If prizes were to be awarded for sabre-rattling or rushing to negative-judgment, one would certainly go Daily Trust columnist, Sanusi Abubakar. Owing to the fact that Daily Trust has since earned for itself widespread acceptance and respect, there is the tendency to think all its writers or columnists are above-board; that they will always rise beyond primordial sentiments and do right to all manner of people. And indeed, Daily Trust must be very careful not to fall into a trap.
Many regard it as the most influential newspaper in the north. Its owners and editorial staff must always remember that in the course of earning that reputation, there are many readers that have become major stakeholders in what I would call the Trust Project, contributing in many big ways to bringing the newspaper to its present position.
Sanusi Abubakar has since elevated Shekarau-bashing to an art. As far as Sanusi is concerned, the man has done nothing good as governor and all he deserves are torrents of condemnation and insults. In his column two weeks ago, he described the immediate-past governor of Kano State as having run the worst government in the state’s history. This refrain was to be repeated by my younger brother, Jaafar Jaafar, in a rejoinder he wrote on Sanusi’s article on the above subject. Jaafar, a respected writer and now an aide to Governor Kwankwaso, captured it very succinctly when he accused Sanusi of forming the habit of jumping the gun. “As a university don”, said Jaafar, “Sanusi supposed to be aware of the invalidity of data obtained outside the prism of research…”
But very strangely, Jaafar himself fell into the same trap that he accused Sanusi of. He tried to bamboozle readers with highfaluting grammar which sadly, was bereft of facts. The article for which the Kwankwaso media aide wrote a rejoinder can pass for a scripted public relations stunt for the Kano governor. As usual, it condemned Shekarau in strongest of terms. Any dispassionate mind reading it could see that it seriously lacked in reason and logic. No research was carried out. It was just a columnist using - for reasons only known to him - the strong platform of a reputable-newspaper to seek to rubbish a well-respected personality who he refuses to understand, and who he instead chooses to hate with a passion.
As human, Shekarau must have made some mistakes – what I will call mistakes of the head, not of the heart. So whereas Sanusi and Jaafar and their ilk could sensationally claim that Shekarau ran the worst government in Kano’s history, there are thousands or even millions of his supporters who would always flaunt credible facts to counter and insist that he ran the best administration that the frontline state has ever had. To get the truth, the only thing to fall back on, in such circumstance, is to look at the records on ground.
Indisputably, one of the most respected icons of our time is the emir of Kano, Alhaji Ado Bayero. In 1993, General Babangida told the nation about how selfless this revered emir has been when he publicly revealed that he was the only one that had never asked him for anything, throughout the eight years that he served as president. Now, this same selfless emir, who has been ruling Kano for almost five decades has matter-of-factly told the world on June 14, 2011, that Shekarau is the best governor that Kano has ever had, and that even though no one is indispensable, it is difficult to find anyone who could aptly fill the big shoes bequeathed by Shekarau. Let’s take a note of the fact that the emir made this statement more than two weeks after Shekarau had vacated the scene.
The records are there to prove that the people of Kano are very well pleased with Malam Shekarau. Surely they do not need a Sanusi Abubakar, who does not live in Kano, to hoodwink them. Shekarau is not the governor of Kano today only because he has exhausted the constitutionally-allowed two-terms. But his public rating has been on a phenomenal rise.
Jaafar talked about a three billion naira pension fund which he claimed is missing. Surely no kobo of pension fund is missing throughout the eight years that Shekarau served as governor, and this much has been attested to by no less a personality than the well-respected Professor Bello Salim, who was managing the funds.
There is also the claim by Jaafar that the state university at Wudil was under-funded by Shekarau because it was established by Kwankwaso. This is superfluous. First of all, is there any university in Nigeria, be it federal, state or private, that could claim to have got all the funding it needs? Is Jaafar not aware that education is like a bottomless pit, which will continue to consume all you put into it and always ask for more? The fact that the state university got accreditation for most of its courses courtesy of Shekarau’s funding is indicative of the fact that he did the best he could for the school. Let me also remind my younger brother not to mix-up history. That university was established by former governor and now senator, Kabiru Gaya, not Kwankwaso.
Kwankwaso’s penchant of blaming Shekarau for his self-inflicted woes would take him nowhere. It will only add to his confusion. Obviously, he is making so much mountain out of a molehill to divert people’s attention from the ridiculous promises he made, before the election, which lured some women and youths to vote for him, pledging to give each of them fifty thousand naira. It doesn’t look like this promise will ever be fulfilled because it surely was not meant to be fulfilled. But just as he did in 2003, Kwankwaso is underrating the people of Kano, and as time will surely tell, he is doing so at his peril.
Gaya, a former Shekarau aide, wrote from Bompai, Kano
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