PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

In Defense of Jokolo

kudugana@yahoo.com

The deposition of Alhaji Mustapha Jokolo as the Emir of Gwandu on Friday June 3, is without doubt, one of the biggest news of the six-year-old democratic(?) dispensation under President Olusegun Obasanjo. The Emir of Gwandu is the second most important emir in the Sokoto Caliphate after the Sultan, and the third in the entire North after the Shehu of Borno who is next to the Sultan in order of protocol. Nationwide the emir is among the top six or seven traditional rulers.

At a personal level, Jokolo was a major player in the coup that ousted President Shehu Shagari in December 1983. Before then he had been the Aid-de-Camp (ADC) to  late Major-General Shehu Musa ‘Yar’adua, General Obasanjo’s second in command as military head of state. After the coup against Shagari, he became the ADC to Major-General Muhammadu Buhari as Head of state until Buhari was, in turn, ousted in a palace coup by his army chief, then Major-General Ibrahim Babangida in August 1985.

The Babangida coup against Buhari ended Jokolo’s military carrier and nearly cost him his life. On the day of the coup, himself and Colonel Sabo Aliyu, the commander of the Brigade of Guard, moved into the Ikeja Cantonment, the headquarters of the core group of the coup makers, to counter the coup. They were shot at in the process and only survived by God’s providence. They were, however, captured and beaten black and blue by the troops. This led to rumours that Jokolo had been killed. The rumour changed subsequently from his being killed to his being crippled for life.

It turned out all the rumours were false as I discovered when, as long-standing friends, myself and my cousin who was his course mate at the NDA and a couple of others, eventually visited him at Bonny Camp, Victoria Island, Lagos, where himself, his boss and many others in the defeated camp, were being detained. He might have been beaten black and blue, but when we saw him, he couldn’t have looked healthier and happier. And in spite of the physical torture he had been subjected to, he remained his stubborn self. Alone among the detained junior officers and troops, he was to be transferred to Ikoyi Prison for a week after others were released because he refused to sign the order for his conditional release.

Ten years after the end of what appeared to be a promising military carrier, Jokolo succeeded his father as the Emir of Gwandu. Not many people, including myself, rated his chances high, following the death of his father in July 1995. First, other rivals including Major-General Muhammadu Jega, the new emir who is Jokolo’s cousin and husband to his elder sister and one-time military governor, Ambassador Abubakar Udu, one of the longest serving presidential chiefs-of-protocol, and Dr. Halliru Bello, erstwhile Comptroller-General of Custom, were more experienced and had more resources. Second, Jokolo was highly temperamental.

But as God said in Chapter 3 Verse 26 of the Holy Qur’an, it is He who gives power to whom He pleases and takes it away from whom He pleases. And so it was that the same God that made it possible for Jokolo to beat all odds and succeed his father as emir in July 1995, also made it possible for him to be removed last Friday, barely a month shy of making it 10 years on the throne.

Predictably, his departure has provoked mixed reactions, some supportive of him, some hostile. Before commenting on these reactions, it is necessary to look at the charges the Kebbi State Government has levied against him to see if they justified the haste with which he was removed.

The charges are essentially three. First, that he was given to making “unguarded utterances that are capable of causing disaffection and disharmony and threat to public peace.” Second, that he maintained frosty relationships with his fellow emirs as Chairman of the state’s council of traditional rulers, and third, that he was an absentee emir who spent more time outside his domain than inside.

Beginning with the last charge, it is true that the emir spent a lot of  time outside his domain but, first, he was hardly alone among public officers, from the president himself, to governors, to legislators, to chairmen of local governments and to other traditional rulers, in doing so. Second, there was an important difference between Jokolo’s absenteeism, if that is the proper word, and that of most of these others and this is that he spent much of his time away from home in the service, not of himself, but of the larger regional and national community.

The president and the governors, etc, can claim that their junketing outside their  stations have been in pursuit of foreign investments, but the results have been niggardly if not zero. With Jokolo one can point to at least four of his exertions that have paid off handsomely as peace and other dividends. First, his championship of the polio immunization campaign in a resistant North, a championship that earned him the enmity of some of his colleagues and many Muslim clerics, eventually led to its acceptance, at least officially, in the region. Second, an Arewa Consultative Forum committee set up over two years ago to intervene in the age-old hostilities between the Tivs and Jukuns in Taraba State, the committee of which he was the chairman, did achieve its objective. To date, the truce it brokered between the two warring communities has held up.

Third, a committee he initiated, apparently at the instance of the presidency – it  paid for the accommodation of members of the committee in suits at NICON-Hilton Hotel - in April 2004, under the late Etsu Nupe, Alhaju Umaru Sanda Ndayako, to forestall the breakdown of law and order in the country as a result of the call for “mass action” by the opposition parties in protest at the massive rigging of the 2003 election, helped in persuading General Buhari, as the spearhead of the opposition parties, to seek a remedy for his grouse within the confines of the law. Last, but by no means the least, the presidential panel on the Zamfara State riots of October 3, 2001, which he chaired, did avert a serious breakdown of law and order in the state.

On the second charge that Jokolo maintained frosty relationships with his colleagues on the state council of emirs, while it is true that the emir can hardly win a medal for public relations, it is not possible that he alone is to blame for the poor relationships. To judge correctly between the parties involved, it was necessary to know the issues involved and the merit of the positions of the various parties on the issues. Propriety is, after all, not necessarily a question of numbers.

In blaming Jokolo alone for the sour relationships with his colleagues, we are not told what the issues were, nor the various positions on them. We are simply expected to believe that because of his temperamental nature, he alone was to blame. Nothing could be more unfair.

Finally,  the issue of “unguarded utterances” by the emir. This clearly is in   reference to his March 28 outburst against President Obasanjo over the marginalisation of Muslims in the composition of the leadership and membership of the National Political Reform Conference (NPRC). The marginalisation of Muslims at the NPRC, the emir said at the Mach 28 meeting of Nigerian Muslims called jointly by the Supreme Council on Islamic Affairs and the Jama’atul Nasril Islam, in Kaduna, was one marginalisation too many, and it should not go unchallenged by Muslims.

Predictably his call was, with few exceptions, interpreted by the media as a call for “jihad”. In its edition of March 29, The Guardian quoted, or more accurately, misquoted, Jokolo as saying “unless Obasanjo met their demand for equal treatment with other Nigerians from the South, particularly Christians, they might be forced to wage a Jihad (Holy War) in the country to secure their rights.” Here, it is instructive that of the five major newspapers that reported the event – New Nigerian(March 29), The Guardian(March 29), Daily Independence(March 30), Punch(March 29) and Daily Trust(March 29) – only The Guardian and New Nigerian quoted Jokolo as threatening “jihad”. And even they did not indicate that they were quoting his exact words.

Yet The Guardian and several newspapers and magazines, including those that did not report the event, proceeded, on the basis of unsubstantiated claims by some reporters at the venue, to write editorials and publish comments denouncing and ridiculing Muslim leaders. For example, The Guardian of April 5,  denounced not only  Jokolo, but the entire SCIA and JNI leadership as resorting to “blackmail, ultimatums and threats of blackmail” to “press (for) sectional demands.” Somehow, the paper ignored the very conclusions of its own story that Jokolo’s outburst did not carry the day at the end of the meeting. Instead, the meeting, according to its own story, decided to pursue its complaints through continuous dialogue with the federal authorities.

Jokolo may have spoken angrily against Obasanjo’s perceived anti-Muslim stance, but to blame Jokolo’s anger alone for threatening public peace while ignoring the presidential actions that provoked the anger, is to make for the monkey while leaving the organ grinder severely alone. You may fault the language of Jokolo in complaining about Obasanjo’s perceived anti-Muslim stance, but no fair-minded person can dispute the substance of the complaints. In any case, Jokolo would not be the first to speak out angrily against the country’s leadership over perceived religious marginalization. In many cases, others have used even stronger language, but I do not remember the media descending on such similar “offenders” with so much vitriol.

The big difference obviously is that Jokolo spoke for Muslims, at least for their majority, and, since 9/11, it has become a crime to be a Muslim in the eyes of America which, as a world’s sole military super power, wants to dictate the rest of the world’s agenda. Unfortunately much of the leadership of the rest of the world, particularly the more subservient breed in the Third World, are  more than willing to oblige. This explains why we entered into dubious and secret military pacts with the Americans as part of its war against so-called Islamic terrorism in regions with large Muslim populations including West and East Africa, the Middle-East and South-East Asia.

Yet as Professor Mahmoud Mandani of Columbia University, New York, warned  in a lecture in June last year at Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, “we need to be wary of the American attempt to draw our governments and political elites into another version of the cold war. Let us not forget that for Africa, as for the Middle-East and Asia and Latin America, the cold war was a hot war. We paid a huge price for its militarization of state life, unaccountability in politics and the pawning of our economic resources. Before our leaders consider a renewed American invitation to join a new edition of the cold war called ‘the war on terror,’ let us subject the invitation and its terms and conditions to a broad national, continental and global debate.” Mandani might as well have added that if the use of force could solve crime, which is what terrorism amounts to, the Americans would have since won the drug war in their Latin American backyard.

As I have tried to show the charges against Jokolo do not stand up to close scrutiny. Certainly they do not justify the complete disregard for due process with which he was deposed. He was called in at 9pm on Friday and bundled out of Birnin Kebbi, without as much as a verbal query. And so far not even his family has been allowed access to him.

Long before his fall, he had, of course, been a villain of the media. Now that he is down one can expect them to dredge up old lies about him and even cook up new ones. Only last Sunday, Thisday and one of its columnists, Eni-B, repeated the old lie about the emir clearing 53 suitcases at Murtala Mohammed International Airport, Lagos, in 1984. The suitcases allegedly belonged to his late father who was returning home from the lesser Hajj.  This was at a time the country’s borders had been closed because of the   change in Nigerian currency.

Jokolo’s boss, General Buhari, had himself long exonerated his ADC with whom he had not had a cordial relationship for a long time. In his first ever interview with the press after his release from detention by Babangida, Buhari said categorically that Jokolo never wanted to go to the airport to begin with.

“I said, Mustapha,” Buhari told The News, (July 5, 1993) “your father is coming back today, would you not go and meet him, he said no sir. I said you have to go and meet your father, he is your father, and he went. Unfortunately there was a misunderstanding between the customs officers and the soldiers there. These people never refused their bags to be checked.”

Not once, not twice, but many times, Jokolo himself had denied any link with the suitcases, calling all the major actors in the saga, including his boss, Buhari, the then army chief, Babangida, and the then National Security Adviser, Alhaji Lawal Rafindadi, as his witnesses. Indeed in the heat of the controversy, Jokolo actually applied to resign his commission because he felt his integrity was being unfairly maligned. The resignation was rejected. Yet without bothering to crosscheck with those he called to witness, none of whom is exactly in good terms with the emir, the press has persisted in peddling its falsehood.

Well, whether or not he deserved his deposition and whether or not he deserves the malicious propaganda that may trail his deposition, the same God that gave him the throne almost ten years ago has made his removal possible. The same God, I believe, will give him the fortitude to bear it all.