By Mahmud Jega
It could well rank as the most memorable case of message failure since the Western detergent salesman who decided to go international. His salesmanship for his company’s detergent had been simple but very effective in the Western world. He erected huge billboards at choice locations; each billboard was divided into three parts. The first part showed a very dirty piece of cloth. In the middle part, the dirty cloth was soaked into a bucket with the detergent. And in the third part, the cloth emerged squeaky clean. Our salesman then transplanted the same billboard into Arabia. He did not know that, unlike Westerners who read from left to right, Arabs read from right to left. So what they saw on the billboards was a very clean piece of cloth, which was soaked in the detergent, and it came out very dirty.
Katsina State Government and the state’s ruling APC made elaborate arrangements for President Bola Tinubu’s visit to the state on May 2, the first since he became President, complete with full security, gaily dressed party men and women, elaborately attired traditional rulers and many dancing troupes. Half a dozen Northern state governors were brought in to add colour to the occasion, so long convoys and the wailing of so many siren cars made it an occasion to remember. Governor Dikko Umaru Radda had factored the marriage of his daughter into the program. So, here was President Tinubu attending a wedding fatiha. Though he attended several at the National Mosque in the last two years, this was probably the first he attended outside Abuja.
Now, as we can see these days, many state governors are trying to get the president or vice president to visit their states and commission one project or another or flag off one thing or another. A first term governor particularly covets a presidential visit because it guarantees saturation publicity from media houses and the social media, giving him something to boast about when he comes up for re-election. While a second term governor may be through with governorship election, he must be running either for the Senate in 2027 or for the history books. It is important for a governor to lay solid claim to his projects with a presidential imprimatur, otherwise a future governor may spray them with paint and then claim credit. By then you are a former governor, with fewer aides and with no media crew following you around, so you will be hurting and with little chance to correct the false claim of credit.
The Governor of Katsina is a first termer who will be up for re-election in 2027. He is tall, charismatic, dynamic, eloquent in both English and Hausa, got good press by being seen personally carrying fertilizer bags, and in two years has been largely free of controversy. His election victory in 2023 was resounding, with 63% of the vote, but weeks earlier PDP’s presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar clinched the state with 46% of the vote despite its having the APC outgoing president, Muhammadu Buhari and an APC governor, Aminu Masari. Katsina is therefore what Americans call a swing state.
President Tinubu commissioned three important projects during his visit to Katsina, including an Agricultural Mechanisation Centre that has 400 Lovol tractors, ten multi-functional combine harvesters, 400 disc harrows, 70 trailer tractors and 1,000 multi-planters. They were however overshadowed by the wedding of the governor’s daughter. Many local folks thought that Tinubu was in the state for the wedding. Maybe the president’s protocol, security and political aides should have persuaded KTSG in advance to disentangle the wedding from the presidential visit. The danger they now face is that governors all across the country who have marriageable daughters may now factor the wedding into a presidential visit.
In the best of times, a splashy wedding ceremony by a top government official is not very advisable, lest people gossip that state funds were involved. Even if not directly, our businessmen are wont to splash gifts and facilities on the celebrants and the parents. I remember attending the wedding of a governor’s daughter many years ago and as we approached the Government House, I saw more than one hundred cows and oxen tethered in a yard, with trailer trucks unloading many more. Aides whispered to me that they were all donations from well-wishers. Since splashy wedding has no bearing to the success of a marriage, Big Ogas ought to have a rethink.
Not just wedding. A telling example was in 1980, when the Governor of old Bendel State, Prof Ambrose Alli, got a lot of media criticism for the grand burial ceremony of his father, said to have cost the state government N632,000. This was a huge amount in 1980. Chief M.K.O. Abiola’s Concord newspaper, which in the Second Republic was extremely hostile to UPN, published a large cartoon saying, “Rest in peace, Pa Alli. Rest in peace.