It is now confirmed that the 40th anniversary of the passage of Mallam Aminu Kano is not without celebration after all. Invitation to a Lecture to mark this year’s celebration available to Intervention shows an anniversary of cross-cutting players.
Prof Nuhu Yaqub, a former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Abuja is delivering the lecture on the mega billion puzzle of “Democracy and the Challenges of Good Governance in Nigeria: What Next After the 2023 General Elections?” The event will have three governors in attendance, none of whom wears a red cap which signifies the Mallam Aminu Kano brand of politics. But the invitation card is, interestingly, a red-ink affair.
Governor Babagana Zulum of Borno State will most likely win any competition for “the best governor” in Nigeria in the current cycle but his own radicalism is not based on the red cap protest politics except if there is a ‘zanna cap’ version of it. Most readers will ‘read’ a symbolism in his selection as the Chairman of the occasion. His Yobe State counterpart, Mai Mala Buni, is no less ideologically hidden although that does not suggest a lack. After all, readers of Nigeria’s Daily Trust on Sunday woke up to read an interesting interview recently in which it became known that Nasarawa State born elder statesman, Alhaji Ishyaku Ibrahim, was actually a communist many years before kingpins of radical activism in Nigeria today ever read anything about The Communist Manifesto. Never judge a book by its cover, it is said. Many radicals in Nigeria today would hardly reckon with him beyond that he was a financier of the defunct National Party of Nigeria (NPN). Well, Governor Mala Buni may not be a professor but he is well educated and a believer in investment in industrialisation. Who knows if he might not be competing with Aliko Dangote by now if politics did not consume him?
Gov Zulum of Borno State
Gov Buni of Yobe State
The invitation also tells us of the presence of Governor AbdullahiGanduje who is the closest to the Mallam Aminu Kano tradition in this context, though ‘Santsi’. He was with Muhammadu Abubakar Rimi, the Second Republic governor of the old Kano State. The royal father of the day is the Emir of Kano, Alhaji Aminu Ado Bayero. He signifies the cultural context of the Mallam Aminu Kano politics.
There are two discussants – Prof Bawa Hassan Gusau and Prof Member George-Genyi, from Bayero University, Kano and the Benue State University, Makurdi, respectively. There is a spatial as well as gender significance in that pairing.
The diversity of players captured on the invitation card can be read as suggesting that the legatees of Mallam Aminu Kano – political and academic – have come to terms with moving away from essentialism to radical pluralism. In any case, the organisational approach of both NEPU and the PRP was always about aggregating diverse expressions of the disempowered.
