Obinna Chima Nigeria’s Federal Executive Council (FEC) rose from its meeting this week and announced…
A splashy wedding in Katsina State was doubly untimely, but it was the huge billboard erected at the entrance to the city on the eve of the President’s visit that caused the biggest rumpus. The message etched on the billboard boldly stated, “Katsina ba korafi.” It means Katsina has no grievances or no complaints. The billboard caused a stir not only in Katsina but all over the northern states. Many days after the president left, it was still trending on the social media.
Katsina has no complaints when, for a decade now, many of the local government areas in its western part bordering Zamfara State and in its northern part bordering Niger Republic are ravaged by bandits? Insecurity in the state got bumper headlines recently when bandits kidnapped retired General Ismaila Tsiga, a former director general of the NYSC, and held him for many weeks. It was said, not necessarily truthfully, that retired Army Generals all over the country coughed out tens of millions of naira to free Tsiga, was kept on remote rocks in Zamfara State. One of the most sensational kidnap cases of recent times was the kidnap of 340 students of Government Science Secondary School, Kankara in Katsina State in December 2020. Maybe the security situation has improved in recent times but it is yet to completely normalize.
What about the other problems bedeviling Northern Nigeria and indeed the whole country? To ask a few questions, is petrol cheaper in Katsina? Is transport fare between Katsina towns and rural areas cheap? Are Katsina’s roads, schools and hospitals in tip top shape? Is food cheap in Katsina markets? Last year I procured a Sallah ram from a local Katsina market but at the weekend I was warned not to expect a similar good deal because General Abdurrahmane Tchiani has just banned the export of Sallah rams from Niger Republic “to foreign countries,” a clear euphemism for Nigeria. Is the dollar cheap in Katsina State? Or maybe in Katsina they don’t deal much in dollars but in CFA francs and in Saudi Riyals, this being the week when the first batch of pilgrims are departing for the Hajj.
The “Katsina babu korafi” billboard was so controversial that Governor Dikko Radda granted an interview to address it. Two Katsina elders, he said, sent messages to him to protest the billboard’s message. One of them was General Tsiga, who obviously will be the last person to say that Katsina has no complaints. The other person the governor mentioned is Alhaji Garba Dangida, my friend and former colleague at New Nigerian Newspapers with whom I have a small personal issue dating back to 1992. The details are not for public consumption.
Radda said he had nothing to do with the billboard; he did not know who erected it; he did not know that it was erected until people drew his attention to it; and he said he did not agree with its message that Katsina did not have any complaints. What better time to put forward your complaints than during a presidential visit? Ahead of the visit, the governor said he sat down with his advisers and they listed three matters that they placed before the president, including security, a water project and abandoned airport projects.
Ok, soon after the governor’s interview, I read another post in the social media which provided a somewhat plausible historical background to the billboard. The man said that in the wake of APC’s contentious governorship primaries in the state in 2022, Architect Ahmed Dangiwa, the current Minister of Housing who finished fourth after Radda, declared that Katsina ba korafi, meaning he and his supporters accepted the election results and would not mount a protest. That is probably why he is a minister now; governors do not often back their rivals to bag ministerial portfolios lest they become empowered and return to challenge them in the next election. According to the man, it was this same billboard that was hoisted ahead of Tinubu’s visit, to declare that there is unity in the state APC.
If so, that was very poor timing indeed. A presidential visit is very different from a party primary election. That one, you were sending a message to your supporters and other party members. This time around, you are sending a message to the man in the best position to solve the state’s problems and through him, to the whole country and the world. How can anybody not possibly know the difference between the two situations? If the president returns to Abuja, very happy that Katsina is the first place he ever visited that said it had nothing to complain about, how could Governor Radda or your senators come later to complain to him about banditry, kidnapping, stalled trade with Niger Republic, the unfinished Kano to Maradi rail line, ungoverned forests or bumpy federal roads?
Whoever erected that billboard goofed big time. No wonder it received the same treatment as the Western detergent trader who transplanted his successful billboards into Arabia. Supporters of Minister Dangiwa transplanted their billboard message from the venue of party primaries to a presidential visit. It was the political goof of a lifetime.