Imagine the taciturn Emir Ado Bayero, as voluble as Omoyele Sowore, bristling, swashbuckling and hell-raising?

That was the royal peculiar mess that was Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II! It was doom foretold. Yet, completely shattering, when it came!

The tragic fate of Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the newly deposed Muhammadu Sanusi II, 14th Emir of Kano, tracks back to two of history’s most famous quips.

One, by George Santayana, the Harvard philosopher, famous for sundry aphorisms: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” — often with tragic consequences.

That bunches, in a historical gargoyle, the deposition of Emir Sir Muhammadu Sanusi I, KBE, (December 1953 – April 1963) and grandson, Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II (8 June 2014 – 9 March 2020).

Sanusi II obviously didn’t remember the slip, or learn from the fall, of Sanusi I. So, he too cropped Grandpa’s plague: avoidable deposition?

The second, by Karl Marx, in his famous essay, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, written between December 1851 and March 1852, in which he quipped: history repeats itself, “the first as tragedy; then as farce.”

Now that the shattering fall of Sanusi II is tragic encore of the royal collapse of Sanusi I, any chance of a future Sanusi III?

Indeed, grandpa lasted 10 years; grandson, barely six. Would a Sanusi III somewhat come to redeem the Sanusi Kano lineage, or just confirm its farce, while their Bayero royal cousins thrive?

Now, the two tragedies of the two Sanusis have rather eerie parallels.

Sanusi I shared combative visibility with Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sokoto blue blood, 1st Republic Premier of the North and foremost political figure of that region, surpassing even Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. He burnt his fingers.

Sanusi II, in preening and combative feuding, nettled Kano Governor, Abdullahi Ganduje. But Ganduje was only a synecdoche for the northern conservative order, or even the British-rigged pristine Nigerian state. Both share common DNA with the North’s feudal system, prime jewel of the British indirect rule in colonial Nigeria.

Now, the ex-Emir ought to be a tested and trusted royal keeper of that heritage, warts and all. But a fatal delusion turned him its tormentor-in-chief. He burnt his throne!

The Sar’dauna despatched Sanusi I under the smoke of alleged financial incontinence, from the findings of the 1963 David Muffet inquiry into the alleged seedy finances of the Kano Emirate Council, even if everyone knew the real cause was the no love lost between the assertive Premier and the colourful Emir.

Governor Ganduje, without much ado, despatched Sanusi II for alleged serial “insubordination”; and for profaning sacred traditional northern ethos. In a grand historical deja vu, the Kano government further forages for alleged sleaze, worth N3.4 billion via a parliamentary probe, for the final nail, on Sanusi II’s royal coffin.

Still, everyone knows there was no love lost between the flamboyant Fulani Emir and the unforgiving Hausa governor.

The only blip perhaps, in the running tragic parallel, is the differing federal temper, then in Lagos, now in Abuja, towards the Sanusi depositions.

Prime Minister Balewa cautioned Premier Bello not to move against Sanusi I, for Kano might burn — an advice the premier spurned.

For taciturn Muhammadu Buhari, it would appear presidential ambivalence: if he didn’t push the Kano governor to depose the gadfly Emir, nothing suggests he cautioned him against it. That fatal ambivalence further cooked the Sanusi II goose.

In both depositions, 57 years apart, Kano didn’t burn. It appears to just have moved on, calmly watching the high-octane emirate drama, of sudden dethronement and instant enthronement.

Indeed in the current case, if anywhere did “burn”, it was hustling politicians seeking capital, ever excitable southern busybodies, going ga-ga over a northern problem via skewed southern lens, and the southern conventional media, awash with subversive dirges, but only to pummel northern feudalism, as the bane — and pain — of modern Nigeria.

Still, not a few have knocked the president for alleged culpable complicity, if not in the Sanusi dethronement, then in his arrest and banishment to Loko and Awe in Nasarawa State, which a court has since declared illegal, null and void.

On this score, however, the sympathy orchestra missed the point. The president exercised his discretion however he wished. But the real culprit is the Sanusi hubris, in which frothing brilliance, and colourful crowing to rub it in, hardly equated any wisdom.

You don’t drench yourself with petrol, knowing some fellas are hell bent on roasting you, do you? But then, that was the long and short of Sanusi II’s royal wisdom!

Read Also: Sanusi dethronement: Count me out, says Malami
Still, on the score of citizen rights, Muhammadu Sanusi II looks set to escape the fate of Muhammadu Sanusi I, in terms of life-long banishment to internal Siberia, for biting the feudal finger that fed him. That appears good progress in Nigeria’s eternal ding-dong between democracy and feudalism.

Still, there is a limit to which folks, even SANs mouthing intimidating legal jargons, can push on that lane. The Nigerian Constitution is democratic and libertarian. But its sociology is feudal — pristine or cultivated — and constricting.

Nigeria is a Federal Republic. But its land space, East, North or West, is strewn with feudal potentates, pushing their democratic rights to reign without question, sell ancestral lands without query, and levy handsome fees for chieftaincy titles for the grovelling elite, in a fit of feudal parasitism.

So, a republican Nigerian state is constrained to cohabit with this thriving feudalism, pleading the hegemony of culture and the legitimacy of tradition. It is this delicate cohabitation that Sanusi I and II tried to rupture, with fatal consequences.

So, our legal heavyweights had better be wary of pushing, too hard, this rights agenda; lest another crazy set of Nigerian citizens charge at these same courts to accuse the government of conspiring with the feudal elite to betray — and criminally too — the republican ethos of the Nigerian Constitution!

A citizen that savoured the sweet gravy of feudal pleasure should stoically bear its bitter torture if things turn awry, shouldn’t he? Instead of dead-panning as an injured, common republican citizen?

That famous legal-speak nails it: he who comes to equity must come with clean hands!

But away from feudal hubris and royal folly, Muhammadu Sanusi, now twice deposed, and maybe risking putative banishment from the Kano throne as some northern voices are suggesting, remains a potent voice, haunting the North for sweeping reforms.

Colourful Grandfather, Muhammadu Sanusi I, romped as unfazed local Caliph, of the Sunni reformed Tijaniyya order of Senegalese Ibrahim Niass, with spiritual fount at Kaolack, Senegal, against the religious sensitivity of the Sar’dauna, more in tune with the Sultan of Sokoto-led, and more conservative, Sunni Khadiriyya.

Flamboyant Grandson, Muhammadu Sanusi II, frothing brilliance, cutting intellect and rousing gift of the gab et al, ripped, without mercy, at the laggardness of the North, calling for urgent and sweeping reforms — or else …

Both earned humiliating deposition for their royal audacity. So, twice in 57 years, the messenger is unhorsed. But is the message unhinged?

Muhammadu Sanusi versus the North — who finally blinks? That nestles in the womb of time!

By Olakunle Abimbola