By Muktar Adamu Wudil
The police’s so-called “peacekeeping” strategy is defeatist already. Rather than uphold the law and protect legitimate authority, the police reportedly pressured the Kano Emirate Council under Emir Sanusi to cancel the traditional Durbar simply because Aminu Ado Bayero also intended to hold his own. This is not neutrality; it is capitulation. If the police were truly impartial and committed to law and order, they would have enforced the governor’s lawful decision by arresting Bayero for breaching the peace and impersonating a public office he no longer holds. Bayero was formally deposed as Emir of Kano. He has neither challenged his removal in court nor contested Emir Sanusi’s reinstatement. Yet he continues to parade himself as Emir, unlawfully occupying a government facility under federal protection. That the police have not only tolerated this but adjusted lawful public activities around his unlawful presence proves their complicity.
If the police were serious about resolving tensions in Kano, they should have engaged the Kano State Governor, who—as the Chief Security Officer of his state—has both the constitutional mandate and the moral authority to guide the police response. Instead, they bypassed him entirely and treated the deposed Emir as an equal stakeholder in a matter that had already been settled by the constitution. That the police chose to act on “dialogue” with a pretender rather than follow the governor’s rightful instructions is a disgrace to due process. The complications we see in Kano today are not organic, they are artificially created and sustained by Abuja’s interference. A local matter that should have been resolved through the lawful authority of the state has been turned into a federal project of disruption. It is not Emir Sanusi’s procession that threatens the peace—it is the Abuja-backed charade of pretending that Ado Bayero still has a throne to sit on.
Mukhtar Adamu writes from Sydney, Australia and can be reached via [email protected]
