Oracle Lamido Sanusi, the former Emir of Kano

. Gernot Rohr

It’s a Nigerian syndrome. A title-craving disease. A subliminal do-you-know-who-I-am mentality that accompanies even the meekest around and leaves him one provocation away from becoming an agbero.

The Nigerian big man’s penchant for perceiving slight or injury once his title is omitted in public and the recourse to petulance or vengeance to effect a correction.

But frankly, nobody expected this from Lamido Sanusi, the Change Agent.

Lamido Sanusi was once the Emir of Kano. He was dethroned 18 months ago. A new Emir of Kano has since been appointed. Yet, Sanusi won’t sit still and accept the fact that since he isn’t the current Emir of Kano then he is a former Emir. We can allow Sanusi to continue pretending he was once a sovereign. So that he can hang onto “once a sovereign always a sovereign.” That might help him. But Emirs of today are not sovereigns.

They are well-decorated community organisers of some historical significance. If Lamido Sanusi were a sovereign, an emperor of the old Kano Empire, the consequences of any dethronement would have been different—dungeon, exile or death. Not this resurgent peacocking that is finicky about vanity and expired protocols.

Well, Sanusi could say he has been exiled from Kano to Abuja, Kaduna and Lagos and left psychologically severely wounded.

Then, let him know that even real sovereigns, once dethroned, are not owed any honours, let alone the modern-day antiquities called traditional rulers in a multiparty democracy, if deposed.

In Nigeria, society infests everyone with the warts of the brute. The acculturation of the ogboju phenomenon. So, the creme de la creme sometimes tastes like the crusts from the bottom.

At that ceremony in Kaduna, the man who addressed Sanusi as “former Emir of Kano” couldn’t have described him more reverently and correctly. So when Sanusi leapt up and threw a fit, he betrayed indignation, an unhealthy grudge.

Though commoners like me can’t know how it feels to be a dethroned emir, Sanusi should mellow out. When Sanusi, the democrat, the advocate of integrity in governance, informed the crowd through a sly innuendo that the man’s sin would imminently cost him his position as Chief of Staff to the Kaduna State governor, many shook their heads in bemusement.

In one Kaduna breath, Lamido Sanusi, the genius, left everybody astounded with a spectacular piece of emotional unintelligence.

If it were just the addiction to big titles, many wouldn’t have minded. We are used to that. If it were just that reflexive, naked, shameless display of power in dressing down a senior government official in public, we wouldn’t have staggered. After all, a big masquerade who once rode in Rolls Royce and Bentley limousines while superintending the affairs of the second largest emirate in Nigeria, despite all his Ted talks, can lose his temper and squash the ego of a fry.

But Sanusi is also a social critic who inundates the public with sermons against arbitrariness and vanity. He ought to be wary of his conduct in public. In every fit of fury or outburst of superciliousness, he must avoid obscenities, pronouncements that suggest that a governor, who is his childhood friend, exists to service his bloated ego.

At the peak of his crisis in the Kano Emirate, a few commentators had called on Sanusi to abdicate the problematic throne and position himself for the presidency. Sanusi might not be a saint; certainly, the Kano State Anti-Corruption Commission doesn’t think he is, but he is a leading light in the national crusade for social reformation. The bane of this country isn’t a paucity of intellectuals and preachers. It is a dearth of principled folks who can preach, not with their mouths alone but, with their public and private lives.