The 40th anniversary of his passage passed two days ago without much fanfare. Lost in a no-let post- election tussle, neither the politicians nor his political children staged any commemoration that made the headlines. Yet, this is the time that banner should have been raised. The threshold has been lowered to the worst level. There is a great desire for the kind of new social order that the political party Mallam Aminu Kano led was asking for on the eve of independence and in 1979. But in the case of today, nobody – political leader, political party, political movement, civil society – has been able to name the kind of change needed. Still, people are prepared to defend democracy as if democracy has a fixed, unchanging meaning. That is paradox number one about Mallam Aminu Kano.
An old book that seems to have posed the right question of whether the NEPU-PRP ‘revolution’ has experienced truncation or transformation
But there is the other paradox about the sage of Mambayya. One of his greatest desires is the peasant moment in Nigerian politics: that moment when the children of peasants would be in charge of public affairs, of political power and the management of its privileges in favour of the masses. Well, the dynamics worked out in such a manner that the peasant moment came, even in his own life time. It came in the sense that the conditions which brought about what Aminu Kano and his fellow radicals were struggling against was targeted.
As the late Prof Raufu Mustapha put it in his paper at the PRP Section of the ‘Marx and Africa’ Conference in 1983 at ABU, Zaria, “NEPU was an ideological and political response to the problems of a backward agrarian society saddled with the burden of a colonial mercantilist capital, heavy taxation, forced labour and an inflexible political regime as personified by the Emir as the sole native authority”.
This was what the Dasuki report on the local government reform of 1976 dismantled in taking away control of local authority from the aristocracy or, to use the language of Mallam Aminu Kano’s part – it doesn’t matter whether you call it NEPU or PRP – the feudal oligarchy. That was certainly a revolution except that the revolution probably occurred in a manner that Aminu Kano’s political children did not realise it had occurred. It was paradoxically enacted by Ibrahim Dasuki, the late Sokoto Prince who chaired the Federal Government Committee on the reform.
A successor in the making?
Perhaps, this action has more significance in the North than in the South of Nigeria, hence it did not get the reckoning it deserves. Of course, there are those who say it was a calculated radicalism by General Shehu Yar’Adua who needed to undo the oligarchy to pave way for his own emergence in the aftermath of the transition from the military to civilian rule in 1979. Irrespective of what anyone believes about the report, it still amounts to a revolution. Is it not, therefore, a paradox if Nigeria has degenerated in the era of the children of those who do not know anybody being in power since 1976?
The last paradox about the Aminu Kano phenomenon is the question of succession. How is it possible that the most established radical populist tendency in Nigeria has no referential political personality to it today in Nigeria? There are no legatees for Zikism but Zikism is a liberal tendency. Awoism still has card carrying stalwarts, even as diluted as it might be now. The Sardauna of Sokoto has legatees to the extent that every politician still refers to him, at least in much of the North of Nigeria.
It may not be possible to replicate the essential NEPU – PRP politics but, given the impact and the achievements of the tendency, is it not surprising this has happened? Alhaji Abdulkadir Balarabe Musa died at a very old age. Alhaji Muhammadu Abubakar Rimi died in 2011 in interesting circumstances. These two became the stars of the tendency in terms of the conception of how power should be managed to protect popular democratic aspirations. There was Barrister Ali Sa’ad Birnin Kudu and then Alhaji Sule Lamido. These two were governors too and who though did so under different political party platforms but without renouncing their PRP roots. There were those who served as ministers, who were academicians and ideologues and who are still around. How come no one from this circuit emerged as rallying point for the tendency?
A rebranded tendency outfit has been in the making. Prof Attahiru Jega, the self-confessed Aminu Kano-ist and Bayero University, Kano academic has been a regularly mentioned signifier of this. But Jega was nowhere to be seen in the struggle for power that just ‘ended’. Did he step aside because he anticipated the current atmosphere? Or did he stay away to prepare to fight another day? Can anyone ever prepare for Nigerian politics? And why did the PRP perform so dismally in the 2023 polls? Lack of money? lack of mobilization? Lack of a towering figure? Or what?
Of course, the world is ruled by paradoxes. And nothing about the paradoxes around Mallam Aminu Kano might be understood as unusual. But even then, all paradoxes call for reflections!
