SANUSI FACES BATTLES FROM HIS KINSMEN OVER HIS OUTBURSTS

The Emir of Kano Sanusi Lamido Sanusi is at the moment talking tough.He is attacking the Buhari-led administration and the northern elite for dragging the country and the Hausa nation backwards with their ideas and agenda that are not workable in every sense of the word.The well-learned monarch who rose to the pinnacle of his banking career by becoming one of the best brains in the nation’s banking industry by running different banks in the country and ultimately becoming the head of the country’s apex bank, according to our sources, is now in the bad books of the northern elite because of his outbursts against President Buhari and the opinion leaders in the north.We have it on good authority that the monarch is currently in a very frosty relationship with the leaders of thought in the Arewa nation owing to his bluntness about the state of the Nigerian nation and there rejection of Western mindset and ways of life.We would recall that his frosty relationship with the northern elite started last year when he openly professed his love for Jesus Christ in spite of the fact that he is a custodian of the Islamic religion and a devout Muslim. So many people from his part of the country quickly picked holes in the assertion and also registered their displeasure with the development but Sanusi who is always very blunt just brushed their anger aside.He has also at different times advised men from the northern part of the country against marrying more than one wife if they cannot be cared for. Most men especially the bourgeoisie from the north see this advice as a rebellion against the injunctions of Islam which allows for Muslim faithful to marry up to four wives if they can be cared for materially and spiritually.At the Economic Recovery & Growth Plan launch, Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, said the President’s economic model cannot work!Sanusi said this is because the Federal Government is borrowing unsustainably.Speaking at the Kaduna State Economic Summit in Kaduna recently , the outspoken former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria said Nigeria is spending 66 per cent of its revenues to pay interests on debts, saying such a model will fail.Sanusi said: “The Federal Government of Nigeria is spending 66 per cent of its revenues on interests on debts, which means only 34 per cent of revenues is available for capital and recurrent expenditures.”That model cannot work. If you look at the 2017 budget of the Federal Government, I sometimes wonder what Nigerian economists are doing? In the 2017 budget presented by the Federal Government, the amount earmarked for debt servicing is in excess of the entire non-oil revenue of the Federal Government, but that is not the problem. The problem is that it is a budget that is even going for more debts.”He said at this stage, government at all levels should realise that borrowing is no longer an option and should, therefore, look for ways to attract investments.
“Growth can only come from investments. It cannot come from consumption. It cannot come from government balance sheet. It cannot come from borrowing because you cannot borrow unsustainably,” he said.Sanusi also used the forum to blast the federal government over the idea of the borrowing moneyfrom China.He said: “We have governors; they go to China and spend one month on a tour and what do they come back with, MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) on debts.”China will lend you $1.8bn to build light rail. This light rail will be done by the rail workers from China. The trains will come from China. The engines will come from China. The labour comes from China. The driver is Chinese.”At the end of the day, what do you benefit from it? Your citizen will ride on a train and when you ride on a train, in northern Nigeria, in a state like Kano or Katsina, where are you going to?You are not going to an industrial estate to work. You are not going to school? You are not goingto the farm. You borrow money from China to invest in trains so that your citizens can ride on them and go for weddings and naming ceremonies.”The monarch added that if the North-West, North-East were a nation, they would have been the poorest in the world.”We are living in denial. The North-West and the North-East, demographically, constitute the bulk of Nigeria’s population, but look at human development indices, look at the number of children out of school, look at adult literacy, look at maternal mortality, look at infant mortality, look at girl-child completion rate, look at income per capita, the North-East and the North-West Nigeria, are among the poorest parts of the world.”As far back as 2000, I looked at the numbers, Borno and Yobe states, UNDP figures: Borno andYobe states, if they were a country on their own, were poorer than Niger, Cameroon and Chad.”Nobody saw this because we were looking at Nigeria as a country that averages the oil-rich Niger Delta, the industrial and commercial-rich Lagos, the commercially viable South-East, and you have an average.”Break Nigeria into its component parts and these parts of the country are among the poorest, if it were a country. And we do not realise we are in trouble,” he stated.Sanusi said for the northern region to develop, it must fix its social and religious problems.He said the region must turn its back on 13th-century mindset of religion and culture.”Other Muslim nations have pushed forward girl-child education; they’ve pushed forward science and technology. They have pushed forward the arts. We have this myth in northern Nigeria, where we try to create an Islamic society that never existed.”We need to understand the roots of the problem of northern Nigeria. Burning books, it happened in Kano. What is the crime of those books? They were writing about (love), and love apparently is supposed to be a bad word.”In a society where you don’t love your women and you don’t love your children, you allow them to beg, you beat up your women, why should anyone talk about love?