Shekarau at 60 Posted By: Mohammed Haruna November 11, 2015 THE NATION

Shekarau at 60
Posted By: Mohammed Haruna November 11, 2015 THE NATION
Last Thursday, November 5, Malam Ibrahim Shekarau, two-term governor of Kano State, the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) presidential candidate in the 2011 elections, and until May 29, the country's Minister of Education, turned sexagenarian. His political career, which made debut in 2003, is arguably the most inspiring in recent Nigeria's history – that of ex-President Goodluck Jonathan included.

The long journey to his fortuitous political debut 12 years ago started, of course, 48 years earlier when he was born to Malam Shekarau and Malama Maryam in Kano. The mother, who died in 1999, was from Gundumawa village in Gezawa Local Government Area of the state. The father, who died in 1979, was, however, originally from Biu, Borno State, but settled in Kano where he joined the then Native Authority Police and rose to the rank of a chief inspector before retiring.

That successful career brought Malam Shekarau close to the emirate's Wakilin Doka (Chief of Police) at the time, Alhaji Ado Bayero, who, decades later as Emir, was to take the son under his wings as governor of the state and eventually turbaned him the Sardaunan Kano, the first in the emirate's long history.

After his formal education, which ended with a degree in Mathematics/Education from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria in 1977, he joined the Kano State bureaucracy in 1978 as a secondary school teacher. Thus began a successful civil service career in which he was principal at various secondary schools in the state, an education administrator, and from which he eventually retired as a permanent secretary in 2001.

Former President Jonathan's spin doctors like to tell the story of his amazing political career as one similar to that of America's Abraham Lincoln, who, we are told, went from a wood cabin to the White House; Jonathan, we are often told, went, in eight short years, from being a shoeless village boy – one from a minority of a minority ethnic group at that – to the presidency of Africa's most populous nation.

As with Jonathan's, Shekarau's debut in the political firmament too had an element of luck. The difference, however, was that with Jonathan it was more luck than any political acuity on his part or on the part of his handlers. With Shekarau's election as the governor of the most populous state in the country and its biggest commercial centre after Lagos, it was the opposite. In his case he needed the capacity to cultivate Kano's highly conscious electorate. It addition he needed tons and tons of money, which he did not have, as a lately retired poor educationist.

You can hardly put his predicament in 2003 better than the man himself did in an interview in the Daily Trust of March 18, 2011. "In fact in 2003," he said, "someone looked at my face and said if I don't have anything (because that was his own assessment) near N100 million, I would be crazy to think of contesting the governorship position. At that time I could not boast of N100,000 not to talk of N100 million, but I contested and won the election. I beat the sitting governor with a gap of over 600,000 votes and don't tell me I rigged the election because I didn't have the apparatus to do so."

His secret weapon as the governorship candidate of the opposition ANPP then seemed to have been his quiet eloquence, humility and simplicity as a retired teacher. His handlers used the latter two virtues to cast him in the image of an underdog in his contest with Dr Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, the sitting governor. And the good people of Kano, from their political history, seem to always love the underdog.

Four years later as governor, it was debatable that his record had met the expectations of Kanawa. As an educationist he had given their formal education his priority attention. He had also established a Directorate of Societal Orientation (A Daidaita Sahu) which, under the Weekly Trust back page columnist, Bala Mohammed, had done a great job of inculcating the much needed civility in the often unruly people of Kano. The governor had again, in more concrete terms, established arguably the best and the most well-funded pension scheme for public servants in the state, well ahead of the pension reform at the national level.

In spite of these achievements and others more, few people bet on his re-election as governor in 2007, not least because no governor in the state's history had ever succeeded in securing a second term.

On one occasion, the late Alhaji Abubakar Mohammed Rimi, its first elected governor, who at that time had become the state's leading political godfather as a stalwart of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, boasted that Shekarau's end as governor was nigh. "Ba Shekarau ba ko Dundundun ne sai mun tsige shi," he said, roughly meaning even if his surname is Dundundun, i.e. "Forever" not just Shekarau, we will remove him as governor. Linguistically, Shekarau is a Hausa metaphour for a baby that overstays in his mother's womb for more than the normal nine-month period.

Rimi's bombast proved empty; for the first time in the politics of Kano State a sitting governor won his re-election. This time Shekarau beat the PDP candidate, Alhaji Ahmed Garba Bichi, a protégé of Kwankwaso, his old rival. At that time ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo had appointed Kwankwaso his Minister of Defence in apparent compensation for his 2003 loss.

After his second term as governor, Shekarau, unlike many of his colleagues who considered the Senate their retirement sanctuary, trained his eyes on the nation's top job. He eventually emerged as ANPP's presidential candidate for the 2011 elections after the party's candidate for the 2003 and 2007 presidential elections, General Muhammadu Buhari, left the party as a result of a crisis, to form his own Congress for Progressive Change (CPC).

And so that year's presidential election was fought mainly between the ruling party, PDP, and ANPP, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu's Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and CPC, as the three leading opposition parties. As in the past, the media tried to organise debates among the presidential candidates. In the one NN24, the now defunct Lagos-based affiliate of CNN, organised on March 18 and in which Jonathan declined to participate, Shekarau emerged, by most accounts, the clear winner against CPC's Buhari and ACN's Nuhu Ribadu.

The BBC News, for example, said it in its review of the debate on April 5 that "if Nigeria's polls were carried out on Facebook and Blackberry messenger, it seems the outsider – Ibrahim Shekarau, the current governor of Kano State – might just win. His composure during the recent presidential debate impressed Nigerians – he was widely seen in the media as "the winner".

Polls, of course, are won and lost through ballot boxes, not on the Internet. Out in the field, Shekarau emerged a distant fourth, after Jonathan the victor, Buhari and Ribadu. Worse still, the tables turned against him in the governorship election when his anointed candidate, Alhaji Salihu Sagir Takai, was beaten, albeit by a narrow margin, by Kwankwaso, this time himself the candidate of PDP.

Since last year, Shekarau's political fortune seems to have dwindled even further. He had played a key role in the merger of ANPP, ACN and CPC which formed the All Progressives Congress (APC), the better to take on PDP. He had therefore expected to be acknowledged by the new party's leadership as its leader in Kano. Instead the party gave the leadership to Kwankwaso shortly after he and several other PDP governors decamped to join APC.

In anger, Shekarau announced his departure from APC to PDP in January last year. An apparently grateful Jonathan subsequently appointed him minister of Education the following July.

Jonathan's hope obviously was that Shekarau would help him get at least a quarter of the state's massive votes in this year's presidential election. That hope proved forlorn, as his party was completely routed in all elections in the state this year.

In spite of the seeming downturn in former governor's political fortunes, it would be mistaken to write him off just yet as finished politically. As a result of its defeat in the presidential election for the first time since 1999, several PDP officials have since said its presidential candidate for the 2019 elections will come from the North. As a two-term governor, ANPP's presidential candidate in 2011, former minister and a prominent member of a 15-man reform committee the PDP recently set up, Shekarau is in good stead to revive his political fortunes and vie for its presidential ticket.

Twelve years ago almost no one gave him any chance of beating a sitting governor. Of course 2019 is not 2003 and, of course, Nigeria is much bigger than Kano. But then in politics the one word one should never say about anyone or anything is "impossible."

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