The Learner

Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim @muhsin234 I read and heard that no fewer than 100 souls were lost and dozens of others injured in celebrations over General Buhari’s victory in the 28 th March Nigeria’s presidential election. How sad and unfortunate! While telling my wife that people were euphoric to that extent, she instead inadvertently said to me that when we returned to Nigeria in the middle of the year, there would be no more electricity outage, no more terror attacks by Boko Haram, and no more any other unpleasantness. That unrealistic wish left me transfixed, for I have heard and read many others expressing the same or similar expectations, as, to them, the ‘Messiah’ has attained power. So much has been written on the election and on the way and manner President Goodluck Jonathan conceded defeat. I have, however, yet to see any piece on that hankering of the 15 million plus electorates, most of whom are masses, who voted for Buhari. People yearn for Change—the slogan of h...

Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim @muhsin234 As a special gesture to mark Nigeria ’s Independence Day, I wrote an article  in which I extolled the country on October  1 st,  2014. It was a rare piece, for I and many others have written several other articles decrying the decay in the country’s polity, insecurity, falling standard of education, depreciation of the naira, and various other unmentionable issues. Nonetheless, I painted Nigeria as great (as it supposed to be), and, somewhat, ‘denigrated’ my host country, India by comparing them. I now kind of believe I was wrong as a friend pointed it out to me then. I think he’s even more right than he thought he was. Last Sunday, the 22 nd of March, President of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan commissioned a 2.5b naira flyover popularly called “Gadar Lado”, meaning Lado’s flyover, in Kano state. Bashir Garba Lado is the senator representing the state’s central senatorial zone. He was credited as the one who spearheaded the ...

Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim @muhsin234 Without digging deeper into the history lane in the Nigerian politics, many people know that last-hour relinquishment, nay betrayal, by swayers in a political journey often results to the success or failure of a particular candidate. For instance, Kano people saw that in 1999 when a comparatively more popular Engr. Magaji Abdullahi lost governorship election to Engr. Rabiu Kwankwaso. There was a similar scenario in 2011 at the presidential election. General Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) entered into an ill-advised alliance with Action Congress of Nigeria  (ACN) at the last minute of the eleventh hour . It didn’t work as feared. ACN and its south-western supporters dumped CPC and the party’s candidate, too, Nuhu Ribadu for President Goodluck Jonathan (and his party, PDP). Yesterday, a well-informed Yoruba friend of mine posted on Facebook that an experienced friend of his feared that opposition might yet again giv...

Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim @muhsin234 I wrote an article  about a year or so ago on the sweeping spate of dirty politics taking the centre stage of my state Kano , Nigeria . It solely focused on the two leading archrivals, the present governor of the state, Engr. Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso and his predecessor, Malam Ibrahim Shekarau. Their politicking forays into the daily lives of Kano people. Often, loyalty or otherwise to one of them defines our identity. No matter how hard one tries to reconcile the two, he or she is bound to fail. They are practically seen as totally the opposite of the other like fire and water; loving both is believed to be incompatible. Whatever, I stand to defy this fallacy. It’s my humble belief that both did something for the state; both deserve some respect; both are humans, not demons; and neither performed to a T. A few days ago, a very good, elder friend of mine awkwardly described my behaviour of what he calls ‘proving people wrong’ as chil...

Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim muhsin2008@gmail.com As Nigerians, we don’t have to go to a far place like India to learn anything in politics, for two reasons. First, we get a model to learn from right below our noses. I am talking about the Niger Republic , yes, our poor, neighbour Niger . In their last general election of 2011, not a single soul was lost as a result of violence, and everything went on efficiently until the end. Second, India is, independence-wise, older, and, democracy-wise, much older than Nigeria . While our democratic government had been interrupted by several military coups after our independence on 1 st October 1960, theirs is never halted since 1947, when the country got independence from the same British colonial brutes that ruled us. But being here, I can’t help but to appreciate and commend their comportment and confederacy during and after the just concluded general elections. India is famously the world’s biggest democracy with nearly a billion el...

Muhammad Muhsin Ibrahim @muhsin234 The political atmosphere of Nigeria, or particularly of my state, Kano, is by each tick of a second getting more tensed and intense. Although I presently reside outside the shore of the state, one cannot help but see and hear this and that on air and online. I am not a politician, nor into the politics; I had though been a very passive partisan, but even that was a long time ago. I am thankful to Allah that I have successfully quit, and wish to reserve any serious public commentary. Nonetheless, for being things as they are, I couldn’t resist the temptation to break my earlier ‘promise’ not to comment. I believe my motive was well-generated. For, we need relative sanity in the polity, peace in our state and mutual respect among the populace, which are all that the current state of affairs sets out to disperse and replace with impurity, impudicity and perfidy. The incumbent governor of Kano state, Engr. Rabi’u Musa Kwankwaso and his predece...