Jigawa – Sai Lamido Indeed

Adagbo Onoja

29 April 2011

opinion

They were not opponents or enemies of the Sule Lamido regime. Some were, in fact, my lecturers who were concerned that my master had entered a political turbulence from which they did not see much chance of his safe landing. So, they were drawing my attention to the impending doom.

The Adamu Muazu scenario in Bauchi State in the 2007 governorship election awaited Sule Lamido, it was declared. Of course, the “student” argued to the contrary, based on the situation on the ground inside Jigawa itself but the moral authority of professors is such that no “student” can dismiss their alerts. And so, I returned to Jigawa from that particular Abuja trip apprehensive.

My apprehension stemmed from my pondering on the contradiction it would be if a governor with an uncommon performance like Lamido could be sacrificed to the gods in the field of play.

What sort of society could allow a whiff of fresh air to be easily blown away, particularly in a country where the system has failed the people for most of the time? Would it not be a conclusive proof of the “defeat of democracy” thesis? Then there was the personal dimension too in the sense that, as one of the main media faces of the Lamido regime, his defeat in the then impending election would mean that I am basically a fraudulent campaigner who was using his media skills to hoodwink people in favour of a regime which is not genuine and which the people have thrown out at the earliest opportunity. That would be such a blot on my ideological pride and integrity. So terrible a certainty would it also be since the elections were going to be supervised by a professor who taught me from the first to the fourth year in the university, including the troublesome course unit, Nigerian politics.

Within this context, I fully associated myself with all who advised Mister Governor to lie low and let the rapidly developing situation pass, especially as it was being compounded by the torrent of hate messages flying around and in which certain Northern governors in the same Goodluck Jonathan boat as Lamido were being called by one title or another in Christendom. But the governor said “No”. If saying and doing what he thinks is contextually right will cost him the second term, so be it.

At 62, he could not abandon his convictions and play to the gallery so as to win an election, he said. He followed up on the position with a big rally where he declared that he feared no one and that he would resist any attempt at making him feel guilty for securing Jigawa votes for Jonathan’s candidacy at the January 13th, 2011 PDP presidential primary.

And so, throughout the electioneering from late February to the first week of April 2011, I lived, so to say, under the shadow of the professorial alert, endlessly needling the Secretary to the Jigawa State Government, Dr. Aminu Abdullahi, in whose car I was travelling in the campaign convoy throughout. I am sure he regretted availing me the facility. Can’t you see what is happening, he would say, pointing to the cultic following that had developed around the governor.

But how could I see anything when professors who were designing the electoral models or are the authorities in these matters were talking? How could I see when the same ubiquitous merchants of power called “they” had done it to Lamido before in 1991 and 1999. Although the circumstances are totally different today from what they were in 1991 and 1999 and Lamido is, generally, not the kind of politician from whom power could slip his hands just like that, I was too conscious of the fact that the masses could sometimes vote or be made to vote against their objective interests. Not with the disinformation, for example, that a defeated presidential aspirant had vowed to relocate to Kano to supervise the fall of Lamido.

Unfortunately, it was progressively turning out that my professor was basing his fears and alerts on what he was reading in a particular newspaper and drawing his data from that “network of falsehood”. He was counting the number of times the paper reported the stoning of the governor, how many Imams the governor was reported to have sacked, how violence would soon break out in Jigawa and how much the governor was hated.

But back in Jigawa, no such things were happening. Instead of an unpopular Lamido, it was an over popular Lamido who was holding rallies up to 3am anywhere in the state without a pebble thrown by anyone against anyone; whose mass movement following had been confirmed by his renaming as “ruwa baba” via a musical number that had miraculously transformed into a state wide anthem? One had to watch the Lamido mass to know what it meant. It was not the kind of followership that an emergent challenge could successfully dislodge in a governorship contest in a terrain in which Lamido had been the most pervasive figure for the past four years.

The long and short of it is that a few days to the governorship election in Jigawa, the issue was not Lamido winning or not but the margin between him and the other parties. Strangely, the distant speculators were still at work, casting entertaining headlines of how fear had gripped Lamido when, in fact, even I could afford to laugh them off. Before that moment, I was still thinking the Lamido agonists might still pull a fast one, stage a kind of surgical strike that would leave the Lamido political machine totally incapacitated. Alas, there was no such thing.

Instead, Lamido emerged the winner with a margin no one could have imagined possible in the days immediately after the PDP presidential primary. But it is a victory we should not take for granted because it could have equally gone awry under the combined weight of the psychological, religious, media hate and political warfare aimed at punishing the political infidel called Lamido.

So, this victory is significant, both for the winner and the hundreds of campaigners, vanguardists, ideologues, staff men and women, party elders, women and children (whose excitement or otherwise at the advance of the campaign convoy was a perfect measure of the party disposition of the area) and sundry supporters.

But his victory is Jigawa’s victory. It is the victory of democracy in Nigeria. Why would this be the case? The answer is because he brags and he is arrogant and yet, the people elected him in an election considered free and fair. If the people are the salt of the earth and democracy is all about the people’s view of power, then the result of the election has annulled the charges of arrogance as far as the people are concerned.

The people have replaced the “arrogance” in the charge sheet with the more ideologically appropriate word, “self-assuredness” or “self-confidence” of the class leadership of the masses. There is nothing to apologise for that arrogance because if the leadership of the Talakawa is lily livered, it will be intimidated and swamped by the local, national and international cabals or coalitions of localism, falsehood, unproductive governance and speculators.

Secondly, Lamido’s is victory for politically informed leadership which has thus been able to elevate the question of power beyond the reductionism of infrastructure provisioning or renewal of facilities as achievements to that of a leader who is a leader because she/he acts as a philosopher, a guide for his or her society.

This aspect is the most sadly missing aspect in Nigeria as many people just found themselves as ministers, governors, chief executives etc without any idea of it beyond the pleasure of the official residence, staff car, police orderly, the allowances and opportunity to show off.

Without the conceptual ability or experience to problematise the office, they spend donkey years there with nothing to show for it socially. But mistaking the office for leadership, they begin to cause trouble in the society by demanding certain exceptions which they thought accrued to them automatically for having being former governor or MD or minister.

Finally, it is victory for the second phase of the journey or the history that is unfolding in Jigawa which will be marked with more and more bragging but also a certainly more and more reflective, humane and systematic driver. Lamido, whose battles will be informed by history and more and more consultations-from the world government (the UN) to the last individual in Jigawa.

This is going to be a case in which all is fair which supports the ‘revolution’, the highlights of which are still locked in Mallam Lamido’s mental diskette but which, based on the notes taken from the electioneering campaign tour, are bound to include a more transformative agricultural strategy and, by implication, industrialization; a certain form of Villagisation especially as it relates to rural housing that can do away with corn stock houses which the governor thinks is offensive to 21st Century existence. Already, the nucleus of Villagisation in Jigawa is there, for instance, in the policy of township roads in selected towns across the state.

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