The Emir of Katsina, Alhaji Abdulmumini Kabir Usman, is an emir after my heart. And it’s not because, as his Nupe overlord, I can knock his kan kwarya (calabash head) any day. Seriously, it is because in less than two years since he ascended the throne he has proved himself a man who can tell truth to power. If this sounds like a strange thing to say about emirs who are supposed to be all powerful in their own right, it shouldn’t; traditional rulers, as we all now know, are no longer as powerful as they used to be once upon the pre-colonial times.

Not for the first time last Saturday the emir spoke truth to President Umaru Yar’Adua who happens to be his subject and the Mutawallen Katsina. The president, the emir said, should move to end the politics of bitterness that has engulfed his state and the country and which has diverted the attention of those in power from their duty of battling the poverty that has been the lot of the masses. The occasion was the emir’s turbaning of some newly appointed traditional title holders in his palace.

Newspaper reports of the occasion made no reference to what the emir may have had in mind but it is safe to say that he must have been distressed at the death in police custody of a local chieftain of the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Tasiu Mashi, following his arrest and brutalisation by the police allegedly at the instance of the authorities in the state as a result of a bitter feud between the two factions that have since emerged within the party in the state, one led by the governor, Alhaji Ibrahim Shema, the other led by the minister of agriculture, Dr. Abba Sayyadi Ruma.

The minister has his eyes on the state’s Government House in 2011. Shema, of course, wants a second term but the minister’s faction seems to have the dubious support of his boss, the president. Dubious because the word making the round is that one of the president’s younger brothers has already been penciled down to succeed Sheme come rain, come shine. Still Ruma, who must be aware of this rumuor, seems undeterred.

Shema, the attorney general and commissioner of justice during Yar’Adua’s first term as governor, is said to have lost favour with the president and his very powerful wife, Turai, for several reasons not least of which was that he was said to have pitched his tent in the camp of a PDP group led by Alhaji Babagana Kingibe, the dismissed Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), whose members thought the president would not survive the serious sickness for which he was secretly flown to Saudi Arabia over a year ago. Shema, according to this story, put himself up as a possible candidate for the vice-presidency under Goodluck Jonathan who, as vice-president, would have taken over if the president had died.

In the event the president did not die. Instead he seems to even be looking forward to a second term. And woe betide anyone who says the man does not deserve a second term because he has not performed or because he still does not look fit enough to last another four years of the presidency’s punishing schedule.

This much can be concluded from the hostility with which the presidency has reacted to its persistent criticism by General Muhammadu Buhari who, as the presidential candidate of the All Nigeria People’s Party, lost out to Yar’Adua in the 2007 general elections. According to Leadership of last Friday, a letter from the SGF’s office dated October 10, requested the general to return a ten year old car he had been given by the late General Sani Abacha’s regime as part of his retirement benefits as former military head of state. And for nearly one year now the presidency had not paid the man’s relatively miserable 85,000 Naira monthly pension.

Few actions can be so mean. It simply beggars belief that the presidency would stoop so low to demand the return of a car that was given out by another regime about a decade ago when, in accordance with the existing policy on the retirement benefits for former heads of state, the car should have been replaced twice over, indeed six times over because they are supposed to get three cars each every four years.

If this was meant to hurt or embarrass Buhari, the presidency couldn’t have chosen a more foolish and futile way. For, what is a ten year old banger for a man who had served his country as a governor, as a General Officer Commanding, as a minister of petroleum and as head of state even if, like Buhari, he has reportedly been as squeaky clean as a whistle?

Obviously if those who advised taking this mean action knew the history of the car they probably would have advised differently. If they knew, as they should, that the man had once outrightly rejected a far more generous retirement package from General Babangida who ousted him from power in 1985 and that he only accepted a not-so-generous package from General Abacha only after it was extended to other surviving heads of state as policy rather than a personal favour, they would have thought of a different way to get even with the man.

What the demand for the return of the ten year old jalopy shows is that President Yar’Adua’s commitment to democracy is only skin deep, that is, if it has any depth at all. Unlike his predecessor and benefactor, he may not have used the words "do or die" to define his politics but goings-on in his native Katsina State and the presidency’s reaction to Buhari’s criticisms shows that the difference between benefactor and beneficiary is the same as that between six of one and half a dozen of another.

The president should, however, know that free speech and freedom of association are what distinguish democracy from tyranny, whether it is clothed in khaki or mufti. He should therefore listen to the wise words of his emir and intervene in the politics of his state and of the nation to banish the extreme bitterness which seems to have become the defining character of our nascent democracy since its return in 1999.

The president should know that unless his own state sets an example in genuine democracy and unless he shows that he can tolerate criticisms especially when, like those of Buhari, they are not malicious, his commitment to democracy would remain hollow.