By Sanusi Bature Dawakin Tofa

Fifteen years have passed since I last held my son, Sadiq Modibbo, in my arms. Even now, the memory of his laughter and the warmth of his tiny hand remains vivid in my mind. There was something remarkable about him, a light that shone through even in moments of fear or pain.

I remember the first time I realized how deeply he loved the simple things that connected him to me.

Whenever he cried, I would gently remove my cap, and just like that, his tears would stop. It was as if the gesture spoke to him in a language only he and I shared—a language of love, trust, and comfort.

Sadiq was often unwell, and our visits to the hospital were frequent. Yet, despite his fragile health, he carried himself with an unusual courage. The doctors, nurses, and other caregivers grew to know him well. They would smile at his little jokes, or nod knowingly when he quieted at the sight of me.

In those hospital rooms, I learned to see him not just as my son, but as a symbol of resilience. Every day, I watched him endure injections, treatments, and long hours of discomfort, yet he faced it all with a quiet strength. Even then, the cap—the small, unassuming piece of cloth—became a tool of love, a reminder that he was never alone.

Sadiq’s love for Kwankwasiyya was another remarkable part of his personality. It was a fascination that seemed larger than his years, and it sparked countless conversations between us. I would watch him with wonder, seeing how a young boy could find joy and meaning in something so vibrant, even in the midst of illness.

I often imagined what he would be like today if he were still alive. Would he be arguing with me as passionately as ever? Would his laughter fill our home in the way it did when he was a boy? The “what ifs” are endless, but in my heart, I carry the certainty that his spirit lives on in every memory, every smile, every small gesture of love that he shared.

Birthdays were special for Sadiq. He would light up at the smallest celebration, reminding us all of the beauty in simple joys. Even as a child who faced health struggles, he found light in each day. I can still see him running toward me, his eyes shining, his cap slightly askew from excitement.

Mourning him has been a lifelong journey. The world continued around us, but I learned that grief is a quiet companion. It is in the small moments—the empty chair at the table, the quiet hospital rooms, the cap that no longer needs to be removed to stop tears—that his absence is most felt.

Yet, even in sorrow, there is comfort. I tell myself that Sadiq’s courage, his love, and his laughter have left a lasting imprint. The lessons he taught me—about patience, joy, and unconditional love—remain guiding lights in my life. Every time I see a child comforted by a parent, I am reminded of him.

Today, I remember Sadiq not with despair, but with gratitude. The cap that stopped his tears symbolizes so much more than a simple gesture; it is a testament to the bond between father and son, to the small acts of love that shape a life. May Allah grant him eternal peace, and may his memory continue to inspire those who knew him—even for just a moment.

Sanusi Bature Dawakin Tofa is the Director General Media and Spokesperson to Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf.

By Muhammad Bello, Dutse, Jigawa State

The lingering power tussle between His Highness Aminu Ado Bayero and His Highness Muhammadu Sanusi II over the revered throne of the Emir of Kano has continued to generate intense public debate and concern across Northern Nigeria and the country at large. For an institution that has historically commanded immense respect, influence, and cultural significance, the prolonged dispute has unfortunately diminished the prestige and moral authority associated with the Kano Emirate.

The Emirate of Kano is not just a traditional stool; it represents centuries of history, leadership, and cultural identity. As one of the most respected traditional institutions in Nigeria, the stability of the throne is crucial not only for Kano State but also for the broader traditional governance structure in the North.

In view of this reality, urgent and sincere efforts must be made to resolve the crisis in a manner that restores dignity, unity, and respect to the institution.

As part of the Kano First Agenda of His Excellency Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf, there is a timely opportunity to take bold and statesmanlike steps toward resolving the impasse. One practical approach would be for the state government to constitute a high-level reconciliation committee made up of respected traditional rulers, eminent Islamic scholars, religious leaders, and elder statesmen from within Kano State and across the country.

Such a committee would carry the moral authority and neutrality required to engage all parties involved and recommend a sustainable solution.

In my humble opinion, the committee should consider the following options:

First, both contending Emirs should be encouraged, in the interest of peace and the preservation of the dignity of the Kano Emirate, to voluntarily step aside by tendering their resignations. While this may appear difficult, history has shown that sacrifices made for peace often preserve institutions for future generations.

Second, the Kano State Government should allow the kingmakers to conduct a fresh and transparent nomination process for a new Emir. Transparency and adherence to tradition will help restore public confidence in the institution.

Third, in order to ensure neutrality and avoid further controversy, both current claimants to the throne should not be part of the new selection process.

The objective of these recommendations is not to undermine any individual but to safeguard the long-term stability, unity, and honour of the Kano Emirate. Institutions of such historic importance must be protected from prolonged political and legal battles that could erode their legitimacy.

Ultimately, wisdom, patience, and a spirit of sacrifice are required from all stakeholders. The people of Kano and indeed Nigerians hope to see a peaceful resolution that restores the dignity of the throne and preserves the rich heritage of the Emirate for generations to come.

May Almighty Allah continue to guide our leaders toward decisions that promote peace, justice, and unity.

By Saminu Umar Ph.D | Senior Lecturer, Department of Information and Media Studies, Bayero University, Kano

Kano does not need to be invented. That is a truth so fundamental, so historically self-evident, that it should not need to be stated at all, and yet the circumstances of recent decades have made its restatement not merely appropriate but urgent. There is a tendency, in the discourse of Nigerian development, to treat every governance initiative as a beginning, as though the society being governed had no prior history of achievement, no accumulated wisdom, no tested traditions of institutional excellence on which new efforts might be built. This tendency is not merely intellectually lazy, but it is, in the specific context of Kano, a form of historical injustice, a failure to reckon honestly with the civilizational inheritance that this state carries and that its people have never entirely abandoned, even through the long and painful decades in which their institutions were hollowed out, their values eroded, and their confidence systematically undermined by the combined weight of misgovernance, corruption, and the slow cultural dislocation that follows when a society loses trust in the institutions that are supposed to embody its highest aspirations.
Kano was, long before Nigeria existed as a political entity, one of the most sophisticated and enduring centers of civilization in West Africa. Its greatness was not the greatness of conquest or of externally imposed order. It was the greatness of organic development, of a society that built, over centuries, a coherent and self-sustaining civilization on foundations that were simultaneously material and moral. The trans-Saharan trade networks that made Kano a commercial hub of continental significance were sustained not merely by geography or by the availability of goods, but by a culture of commercial integrity, of trust between trading partners, of contractual reliability, and of the kind of reputational accountability that makes markets function across distances and between strangers. The Islamic scholarship that gave Kano its intellectual authority was not merely a religious tradition. It was a governance philosophy, one that placed knowledge, justice, accountability, and the subordination of personal interest to public duty at the center of what it meant to hold power. The traditional political institutions that maintained Kano’s social order were not instruments of oppression but, at their best, mechanisms of consultation, legitimacy, and the managed resolution of social conflict.
These were not accidental achievements. They were the products of deliberate cultivation, of generations of Kano’s people choosing, consciously and consistently, to organize their collective life around values that made both individual flourishing and communal solidarity possible. That is what a civilization is: not a collection of buildings or a record of territorial expansion, but a living tradition of values, practices, and institutions that enables a human community to achieve, across time, more than any individual generation could accomplish alone. Kano built such a civilization. And the question that every serious governor of Kano must eventually confront, whether they frame it in these terms or not, is whether they are adding to that civilization or subtracting from it.
It is against this civilizational backdrop that the Kano First Initiative under Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf must be understood, not as a new idea imported into Kano from outside, not as a political slogan invented to win elections and abandoned when the votes are counted, but as a deliberate act of historical retrieval, an attempt to reach back through the debris of recent decades and recover the foundations on which Kano’s genuine greatness was built. The initiative’s framework document states this explicitly and without embarrassment: Kano’s most persistent challenges are not solely infrastructural or economic in nature. They are fundamentally behavioral, normative, and narrative failures, accumulated over time and reinforced by weak value transmission, fragmented authority, and uncoordinated messaging. This is a diagnosis of remarkable historical honesty, and it is one that only a governor with a genuine understanding of what Kano has been and what it has lost could have authorized.
Governor Yusuf’s historical vision is not nostalgic in the sentimental sense of the word. He is not proposing a return to a romanticized past that never existed in the uncomplicated form that nostalgia requires. He is proposing something simultaneously more modest and more ambitious: the recovery of specific values, specific institutional principles, and specific civic traditions that demonstrably worked, that demonstrably sustained Kano’s coherence and productivity over centuries, and that demonstrably began to break down when they were displaced by the governing logic of extraction, patronage, and the systematic subordination of public interest to private accumulation. Islamic ethical governance, communal responsibility, the dignity of productive labor, respect for legitimate authority, the centrality of knowledge in public life, these are not abstract ideals. They are the operational principles of a civilization that actually functioned, and their recovery is not a romantic aspiration but a practical governance imperative.
The intellectual architecture through which this recovery is being pursued bears the clear fingerprints of the Honourable Commissioner for Information and Internal Affairs, Comrade Ibrahim Abdullahi Waiya, whose contribution to the Kano First Initiative has been, in every meaningful sense, the contribution of a man who understands both what Kano is and what it needs. The framework he has championed integrates three traditions that, taken together, give the initiative both its cultural legitimacy and its analytical credibility: the Islamic ethical governance tradition that historically underpinned Kano’s stability and justice, Kano’s own sociocultural heritage of communal solidarity and institutional accountability, and the modern behavioral change communication science that provides the methodological tools for translating values into measurable social outcomes. This integration is not accidental. It reflects a deep conviction, shared by both the governor and his commissioner, that genuine renewal cannot be achieved by importing foreign solutions but only by excavating and rebuilding on Kano’s own foundations.
The scale of what has been lost must be honestly acknowledged if the scale of what is being attempted is to be properly appreciated. Kano today carries wounds that decades of misgovernance have inflicted on its social fabric with a thoroughness that cannot be undone quickly or easily. Youth disaffection has reached levels that express themselves in drug abuse, street violence, and the nihilistic political thuggery that represents, at its core, the rage of young people who were promised a future and received instead a void. Institutional trust, once the bedrock of Kano’s civic life, has been so systematically eroded that the default posture of many citizens toward their government is not engagement but cynicism, not participation but withdrawal. The digital media ecosystem, which should be a tool of civic enlightenment, has in too many instances become a vehicle for the amplification of the very misinformation, polarization, and moral dislocation that the Kano First Initiative is designed to address. These are not small problems, and they will not yield to small solutions.
What gives the Kano First Initiative its historical seriousness is precisely that it does not pretend otherwise. The four-phase implementation framework, stretching from 2026 through 2030, is built on the recognition that the restoration of a civilization’s normative foundations is a generational project, not a political campaign. Phase One builds the empirical foundation, the baseline surveys, perception mapping, and narrative architecture that genuine social intervention requires. Phase Two deploys coordinated, multi-channel behavioral activation across youth networks, religious institutions, traditional authorities, and community organizations. Phase Three scales what works and deepens digital engagement. Phase Four embeds the initiative permanently into Kano’s governance architecture through a dedicated directorate and the annual Kano Values Index. This is not the timeline of an administration managing its image. It is the timeline of a government that has looked honestly at the depth of the challenge and committed itself to the depth of response that the challenge demands.
There is an emotional dimension to this story that deserves to be named directly, because it is one that the purely analytical framing of policy discourse tends to obscure. Kano’s people love their state with an intensity and a pride that is, even in a country of fierce regional loyalties, remarkable. They carry within them the memory of a greatness that their grandparents knew and that they themselves have glimpsed, in fragments and in moments, even through the long decades of disappointment. When Governor Yusuf speaks of restoring Kano’s glory, he is not merely making a political argument. He is speaking to something that lives in the hearts of ordinary Kano citizens, something that has survived misgovernance, political manipulation, and cultural erosion with a resilience that is itself a testament to the depth of Kano’s civilizational roots. That emotional resonance is not a weakness in the Kano First philosophy. It is one of its greatest strategic assets, because renewal that connects with people’s deepest sense of identity and pride generates the kind of civic energy that no top-down programme can manufacture.
The work of restoring that glory belongs, ultimately, not to government alone but to every institution, every community leader, every journalist, every religious scholar, every teacher, every trader, and every young person in Kano who chooses, in their daily conduct, to live by the values that made this civilization great. Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf has provided the vision, the institutional framework, and the personal example of a leader who is willing to pay the political costs that genuine commitment to the public good always exacts. Comrade Ibrahim Abdullahi Waiya has provided the intellectual architecture and the communication infrastructure through which that vision can be translated into civic reality. The rest, as it must always be when a society is serious about its own renewal, belongs to the people.
Kano’s glory was never lost. It was covered over, layer by layer, by the accumulated debris of decades of bad governance, institutional betrayal, and the slow erosion of the values that once made it shine. The Kano First Initiative is not building something new on empty ground. It is clearing the ground of debris so that what was always there can breathe again, grow again, and reclaim the space in Nigeria’s national life and in West Africa’s historical memory that Kano has always, by right of civilization, deserved to occupy. That is the historical vision behind Kano First. And it is a vision worth every effort, every sacrifice, and every ounce of collective will that Kano’s people can bring to its realization.

Saminu Umar Ph.D is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Information and Media Studies, Bayero University, Kano. surijyarzaki@gmail.com