"Monarchy is way past its
sell-by date not just in Nigeria but everywhere. It’s an anachronistic, vestigial
remnant of a primitive past that invests authority on people by mere accident
of heredity. Any authority that is inherited and not earned, in my opinion, is
beneath contempt. Emirship isn’t only a
primeval anomaly in a modern world, it is, in fact, un-Islamic. In Islam,
leadership is derived from knowledge and the consensus of consultative
assemblies of communities called the Shura, not from heredity. Monarchies in the
Muslim North, which have constituted themselves into parasitic, decadent drains
on the society but which pretend to be Islamic, are grotesque perversions of
the religion they purport to represent. Anyone, not least one who makes pious
noises about equality, that is denied the unfair privileges of monarchy is no
victim.
Most importantly, though,
Sanusi embodies a jarring disconnect between high-minded ideals and lived
reality. He rails against child marriage in public but married a teenager upon
becoming an emir. ... He expended considerable
intellectual energies critiquing polygamy among poor Muslim men, but he is
married to four wives. His defense, of course, would be that he can afford it,
and poor Muslim men can’t. Fair enough. But transaction-oriented reformists
lead by example. Sanusi habitually
fulminates against the enormous and inexorably escalating poverty in the north,
but even though he is an immensely affluent person, he has not instituted any
systematic mechanism to tackle the scourge of poverty in the region in his own
little way. Instead, he spends
hundreds of billions of naira to decorate the emir’s palace, buy exotic horses,
and luxuriate in opulent sartorial regality. And, although, he exposed humongous corruption
during Goodluck Jonathan’s administration and dollar racketeering during
Buhari’s regime, he is himself an indefensibly corrupt and profligate person."
Farooq A. Kperogi, March 14, 2020
