Come January 31st, 2026, Dr Kole Ahmed Shettima, Africa Director of MacArthur Foundation will add another feather to his cap. In addition to philanthropy administration, he will be turbaned as the Zanna Yuroma. That makes him part of the intellectual resources available to Dr Bashar Bukar Albishir , the influential Emir of Machina in Yobe State. He is being invested with the title along with two others – Engineer M K Machina as the Marafa of Machina and Dr. Abubakar Kagu as the Matawalli of Machina.
Intervention is authoritatively informed that Machina is a small but an old empire, famous for giving color to the durbar in Maiduguri in the old Borno State through their dexterity with the horse. Dr Shettima’s civil society constituency is already upbeat about his new feather, notwithstanding that no one has seen Dr Kole on a horseback, yet.
21-year old Princess Ingrid Alexandra ,future queen of Norway who entered the University of Sydney last year for her degree after a stint in the military, is a good example of what is going on!
But, what is a University educated and worldly player doing with being an adviser to the traditional authority in his area? This is the big question.
Well, the traditional authority is one of the few realms drawing some of the most qualitative elements into that fold across the world today. That establishment is not only investing in its stability by giving the job to younger heirs, especially in Europe where many successors are currently PhD students as part of their grooming but also where many of the incumbents went in as accomplished individuals, retired intellectuals, bankers, retired armed forces personnel and even from business. This, again, is across the world, particularly the Middle East and South East Asia.
Faces of civil society solidarity, amongst them Engineer Y Z Yáu of CITAD (3rd from left); Cde ‘Ojukwu’ (6th from left) and Cde John Odah, the subject of an impending civil society blockbuster – Moving Mountains From Behind No More’ –
So attractive the traditional authority made itself that the Americans briefly contemplated having a monarch at their becoming, perhaps on the scale of the Qking (when we merge queen and king) of England before dropping the idea. In the Obama era, the idea came back briefly. Nikolai Tolstoy, a historian, raised the stakes by writing an opinion in The New York Times in 2016 calling on America to consider monarchism, meaning abandonment of presidential democracy. Should Trump succeed in cancelling elections as part of the democratic checklist, then the Americans would now have arrived at having a king.
In contemporary Nigeria, the Mohammed Abubakar Rimi regime in the Second Republic comes to mind when talking about the reversal of the fortune of the traditional authority from where the world dumped it in 1789 in favour of republicanism. Versed in Frankfurt Scholars critique of instrumental reasoning but finding themselves in the hot ideological Okro soup that was Kano politics in 1979, the radical resource persons in the Rimi regime found themselves turning to that very reasoning by saying, Come on! why can’t we also have radical emirs? That is how emirs with PRP roots became a reality, with some of them in Jigawa State today being some of the most sophisticated IT actors in the world. The logic is that no institution or structure is inherently conservative. It all depends on how it is discursively constituted at any one point.
In 2011, this positive reversal of fortune went a notch further when a former CBN governor climbed one of the most entrenched traditional stools in Nigeria – the Emir of Kano stool. Most recent traditional rulers in Nigeria, especially in the Southwest and, in one case in the Middle Belt, have been professors, former governors and what have you. What is interesting is that, except in one case, most entrants into that domain are qualitative individuals with the exposure as well as the sense of balance and restraint required in handling human complexity.
Is it possible that, except in very few cases, the traditional establishment is consciously guarding recruitment into that domain in such a way that only quality souls enter? That could be interesting as the future may lie there. Who knows.
Looking forward to seeing Kole decked in the ‘Rawani’ dress code that signifies him as part of the institution with the most successful record in recapturing power after losing it in 1789.
Ranka dade!
