By Adamu Aminu
Political disagreement is not the problem. Nigeria’s democracy was built on the expectation that citizens and their representatives would argue, differ, and contest ideas openly. What is happening in Kano today is something else entirely. It is not a debate. It is decaying.
In recent weeks, the public exchange between two political proxies in Kano has crossed every line that should separate legitimate criticism from outright character assassination.
What began, ostensibly, as political rivalry has degenerated into insults, curses, and personal attacks that now extend beyond the individuals involved to their families. Parents, spouses, and children — people who hold no office and made no political claim — have been dragged into a contest that was never about governance in the first place.
It is with genuine concern that this must be said plainly: the recent exchange between Alhaji Usman Sharu Baban Lungu, an elderly statesman in his eighties, and Alhaji Nagoda, an aide to Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf, descended into accusations too grave and too dishonorable to repeat here — accusations that dragged innocent family members into territory no political disagreement should ever reach. “Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un”
Whatever their differences, two men of public standing — one of them elderly enough to command respect by age alone — have involved their own households in conduct that neither politics nor personal grievance can justify.
Is this the legacy they intend to leave for their children, and for their children’s children, long after they are gone? A name is the one thing a person carries beyond death.
This is not politics. It is a scramble for relevance, dressed up as loyalty. By all appearances, both men are not fighting for ideas or for the people of Kano. They are fighting for attention, for patronage, for whatever crumbs might fall from a political table they hope to remain seated at.
None of this happens in a vacuum. Social media pages and radio stations are institutions that ought to apply editorial discipline and ethical restraint, and have instead become amplifiers. A radio interview is meant to test a politician’s ideas, not to provide a stage for insults. Yet politicians whose speech is more familiar with vulgarity than with policy have found that behavior rewarded with airtime and circulation, because outrage travels faster than substance.
The mudslinging is no longer whispered in private. It is broadcast and shared, in the hope of impressing political godfathers who measure loyalty by how loudly their proxies can humiliate a rival.
This raises questions Kano cannot afford to postpone. Where is Kano’s political direction heading when public office is pursued through insults rather than ideas?
Is this the inheritance we intend to leave the next generation, a political culture where vulgarity is normal and dignity is optional?
Has character assassination become a shortcut to relevance, a way of chasing clout rather than earning trust?
And where are the gatekeepers in all of this?
The Kano State Governor, political leaders, religious clerics, and other well-meaning individuals who command moral and civic authority in this state cannot claim ignorance of what is unfolding on air and online.
Their silence is not neutrality — it is consent by omission. Religious clerics who ordinarily do not hesitate to speak on matters of public morality owe the state a word on this matter.
A society that leaves moral guardianship to chance will, sooner or later, find that vulgarity has filled the space their silence left behind.
Constructive criticism holds power accountable. It sharpens argument and improves governance. What Kano is witnessing instead is the normalization of verbal immorality. Left unchecked, this trend does more than embarrass the individuals involved. It teaches a generation of young people in Kano that vulgarity is a legitimate substitute for vision.
Kano’s institutions, political, religious, and media alike, must now decide whether they are custodians of public discourse or accomplices to its collapse.
Adamu Aminu writes from Kano.