Opinion
History, the historian and intellectual honesty: A tribute to Prof Haruna Wakili
Kabiru Haruna Isa, PhD
“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it”~Haruki Murakami
It was in January, 2020 when ASUU-Chairman, Bayero University, Kano (BUK) branch informed me of the ailing condition of Professor Haruna Wakili.
As a good tradition of the branch, whenever any of its members is sick, members of the executive council (EXCO) will pay them a visit to show empathy.
I was part of the ASUU team that visited Wakili just before he embarked on his medical trip to India.
While in India, I, and of course my colleagues, would occasionally send him goodwill messages which, to our delight, he replied giving us hope that he was responding to treatment.
I was away in Katsina last week Monday when I received a call from my HOD, Prof Dalha Waziri, informing me of the return of Wakili to Nigeria.
He also told me that there was a plan to visit him on Wednesday, at the National Hospital, Abuja.
I could not resist such an opportunity, stressed as I was.
We therefore left Kano on Wednesday 17 June and arrived Abuja on the same day, braving the dilapidated condition of the Kano-Abuja road and the general insecurity now associated with travel within Nigeria.
When we entered his hospital room, my hope to see him in an improved condition dissipated immediately.
I saw him covered on the sickbed that was to be his deathbed and he couldn’t know we were there as he had gone far in the journey that turned out to be his last.
Three days later, it was on a ‘dark and unforgettable Saturday’, the 20th of June, I received a traumatizing call from his niece confirming my worst fear that he had died.
It wasn’t unexpected, though.
An inspiring teacher
Prof Wakili was my teacher and a colleague at the Department of History, BUK.
My first contact with him was when I was admitted through direct entry into BUK to study BA History.
He was the then Acting Director, before he was subsequently confirmed as the substantive Director, of the Centre for Democratic Research and Training, Mambayya House (later rechristened the Mambayya House, Center for Democratic Studies).
The undergraduate students in our Department, especially those who were in level III, were narrating different stories about his personality, the courses he taught and his teaching methods.
I registered with his course, HIS3308 Comparative Historical Methodology, which was a core course that all students majoring in History must take.
He introduced us to advanced historical methodology and the new trends of inter-disciplinarity, multi-disciplinarity and cross-disciplinarity.
More importantly, he made us to appreciate, grasp, love and value scholarly pursuits, the practice of history and the historical enterprise.
He made sure that his students worked assiduously and diligently to understand their subject matter and the role and relevance of history to individual, family unit, society, state formation, nation building and human development.
He used history class to instill self-respect and self-pride in his students and always encouraged them to never settle for less or accept the position of inferiority in the face of parasitic commercialization and commodification of university education.
I remember his intellectual and historical pontification whenever he was on the podium.
He always tried to justify that history was the queen of all disciplines on the account of its centrality to all fields of study.
No discipline can do without history; and any society that ignores history does so at its own peril; it is the be-all and end-all of human existence, functional operation of university education and knowledge production.
On intellectual honesty
In addition to the above, and at a closer level, Professor Wakili was my BA dissertation advisor when I was in level IV.
I vividly remember my first meeting with him.
He appeared serious, as was characteristic of him, and briefed me about his personal principles and work/research ethics.
One of the important issues raised that I will never forget was the need for any student of history, aspiring to become a historian, to suppress primordial sentiment and at the same time to always imbibe/symbolize intellectual honesty.
There was arguably, nothing within the four walls of university that gave him pleasure like intellectual discourse, scholarly disputation, research, identification and nurturing of talents.
He had the patience of sparing his precious time to respond to vexed questions of his supervisees.
In one of my subsequent encounters with him as my supervisor I asked him to shed light on what he meant by intellectual honesty. He responded in a most exquisite and philosophical way.
He explained that it was all about being truthful and sincere about the past, reporting what actually happened and acknowledging your sources as accurately as possible.
He was fond of quoting Samuel Eliot Morrison thus: “no person without an inherent loyalty to truth, a high degree of intellectual honesty, and a sense of balance, can be a great or even a good historian”.
A passion for administration
Professor Wakili was adamant and uncompromising when it came to academic standard and excellence.
He always gave the best and expected nothing less in return.
He persistently emphasized that his students had to conduct original research and at the same time drew their attention to the gravity of the crime of plagiarism.
He was generous with his collections and lent his rare books to his students.
He engaged his students and prodded them to think rationally and critically.
He had passion for administration and recorded huge success as a Director of Mambayya House.
This success catapulted him to the position of the commissioner for education in home state, Jigawa State, where he midwifed the establishment of the state owned Sule Lamido University, Kafin Hausa.
After serving as a commissioner, he was subsequently appointed as the Deputy Vice Chancellor (administration) in BUK, the position he held up to the time of his death on 20th June, 2020, at the age of sixty.
I will conclude with the words of American philosopher and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “it is not the length of life, but the depth of life”.
The impact he made on the university system, education sector in Jigawa state and young academics in Nigeria will ever serve as memorials and ‘depth of his life’.
May Allah have mercy on his soul.
Kabiru Haruna Isa, PhD teaches at the Department of History, Bayero University Kano.
Opinion
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Opinion
𝐊𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐰𝐚𝐬𝐨’𝐬 𝐏𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐮𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐁𝐞𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐲𝐚𝐥
Aliyu Isa Aliyu, Ph.D
During my time as the financial secretary of NNPP in Kano state and other political engagements, I saw clearly how many of the so-called fake Kwankwasiyya loyalists behaved. They always came with sweet promises, showing deep respect for Kwankwaso’s leadership and pretending to be his strongest disciples. They claimed they would defend the party’s ideology even with their lives. But the moment they got what they wanted, whether it was an election victory, recognition, or political favour, they slowly pulled away. Their loyalty was never to the Kwankwasiyya movement, but only to their own ambitions. Personally, I never regarded their loyalty, never praised them, and never wasted my time writing about them.
What surprised me most was Kwankwaso’s ability to take all of this without holding any grudges. Time and again, he welcomed them back whenever they were politically stranded. Instead of shutting them out, he gave them another chance, teaching us that leadership is not about revenge but about building bridges, even with those who once betrayed you. Many of us in the party leadership found it hard to understand this level of patience, but over time, I came to see it as part of what makes him a rare politician in Nigeria.
This same cycle has repeated itself in every election season. Politicians who abandoned kwankwasiyya the most critical times would always return in desperation, and Kwankwaso would open the doors again. For him, the bigger picture has always been the growth of the movement and the empowerment of the masses, not the small politics of exclusion. But from my own experience, I have seen both the strength and weakness of this approach. The strength is Kwankwaso’s unmatched generosity and forgiveness, but the weakness is the opportunism of those who treat leadership as a shortcut to power. In 2024, some of them worked tirelessly with all kinds of deceit just to secure tickets for their boys as local government chairmen, but thankfully Madugu Kwankwaso was firm and did not fall into their trap.
Now the time has come for our leader, Senator Kwankwaso, to reflect on his political generosity and take the right stand. It is better to lose an election with true loyalists than to win with those sabbatical politicians who only come for their selfish gains. Nobody can deny that they contributed to NNPP’s growth in Kano, but the truth is that the sacrifices Kwankwaso made for them are far greater than what they have done for him or the movement. Before their defection to NNPP in 2022, there were committed people already vying for those positions, but they were pleaded to step down and hand over the tickets for free. You cannot build a political movement with people who carry two faces. In politics, you are either here or there; there is no middle ground. Kwankwasiyya is not only about winning elections, it is also about discipline and sacrifice. We won clearly in 2019 before the election was declared inconclusive, and we still won in 2023 despite the odds. If Almighty Allah has destined our victory in 2027, no betrayal can stop it, no matter who leaves Kwankwasiyya.
– Aliyu Isa Aliyu, Ph.D
Opinion
A reply to Dan’uwa Rano’s from makafi to awakai: the display of blind plotics and political idolatry
Ibrahim Bello-Kano
I’ve read Danuwa Rano’s post as a trained and professional critic of prose works, both fictional and non-fictional (the kind of writing in which the writer and the narrator are the same person, and in which there is a direct mode of address to the purported reader of the writing, the text). Thus, my response to this post, shared on this platform, is three-fold.
1. The writer, Danuwa Rano, is a well-known member or sympathiser of the APC in Kano and a supporter of an aspiring APC candidate for the position of the Gov. of Kano State, despite his critical yet digressive comment on the Gov of Jigawa, Namadi, Abubakar Rimi, and Aminu Kano, to cite just those three. In my academic field, we train our students in the literary criticism of non-fictional texts to look for the writer’s MOTIVE for writing. Usually, in this kind of writing, the writer does not reveal his motive (which is usually hidden) for writing directly but takes detours, digressions, and other textual strategies of establishing some nuggets of “authenticity”. Just a ploy to deceive the unsuspecting or the gullible reeader, to say the least. If and where the writer is well known, we also seek to read his previous works, including his podcasts, interviews, or open attitudinal-ideological stance in relation to public discourse.
2. We also probe the text for its linguistic “unsaids” or “non-saids”, namely its TONE and the perspectival presentation of events and people (we call this reading or interpretive strategy “symptomatic reading”). It’s interesting that the writer himself reveals that his text was inspired by a previous one critical of Kwankwaso and the Kwankwasiyya movement, written by Auwal Anwar.
3. After a thinly veiled ideological bad faith on the part of Danuwa Rano, he delves into a moralistic discourse, namely that God/Allah has created human beings with dignity and with self-worth, higher than those of the animals such as “goats”; and much more integrative than the blind (“makafi”). But Danuwa Rano is clearly not very educated in how language, in this case Hausa and English, work. In language, in Hausa, we call or regard someone that is a maestro, a highly gifted person, in any vocation or an endeavor, as, or by describing him as “shege” or “maye” in or about something that we admire or value (masterly). Why is that? Language has both DENOTATION and CONNOTATION. In any Hausa dictionary, the denotation of “Shege” would be “bastard” (illegitimate within the marriage-kinship and cultural system). But when used in the context of connotation, “Shege” describes someone with admirable skills, in appreciation of his or her skills, mastery, and distinguished capacities. Alas, this is what Danuwa Rano has missed. So, in every linguistic comminity, symbolism, figuration, and emblematic descriptions are never far away from the symbolic sphere of experience. Here’s another example from the English language. Expressions such as “evil genius” and the Latinate “maestro” exist because symbolisation or figural descriptions are creative, a way of coming into the undecidable space of appreciation and appropriation, including the anxiety about what we denote in the cultural-linguistic game, and in our unconscious.
4. Rather bizarrely and crudely, perhaps even maliciously, Danuwa Rano fails to see, blinded by his ideological moralism, that whenever the Kwankwasiyya people call themselves “makafi” and “awaki” they are, in fact, ENGAGING IN the SYMBOLIC PARODY of their opponents, that is, those who criticise them for being resolute and committed political agents in a certain way. To borrow a metaphor from Michel Foucault, it is the Kwankwasiyya people’s way of “self-presentation” in the political and democratic arena. Indeed, it was the same process at work when the British Workers called themselves “Chartists” (based on their Charter of Demands). But we know that a group of human beings cannot be a List or a Charter. Rather, in language, any group can identify with a colour (“Red” for communists and Marxists; Green for Muslims; or with emblems (the Crescent Moon, The Cross, or the Hammer and Sickle, or just an Effigy; a country’s or a state’s “coat of arms”). Should we assume, then, that the Kwankwasiyya followers are physically, intellectually, or ideologically blind? But if they were, they would not work for someone, Senator Kwankwaso (RMK), that they couldn’t have literally “seen”.
5. Danuwa Rano is such a poor writer, such a poorly educated person on how language and symbolisation actually work, that he mistook a figural statement as intransitively real and factual. What a pity! In fact, I am tempted here to cite the famous argument of the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, that language as such is only a doxa (opinion) rather than (a) truth (episteme). In this view, language is a kind of rhetoric and thus inherently rhetorical. For example, in the Hausa “Kirari” system, any one can call themselves a lion, a mouse, an elephant, or even a fox, or even, indeed, a “merciless killer”, one who does not and would not spare his enemies. I recall, in my youth, my father admiringly calling my mother “uwar garke” (“the mother of the herd”, his herd) but does that mean she was a cow, the female head of a herd of cows? Certainly not!
6. It is a mark of Danuwa Rano’s ideological project that he mistakes linguistic and symbolic parody for the literal thing. Hence, his weak, unconvincing, and flat moralistic attacks on RMK and the Kwankwasiyya people. The latter are saying that they are deeply committed to their political projects, that they are not the typical political opportunists, fortune chasers, and the “fair weather people” that one finds in the Kano APC. In addition, the Kwankwasiyya “Makafi” are also saying that they see clearly where their principled allegiance lies.
7. If Danuwa Rano were a careful, perceptive thinker or writer of political innuendo, he would have seen something prevalent in the history of Kano since the 18th century, namely the tradition of following religious, sectoral leaders, as seen in the mass of committed followers in Kano of the Tariqa, the Shia, and the Izala, to mention just those three. It’s hard not to find a Kano man or woman that is not openly oriented to those three groups.
8. It is, without a doubt, the same temperament that one still finds in the secular political sphere in Kano. Expecting otherwise in the political sphere of the community is either short-sighted or willful blindness or sheer ignorance, all all three. Or, one might ignore all this in furtherance of his un-stated ideological-political agenda.
9. Let me reiterate a point that I have always argued in public: Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso is, without a doubt, a veritable political leader for many reasons. There is not one politician in Kano today who has the deep and wide charisma as to draw a huge crowd of enthusiastic supporters, with the charm and grace that can score, or in fact has scored, over one million votes in Kano State in the elections. His party’s candidate for Governor scored well over a million votes in the 2023 elections. Even Tinubu lost in Lagos in the 2023 elections (only scored anout 600, 000 votes). For that reason and many others (RMK’s cosmic patience, personal Promesean and Sysipusian endurance, his political sagacity and capacity for brilliant and moving political oratory— the “Ma-a-ha chant”), he is the target of disgruntled enemies, the object of deep malice but that is obscured or hidden as “objective analysis”.
10. But hate him or love him, despite Kwankwasiyya movement or not, one must accept that RMK is simply the modern expression of the new politics that is gripping the imagination of young people and that of perceptive, politically committed intellectuals, those who know what is at stake in the political future of Kano State and Nigeria as a whole.
11. Imagine a political leader, the one whose previously opportunistic followers had deserted when he left office, the man who stayed out of power and elective office for eight years, the man who founded a political party within eight months to the national elections, and yet him and his party swept the board, won virtually all the elective offices, including the Govenorship. I daresay such a man, RMK, is naturally the target of malice, envy, and bruised political egos. Danuwa Rano’s virtuperations on RMK and the Kwankwasiyya movement is one more example of crudely malicious, badly conceived, poorly written attacks on modern Kano’s most successful person and his movement.
Ibrahim Bello-Kano.
