By Hon. Muhammad Sanusi Kiru (Former Commissioner for Education, Kano State)
The recent commentary titled “The Administrative Sabotage – Two Captains in One Boat” is not merely an exercise in poor logic; it is a frantic scream of intellectual insecurity. While the author attempts to weave a tale of “strategic humiliation,” he has only succeeded in exposing a staggering ignorance of how serious governments function. To suggest that a sitting Commissioner is “castrated” because he serves on a committee chaired by a veteran is a weak, infantile argument that reeks of the very “ego-driven” sickness it claims to oppose. It is a direct insult to the supreme discretion of His Excellency, Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf, and it is time to dismantle this hollow narrative with the cold, hard facts of administrative reality.
Let us address the professional disparity that these defenders of mediocrity are so desperate to ignore. Professional pedigree is earned in the furnace of decades, not granted by the stroke of an appointment letter. Malam Muhammad Garba is a journalist of global stature, a man who rose from the newsrooms to lead the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) and the West African Journalists Association (WAJA). He is a master of the craft with eight years of executive experience in this specific portfolio. In contrast, while Comrade Ibrahim Abdullahi Waiya is a legal practitioner, he is a guest in the house of media management.
In any civilized governance structure, when a technical task is required, you put the subject-matter expert at the helm. For a lawyer to be mentored by a world-class journalist on a communications committee is not an “insult”; it is a privilege. To suggest otherwise is to argue that a student is “humiliated” by being taught by a professor.
The “Two Captains” metaphor is the hallmark of a mind that lacks wider experience.
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Those echoing this betray a fundamental inability to distinguish between Executive Line Authority and Technical Ad-Hoc Committees. In the Ministry, the Commissioner is the head; in a transition committee, the Chairman is the specialist. This is a global gold standard, practiced from the hallowed halls of the United Nations to the cabinets of the United States and the United Kingdom, where sitting ministers frequently serve under retired veterans to tap into “institutional memory.” Are we to believe that these global powers are also practicing “governance suicide”? Or is it simply that the authors of this discourse are too professionally shallow to grasp the concept of technical hierarchy?
Those rising in defense of Comrade Waiya must stop their dangerous games. Let us be clear: most of those attacking the government’s decision are simply uncomfortable with the new political realignment in Kano. They are terrified because the government they failed to showcase or protect for nearly three years is finally gaining public visibility and professional traction. Having held the state’s information machinery to ransom under the dictates of their own incompetency, they now fear the arrival of authoritative experts who actually understand the terrain of journalism.
By labeling the Governor’s strategic alliances as “sabotage,” these individuals have effectively unmasked themselves as political sycophants, individuals who claim to serve the Governor while simultaneously suggesting he is too incompetent to structure his own administration. Their loyalty is fragile and conditional, rooted only in the hope of personal aggrandizement. They are not “protecting the office”; they are protecting their own vanity because they were not allowed to chair a temporary committee. This is the height of hypocrisy: claiming to support the Governor’s “New Kano” vision while attacking the very handshake he has authorized to consolidate the APC merger.
The era where positions were held by those who fear being overshadowed by competence is over. Kano State is in a phase of sophisticated political evolution that demands broad-based inclusion. If these self-appointed defenders are so pained by the sight of a veteran taking the lead, it is because they know their own lack of depth cannot survive the scrutiny of a master. Administrative decorum demands that the veteran leads and the appointee learns. It is time to drop the petty, amateurish gymnastics and realize that the mission is far greater than the fragile egos of political interns.