they refused to listen,” he effectively did what exactly he said he wouldn’t do.

I can predict with almost mathematical precision what Sanusi will say tomorrow in defense of Tinubu’s brutally punishing “reforms” because Sanusi has a limited, predictable repertoire of apologetics for the neoliberal theology he has been a zealous evangelist for since at least 2011.

Shortly after Tinubu took over power, for instance, he visited the Presidential Villa and was ecstatic, even giddy, in his extolments for Tinubu’s unilateral, precipitous, and ill-advised removal of subsidies, which inaugurated the ongoing unbearable torment in the land.

His response to State House correspondents’ questions about the visit is worth reproducing at length:

“We’ve been friends since his first term as governor of Lagos State when I was a banker. And I have not seen him since the elections…. So, the first reason [for my visit] was to come and congratulate him formally.

“But also I wear many caps. I wear the cap of an economist, so I came to thank him for the steps he has taken to put this economy on course. As you know, many of the issues that we have been talking about—eh, the subsidy that has caused a hemorrhage on the fiscus, the multiple exchange rate regimes, and so on.

“These are issues that I have personally been talking about for a long time, and I am happy that on his very first day, he has addressed these issues and the markets are happy. And it is important [that] when the government does the right thing for us to give them feedback. [It’s] not always when they do the wrong thing that you complain.”

By the end of 2023 when the injurious consequences of the double whammy of subsidy removal and currency devaluation began to take shape and there were fears that mass hunger and disillusionment could spark social and communal convulsions, Sanusi came to the defense of the Tinubu administration with all he had.

“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 in a widely shared article he reportedly wrote in a WhatsApp group. “After all, Nigeria cannot even afford to pay the subsidy.”

He said the downward spiral in the economy was the direct consequence of Muhammadu Buhari’s stubborn refusal to heed his counsel to “firmly and unequivocally eliminate fuel subsidies,” not Tinubu’s removal of subsidies. It’s counterfactual logic, but Sanusi isn’t known to deploy the resources of logic, evidence, or even basic common sense when he evangelizes the false gospel of neoliberal salvation.

His solution to the ruthless decimation of the poor and the hollowing out of the middle class was for people to learn to live within their means and for economically well-off people who feel so inclined to help people who are less fortunate than they are. He freed the government of any obligation to cut waste and to tend to the needs of a badly hurting country.

“I can only plead with the people to endure the hardship, and those who have the means to help the downtrodden should do so,” he said. “I am also pleading with commoners to live according to their earnings; we must not peg our lives above our earnings in this difficult situation where people are looking for what to eat.”

Never mind that the poor are writhing in pain not because they are living above their earnings but because their little earnings have lost their worth because of the policies he advocated.

So, what more could Sanusi possibly say in defense of the cruel policies of his “friends” who have turned to his “fiends” than he has already said?

That’s why his sneaky quid-pro-quo proposition to the Tinubu administration is so irresistibly hilarious in its sterile juvenility. He has by now exhausted his entire armory of neoliberal apologetics.

He already said the “markets are happy” with Tinubu’s reforms and that the people whose happiness has been stolen to make the markets happy should learn to “endure the hardship.” He’s no longer useful to his friends.

The second assumption that needs to be unpacked stems from the first. And it is that Sanusi imagines himself to be some nonpareil persuasive genius whose unrivaled communicative aptitude can magically cause suffering Nigerians to forget their sorrows and mollify their anger.

He wants his friends in government to believe that he is withholding these astonishingly unparalleled  swaying powers because his show of friendship to them hasn’t been reciprocated.

“They don’t even have people with pedigree that can come and explain to the people what they are doing,” he said. “I am not going to help. I started by helping, but I am not going to help. Let them come and explain to Nigerians why they are pursuing the policies that they are pursuing.”

Had I not watched the video of these remarks, I would have said these rants were the vapors of someone’s febrile and depressed imagination, falsely attributed to Sanusi.

Sanusi, by these statements, is passing himself off as someone “with pedigree” who, if his friendship were requited, can “come and explain to the people” why they are starving and dying because of economic “reforms,” and the people would be calm, understanding, and accept their deaths by instalment with equanimity and even gratitude. Such delusion of grandeur! Such entertainingly comical megalomania!

But what is Sanusi’s record in this business of telling people who are dying that their death is inevitable, that the happiness of the markets is more important than the wellbeing of the people?

In 2012, he was one of the major architects and defenders of the removal of petrol and other subsidies. He clashed with human rights activists like Femi Falana (whose concerns about the cost of subsidy removal on the poor Sanusi infamously dismissed as “not an economic argument.”)

He also clashed with scholars such as the late Pius Adesanmi who worried about the implication of high petrol price on generators, which is the main source of electricity for the poor. Sanusi dismissed this concern with the false claim that generators run on diesel, not petrol.

Yet, with all his “pedigree” and unmatched persuasive powers (the kind he is supposedly withholding from his “friends”), he failed to dissuade the masses of the people from flooding the streets in the #OccupyNigeria protests.

The truth about Sanusi, as I have repeatedly pointed out, is that he is a self-loving sadist who actually derives delight from the misery of the masses. His only grouse with the Tinubu administration is that it is undermining the emirship he invested princely sums to recapture through massive financial contributions to Governor Abba Kabiru Yusuf’s election.

So, the “quo” in his wily, unstated, but nonetheless evident quid-pro-quo suggestion was for the Tinubu administration to withdraw its seeming support for former Emir Aminu Ado Bayero. Then he will transform into a propagandist to defend and justify your suffering. But what Nigerians want is a relief from their hardship, not a callous justification for why they must endure it.

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