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, 632,000 naira.”
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.
