Gandujegate And Absurd Celebration Of Fraud In Kano

By

Mukhtari Usman Dandago

mukhtarusman460@gmail.com

 

Ordinarily, Thursday 25ft October 2018, would have had a very beautiful and nice morning in the ancient and peaceful city of Kano. As usual it would have captured young boys and girls going to their respective schools for learning, businessmen and women  driving or walking, as the case may be, to their place of business in the quest to earn. Similarly, public servants would have reported for duties at the prescribed time to add value to service delivery in the public sector and farmers stayed put in their farms, ravaged by the recent floods, to salvage what the disaster had spared for them.

However, what the morning in question suffered was, to be modest, an aberration. To the dismay of not a few, as early as 8.00am, school boys and girls, clad in their public school uniforms, where drove in droves to Audu Bako Secretariat that warehouses the Kano State House of Assembly Complex. Commuter buses, filled with rural folks from different Local Government areas made State, Zaria, Sokoto, Iyaka Roads in particular their destination. Among other nuisances, the convergence created traffic gridlock that made the neighborhood unnecessarily inaccessible. Consequently, civil servants were denied entry in to the Secretariat to the extent that official activities were totally paralyzed and business men and women, used to the routes, ambushed and demobilized for their activities.

Mobilized by the powers that be at a whooping cost to the state treasury, the scandalous mutely crowd, including sponsored organizations, were all through absurdly singing KANO SAI GANDUJE war songs, consciously or unconsciously celebrating corruption, bribery, abuse of office and moral decadence at the highest level in the State that conscientious people and men of goodwill lament, to say the least. This is more so as the absurdity was mischievously organized to essentially intimidate, cajole and blackmail the Law makers investigating the Gandujegate saga into behaving to type.

One is of the opinion that, civility and patriotic disposition would have demanded all and sundry to remain calm only, especially as proceedings of the investigating panel were aired live in all radio stations in Kano and beyond, to reflect on the dire consequences of the fallout to collective integrity image of the people of Kano and the state as a corporate entity. Running in circle in defense of indefensible by untoward means will not help anybody, especially our dear state. We must call a spade a spade so that we can use a spade when only a spade is needed.

Now that the jury is out, Gandujegate must be seen as a turning point in Kano politics as indeed elsewhere. Coming not long after the equally scandalous Primaries in the state, it must provide a factual redefinition as to the caliber of who to elect rather than political party into leadership position.

Finally, I sympathize with the rented crowd, including fathers of the innocent school children, ostensibly hired to scuttle or undermine the statutory responsibility of the State House of Assembly in respect to the now famous or infamous Gandujegate that Kwalliya, kwalliyar su, bata biya kudin sabulu ba, as the saying goes. i as well console those that the crowd refused access to either their working place or business premises that, by the grace of the Almighty, there will soon be changes that will allow them free access to wherever they want to go at all times, that is to say when new crop of leadership, leadership that will respect all laws, emerges.