The deposition of Ibrahim Dasuki as the Sultan of Sokoto and his immediate replacement with Muhammed Maccido has added a new twist to the struggle for power in Nigeria. That the deposition will have implications for the overall democratic struggle in the country cannot be ruled out, although such implications are difficult to determine at the moment. It is in anticipation of such repercussions that the view that Dasuki’s deposition is "probably the most significant of General Abacha’s attacks on the Nigerian establishment" may need some qualification. Abacha himself is not an outsider to the Nigerian establishment, given both his military career and the military and political offices he has held in the past 12 years. Therefore, the dismissal of Dasuki is less an attack on the Nigerian Establishment as a well-calculated brinkmanship by Abacha himself to secure unquestioning loyalty and control of the main bastion of hegemonic politics in Nigeria.

The official explanation given for Dasuki’s deposition is that he failed to show respect for constitutional (sic) authority and was found to have engaged in subversive activities against the government. More specifically, he is said to have been involved in shady financial transactions that were partly responsible for the collapse of two banks. For this, he is to be arraigned before the Failed Banks Tribunal, another of Nigeria’s many extrajudicial agencies imbued with judicial powers by the junta.

The local media coverage of the Dasuki saga, especially by the government-owned Daily Times suggests that the general response to it has been a spontaneous God Kasham, implying a well-deserved end to a perfidious beginning. While God may have truly caught Dasuki, his deposition at a time that the democratic agitation in Nigeria is at its most vibrant is a setback, generally for Nigeria and more specifically for the feudal North. This is because Dasuki, due largely to his exposure, age, and obtuse comprador business connections, is the most capable among the Sokoto princes to transform the sultanate from a secretive but power obsessed hegemony to a moderately accountable institution capable of accommodating the democratic changes required for rescuing the impoverished North from its medieval mind frame.

Dasuki’s deposition is, therefore, a loss for the moderate elements within the feudal establishment who genuinely want such a transformation. Furthermore, given the awe and respectability by which the Caliphate is held by the bulk of those entrenched ‘Northern nationalists’ in the armed and security forces of Nigeria, a Dasuki-held sultanate could have become useful for the North in pressing for reforms as alternatives to the fundamental changes which the more radical sections of the country now demand and on which any hope of a compromise is receding daily, despite Abacha’s mind-numbing and knee-cracking repression.

According to comments outside Abacha’s Aso Rock, Dasuki’s most obvious error was to have become an open major player in the political horse-trading that ensued with Babangida’s infamy against the democratic process. Since the Caliphate’s agenda of permanently excluding the Southerners or more appropriately the Yoruba from power appeared consistent with Babangida’s own ambition to latch on to power at all cost, Dasuki saw nothing wrong in throwing the weight of the Caliphate behind that scoundrel. Like the rest of the Northern hegemonists, Dasuki was well aware that the military framework was well suited for pushing the Caliphate’s program of perpetual domination of the rest of Nigeria. What he misread was the nature of the contradictions within the military itself (i.e. contradictions arising from the ambitions of many of its officers) and the extent to which some of these officers are prepared to go in resolving the personal aspects of these contradictions in their own favor.

For all his shortcomings, there was one behavior of Dasuki which, though overlooked at the time, was sufficiently revealing of what he meant to be or could have been if the environment had been ridden by less contradictions. This was his issuing a press statement either in 1990 or 1991, in which he claimed that the sultanate was being misrepresented as the cause of Nigeria’s multifarious problems. It was a rare act, a gesture which spoke more about the man’s awareness of the need for that parasitic institution to change or go the way of the dinosaur. This then is the heart of the Dasuki saga. In all likelihood, and given his own extensive business interests and administrative background, Dasuki as Sultan seemed more attuned to historical circumstances and consequently less backward than Ado Bayero or even Maccido.

Although accused by Abacha of wrongful business deals, Dasuki is no more so than any other emir in the North (remember the 53 suitcases palaver of Buhari-Idiagbon regime?) in using his office to conduct business and amass enormous wealth. While this is the character of every Nigerian traditional ruler today, the intimate, but often superior closeness and limitless access the Northern emirs have to Nigeria’s top bureaucrats, security and armed forces personnel in their capacity as self-imposed custodians of the Nigerian state, make such misuse of their status second nature. The emirs of Gwandu, Zaria, Kano, etc. have more company directorships among them than Abiola, the late industrialist, Adeola Odutola, and Iwuanyanwu combined!

There is a farcical irony in attempts by a regime headed by Sani Abacha accusing anybody of corruption. Abacha’s own corruption, if properly investigated, will be remarkable for its crudity and absolute lack of sense of public morality. In his days as Chief of Army Staff and later Minister of Defense, Abacha caused a stir among his officers when he openly advised them to emulate him! Given all the raging rumors of general doubts about Abacha’s probity, the official projection of Dasuki as a crook was less a genuine determination to punish crime as a clever ploy to further remove from positions of social relevance all those who may be deemed to have power of moral restraint on the regime or the connection to influence external hostilities towards Abacha’s junta: Enahoro, Soyinka, Akinrinade, Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, for example).

Babangida, it must be remembered, created both Dasuki and Abacha in his pursuit of ambition and power. A central element of Babangida’s strategy was to convince the Hausa-Fulani elite of the necessity of sharing power, if not with the other dominant groups in the country, then on a broader pan-Northern platform. But even this project was scuttled by Babangida himself when his own ambition and the sycophancy of the crowd around him forced him into the fatality of believing that he had become omnipotent. All said and done, Babangida was a product of the 1980-83 rupture within the Hausa-Fulani power club. A brief historical flashback seems appropriate here.

By 1982, it was apparent even to the most intrepid member of his own party, that Shehu Shagari was an abysmally weak and ineffectual head of state who deserved to be voted out by the electorate in a straight and fair contest. The expectation, therefore, was that the NPN would do the most sensible thing: nominate a more competent politician like Maitama Sule or Adamu Ciroma as its flag-bearer for the election of 1983. To the consternation of conservative elements from the North who had worked surreptitiously for an NPN victory at the 1979 election, the NPN suppressed every attempt to challenge Shagari from within the party. This retention of Shagari by the NPN and the unchecked arrogance and mindless corruption rampant among many of the rootless Northern lieutenants of the president led to a split in the rank of what used to be called the Kaduna Mafia, a shadowy association of mostly retired civil servants, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs and, of course, military officers of Northern origin.

A faction of the Kaduna Mafia was reported to have formed a committee which immediately went into electoral pact with the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN). A memorandum of understanding was jointly signed by the parties a few months before the election of 1983. This committee, it was widely rumored, scouted for and nominated Alhaji Mohammed Kura, as vice presidential running mate for Chief Awolowo. The committee was also rumored to have recommended a number of bright and articulate young politicians and bureaucrats of Northern origin to stand for the UPN as party candidates in some key states in the North.

Of course, Chief Awolowo lost the election partly because the alliance was foiled by more powerful Mafia members but largely because of massive rigging. Never before in Nigeria’s history was there an election result as that of 1983 in which the number of votes cast at the polls far outstripped the population of those who registered to vote! Four months after the massively rigged election, the military carried out a coup d’etat on behalf of Shagari’s party to limit the damage that Shagari’s rudderless governance was doing to the civilian wing of the Kaduna Mafia. The Buhari-Idiagbon coup was in effect a setback for the slowly emerging anti-NPN alliance which a section of the Northern political establishment had sought to create by joining forces with Chief Awolowo.

Evidence that the Buhari-Idiagbon coup was to give a second opportunity via military government to Fulani control of Nigeria was not hard to find, as southern politicians were quickly sent to jail while their northern counterparts were given lenient sentences or let off the hook. Several northern politicians were allowed to escape to Europe. Cosmetic efforts were made to bring Umaru Dikko back to give the appearance that northern politicians were direly sought after for severe punishment. While so many others within reach in Nigeria were literally "forgotten" by the Buhari junta.

Babangida’s 1985 coup against Buhari, a respected and still respectable Fulani nationalist, could have been motivated by personal rivalry, but it was also conceived as a necessary sacrifice to reconcile the warring factions within the Northern political class. Babangida himself was not Fulani; consequently, he realized early in his career that he needed to reassure the Hausa-Fulani hegemonic group of his own sincerity. In spite of his initial cherubic appeal to the rest of the country, Babangida went further than most people in his shoes would have dared to spout his Northern identity. This he did in a very clever manner that would have appealed only to those meant to appreciate the signal being sent. This was in the matter of language at public functions. In spite of English being the official language of government and business in Nigeria, Babangida’s populist official engagements in the North were always addressed in Hausa, the effective lingua-franca of Northern Nigeria. His strategy was to patronize Fulani aristocrats such as Ibrahim Dasuki and Alhaji Abubakar Alhaji. The latter was at this time the permanent secretary of the finance ministry, but was better known as one of those who exercised immeasurable authority in Babangida’s boardroom of power. Both Dasuki and Alhaji Abubakar Alhaji are first cousins.

On the death of Siddiq Abubakar in 1986. The festering ancient hostilities and rivalries among the Sokoto princes broke open in a bitter contest for the throne. While Maccido, the eldest son of the late Sultan, could have been the popular choice, it was Dasuki who was installed at the instance or with the support of Babangida as well as Abacha, who later sent the troops to snuff out the riot and the arson that marked the protest against Dasuki’s installation as sultan.

Like Dasuki’s ascension to the sultanate, Sani Abacha’s rise to the headship of the army and all the myths subsequently built around him, were derived from Babangida’s own agenda of self-perpetuation. Babangida wanted an officer of awesome brutality and paranoid security mentality to keep other ambitious officers at bay. He found one in Abacha who played this role to perfection from 1985 to 1993 under various titles: chief of army staff, minister of defense, chief of defense staff, etc.

When Babangida asked Abacha to stay on in the moribund interim government of Sonekan, the calculation was that the former would be the main deterrent against Sonekan's effort to act out his own mind ( in case he suddenly grew one) and therefore jeopardized Babangida’s desire to return to power, which was disclosed only to Abacha. In positioning Abacha as his protector, both literally and metaphorically, Babangida apparently took to heart the belief that Abacha recognized his own intellectual limit and would prefer to stay at the corridors of power rather than taking power for himself. Shortly after, Abacha saw the sacking of the bumbling Sonekan in November 1993 as the ultimate reward of his own surrogacy.

It was on account of his well-known intellectual limitation and the fact that he was a Babangida surrogate that Abacha was openly and arrogantly derided by those who regard themselves as being cerebral among the Hausa-Fulani elite. Having to tolerate Abacha as head of state even after he had seized power was for the likes of Dasuki and Yar’Ardua a troubling emotion. Apparently, they sought, as is the habit of the Fulanis, to resolve that contradiction in false terms: they believed that it was safer, as an interim measure, for the power of ruling Nigeria to be in the hands of a bastard Northern pig instead of being held by a well-bred southern horse, while keeping their disapproval of Abacha to themselves. Preferring Abacha to an Abiola was a replay of the July 1966 preference of Lieutenant-Colonel Gowon over Brigadier Ogundipe.

For Dasuki who, long before he became the Sultan, was among those who had been institutionalized as defenders and promoters of the Caliphate’s interests in the governance of Nigeria, the dislike for Abacha could only have been visceral. Schooled at Oxford, Dasuki had started out as a District Officer in the North before independence, later went on to become a permanent secretary, and then a diplomat. From his vintage District Officer’s assignments in the 1950s, Dasuki was among those charged with selecting the ‘Northern boys’ who were sent to the military school in Zaria during the decade of the 1950s. These are the same boys who have, since the 1970s, matured into Nigeria’s military politicians through whom Northern power over the rest of Nigeria is exercised as Nigeria’s power.

Despite his initial trepidation, evident in his refusal to go to Abuja, Abacha was given a boost of confidence by the likes of Kingibe. As a calculating moral mutant, Kingibe obviously saw the need to displace the narrow hegemony of the Sokoto Caliphate at the heart of power and to put in its place, a seemingly ‘national’ but in reality a ‘pan-Northern’ hegemony (under the supervision of the Kanuris) which will be capable of providing the kind of ‘uncritical’ efficiency Nigerians are always yearning for in their leaders. The attraction by the regime in recent times of ‘moralists’, such as Buhari, and the granting to them of enabling power to act as overseers in policy areas crucial to the repackaging of Abacha as saviour is an indication of the success of this unfolding ideology of reconstituting the Northern hegemony while giving the appearance of a government that is committed to another transition to democracy.

Having put a broad-based cabinet together that is capable of persuading the average change-yearning Nigerian that Abacha was intent on getting Nigeria running again by removing such obstacles as some members of the national elite are believed to constitute, the removal of Dasuki is a jackpot of evidence for the new-breed ‘milito-politicians’ to take back to their friends and constituents.

With Dasuki now out of the way and the Caliphate’s ability to mount any long-lasting resistance on the wane, the stage appears set for the effective formation of a new pan-Northern ruling hegemony. The question worth asking now is how effective this new pan-Northern hegemonic group would be in terms of long-term competition for power in Nigeria? The only reason it might not be as effective in the long term, as it is being configured to be, is that there is no indigenous pan-Northern middle class to serve the desire of this new alliance of power seekers from a section of the country.

The absence of a middle class to sustain the hold of the old Kaduna Mafia directed formerly by the Fulani also plagues the new Kanuri-directed pan-Northern Nigerian ruling group. This lack of an efficient middle class explains why, in spite of the so-called "good work" Abacha is now claimed by his sycophants to be doing, the regime has ignored the crisis in the education sector. This new Northern alliance for power is using the old trick of its Fulani version by insisting that the impoverishment of the country is a necessary step in creating a population of zombies that will comply with military or feudalistic dictations from handpicked ministers and security agents. The recent statement from Abuja that privatization will benefit people of the southwest who are NADECO members suggests that the new alliance is also prepared to use bureaucratic bottlenecks to frustrate investment, development, and educational growth, as this is the surest way to reduce the impact of critical citizenry for which the Western Region of Nigeria has been stigmatized by the northern elite as a trouble-making ethos.

The Kanuri-driven power mafia has adopted the ideology of its Fulani counterpart. Since 1975, Key Northern bureaucrats and politicians who had anything to do with the formulation of education policies for Nigeria have religiously pursued a policy of deliberate underdevelopment of the educational sector through all kinds of subterfuge and diversionary programs such as Nomadic education, Quota system of admission to Federal educational institutions, proliferation of mushroom state universities despite the inadequate supply of teachers and students for existing colleges funded by the federal government, and the deliberate weakening of states’ traditional control over education through federalization and underfunding of such internationally-known centers of excellence as Ibadan, Ife, Lagos, Nsukka, Benin, and Port Harcourt universities. Apart from underfunding these universities to the point of atrophy, the federal government under the supervision of Northern ethno-military rulers used bureaucratic guidelines to destroy university autonomy and academic freedom, recently best illustrated by the imposition of military sole administrators to replace professors as vice chancellors of former regional universities taken over by the federal government.

As far back as 1976, Alhaji Jubril Aminu, a former executive director of a federal agency designed to create roadblocks for state universities deemed by the Fulani hegemonic group as moving too fast for effective feudal control, and later a minister of education under Babangida, insisted, in a paper circulated privately among government functionaries, on the necessity for what he described as "social restructuring" in the field of education for purposes of achieving "a just and egalitarian society." The gist of this paper is that educational advancement in Southern Nigeria should be stopped or slowed down to give time for the North to bridge the educational gap between the north and the south. Writing as an irresistible Fulani or Northern nationalist, Aminu presented the age-old difference between attitude to Western education between the Yoruba and Ibo on the one hand, and between the Fulani and the Hausa on the other, in the rhetoric of divisiveness:

Anyone reading Aminu’s paper is bound to discover that in spite of the gentleman’s blatant Hausa-Fulani nationalism, he knew perfectly well how the crisis of educational imbalance between the North and the South came about and what could be done to prevent it from widening. Afterall, Aminu studied medicine at the University of Ibadan and can still remember how many people from his state of origin were his room mates at Ibadan. He also served as the first executive secretary of the National Universities Commission, a bureaucratic agency that did more to stop the development of higher education than any other sector of the government. He also served as Vice Chancellor of a federal university in his state of origin, the University of Maiduguri, for years before becoming the minister of education. He is in the best of positions to know if the state universities in the far north were doing better in terms of the enrollment of Northern students than Ahmadu Bello University. He knew at the time he wrote the paper calling for "social restructuring" that no state in the North set out to establish a university for students in the South. For all the state universities in the north to be close to being cost-effective, it direly needed, and still does as we write, to recruit students from the South. Abubakar Umar, Aminu’s fellow Fulani, has since written that the entire states in the far north (including Aminu’s state of origin) can not boast of having as many undergraduates or school teachers as Delta State of Nigeria, one of the two states created from the old Western Nigeria where free primary education was started as far back as the 1950s to prepare for self-government and later independence.

To return to the theme of the realignment of Northern hegemony over Nigeria under the direction of a Kanuri, there are many suggestions why Dasuki might have been desperate of late to get Abacha out of power. The first is that he possibly read correctly that the Caliphate was being displaced at the heart of power. Being a feudal and oligarchic patriarch, Dasuki was bound to resent the rise of the aristocracy of soldiers and their minions with capital which Abacha and his minders had initiated and are attempting to legitimize as pan-Northern through the appointment of individuals from the three major Islamic zones of the North: the Fulani, Hausa, and the Kanuri. Another factor is traceable to the perception of Dasuki and other members of the Dominant Northern Elite (DNE) that Abacha is too intellectually inferior to serve as the flag bearer of the Northern hegemonic class. It was rumored that the main worry of the North does not arise from the annulment of the election won by Abiola; rather, it is that Abacha’s inadequacies and vaunting ambition are, if unchecked, capable of pushing Abacha’s junta into causing a velvet-divorce disintegration of Nigeria.

The hurried hanging of the Ogoni Nine in November 1995 could only have heightened anxieties in this respect. What must have frightened Dasuki and his supporters most could not have been the idiocy of the hanging itself, but the stridency of the anti-Nigeria protests it generated worldwide. Ironically, the Ogoni Nine incident reduced the scope of manoeuvering available to the Dasuki segment of the DNE.

Although Dasuki was replaced with Maccido, over whom he was favored back in 1988, it is worth noting that the justificatin for the replacement is not the alleged 1988 perfidy against the same Maccido, but the more publicly appealing charges of "contributing to the economic adversity of the state" through participation in capital flight and "subversion" against the state. With the supposed 1988 perfidy against Maccido now blamed squarely on Babangida, it is not likely that anyone will remember that Abacha, as the chief of army staff, gave final authorization for the use of troops to quell the week-long anti-Dasuki riot that overtook Sokoto when Dasuki was turbaned.

Its strategic calculations notwithstanding, the Dasuki saga by itself represents, as pointed out earlier, the alteration of that relationship that traditionally exists between the Nigerian military establishment and the unaccountable institution/persons to which it is beholden. Had the military been a truly cohesive and altruistic national institution, this would have been something worth cheering. But as also stated earlier, too many elements are competing here from Abacha’s own personal ambition through his unbridled quest for riches and that troubling sense of inadequacy, equally matched by the ambition of some of his advisers, as well as the genuine search for regional (read Northern) supremacy among his less visible but highly influential backers, such as Shehu Shagari, Jubril Aminu, Adamu Ciroma, Ibrahim Gusau, etc. All of these are bound to produce contradictions of their own and with time, the whole agenda will begin to unravel.

What is clear for now is that Dasuki’s removal will be temporarily useful for holding the contending ambitions and power game together. Abacha’s strategists will, for example, point at it as proof that their man was all along a misunderstood avenger. We should expect this to be connected to the regime’s highly selective anticorruption campaigns, such as the trial of the executives of failed banks and the probing of customs and excise officials. All these are high-profile and well-targeted actions, the need for which is hard to deny in view of the degree to which public morality has been perverted in Nigeria. The newspapers and magazines, with the exception of the known opposition Tell and The News, are already struggling to outperform one another in sensationalizing these probes without critical analysis of the issues involved. The pro-junta media have, for example, refused to point out the irony in the probing of parastatal executives by a head of state about whose wealth and property questions have been raised all over Nigeria. Most of the media houses in Nigeria conveniently glossed over the adage: Charity begins at home in their sensational reporting of the junta’s 'crusade against corruption'.

It is tempting to believe that majority of Nigerians have so far remained unimpressed by these probes or do not believe that the regime is truly committed to pushing them to a logical conclusion. But in the myth-relishing Nigerian environment, with its preference for an admiration of the superman, (a culture engendered by decades of military and feudalistic governance) the fact that the Abacha regime could depose and insist on putting Dasuki on a show trial will be hard to dismiss as evidence of strong determination to cleanse the augean stable. It is a message that will also be handy for the foreign minders of the regime. All of these make Dasuki’s removal both a deft populist strategy and a warning. On the one hand, it will be used to challenge the cynicism of Southerners in general and the Yoruba in particular, towards the Abacha junta. On the other hand, it is a signal, also for Southern consumption, that the regime has no intention of letting-off in its macho toughness and that there is no internal force, however formidable, that it cannot overwhelm.

All of these mean that a despot could now be repackaged as a pan-Nigerian ideologue and an avenger of long-standing culture of bureaucratic corruption. The institutions that can provide proper critical discussion of these issues are being silenced on a systematic basis by Abacha’s security men. Apart from those media organizations whose trademark is Abacha panegyrics, the critical and oppositional ones are being starved of news print. For now, given the peculiarities of Nigeria already hinted here, the marginalization of Dasuki is bound to succeed, even though temporarily. But the consequences of that temporary success are bound to be far-reaching on the democratic struggle, particularly in the sphere of mobilization of the people.

What the Abacha junta is doing at the moment is obviously a long-term demobilizations of the popular strength leading ultimately to the creation of conditions which could make its iron-grip on power excusable. It is a very clever ploy to sweep under the very contentious issue surrounding power and politics in Nigeria, namely, the corrosion and destruction of Nigerian federalism as a result of vengeful militarisation of power. The more the Abacha junta is able to imprison the likes of Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, Beko Ransome-Kuti, and harass Enahoro, Soyinka, and Akinrinade, and others, the more it will be able to secure the collaboration of the likes of Odumegwu Ojukwu, Yakubu Gowon, Muhammadu Buhari, and for a totally different reason, the whole of the Northern bourgeoisie. However one might wish to look at Abacha’s experiment with power, it is still the hegemonic politics of old, now controlled by self-convinced and self-appointed mutants within the Northern establishment.

If the whole nation is going to be seduced and made to fall back into the familiar habit of national amnesia, those involved in the democratic struggle as a matter of principle must remain clearheaded. The central issue in the Nigerian struggle is not an ad-hoc diversionary moral cleansing of an ethos fuelled by immorality. Corruption and other moral excesses that have resulted from unconscionable exercise of power in Nigeria are symptoms rather than causes of the failure of the Nigerian nation. Nigeria has travelled this road of moral cleansing before under Murtala-Obasanjo and Buhari-Idiagbon regimes. At its best, the discourse on corruption initiated under these regimes , though more intelligent and sophisticated than what is now being circulated by Abacha’s aides, ended up compounding and confusing the various issues bound up with the absence of a national agenda. At its worst, it produced a monster called NPN with its own Ethical Revolution discourse in the second republic. Ironically, most of those in the extreme right-wing of the NPN are now the intellectuals behind the Abacha junta today!

Those in the pro-democracy movements inside and outside Nigeria must not allow the mistakes of the past to be repeated and should therefore continue to insist on the democratic agenda as ultimately the best way to keep Nigeria together as one country. The starting point for this agenda is a return to the election of 12 June 1993, the installation of its winner to power, and thereafter, the convening of a sovereign national conference at which the genuine restructuring of the federation and all issues incidental to it should be negotiated.