38 Years After . . . Malam Aminu Kano’s PRP, Our PRP Offers Only Hope For Change

By Kabiru Muhammad Gwangwazo (PRP Interim National Publicity Secretary)

The PRP is today, like the proverbial phoenix, retooling and pulling together all those who believed and still believe in the gospel of its founding fathers, of NEPU, of PRP. Of a better life for the Talakawa.

We are working along the trajectory charted by the Late Malam Aminu Kano and his colleagues from their days in NEPU to the PRP which he left us with.

For the past 38 years the chain has remained unbroken. We have had Malam Aminu Kano dying but the ideals he stood, for lived for and left us with remain.

After him, Khalifah Yusuf Hassan was the leader and national chairman. He was from Yobe, even as Late Rimi, one of Malam’s most beloved and shining examples of what the PRP could do was alive and not aligned to the base of the PRP having succumbed to the vagaries of politics and the conspiracy of subversion of the will of the people by the dominant Nigerian political and power elite.

Rimi had remained a PRP politician at heart and in political activism, but the PRP leadership had remained with the line left by Late Malam Aminu Kano.

With Khalifah Yusuf Hassan as national chairman in 1983 and subsequent years, the political twin of Kano’s Late Governor Rimi, Malam Abdulkadir Balarabe Musa who had initially aligned with the Rimi and Imoudu camp of the PRP for obvious reasons had retraced steps and returned to the Malam Aminu Kano PRP fold.

Thus with Khalifah Yusuf Hassan of Yobe, as chairman after Malam Aminu; and Yobe (then in Borno state) being a key progressive community taking its cue from Kano, Malam Abdulkadir Balarabe Musa had taken on the role of PRP Leader strengthening the simple and principled Khalifah Hassan.

After Hassan, the role of Leader and chairman fell to Malam Balarabe Musa whose unswerving principled stand for PRP and the Talakawa was manifest in every material particular in his daily life, in his public life, in his public utterances and position on whatever matter was on the national plate.

He kept the PRP flame burning with an incandescent life that defied all efforts to snuff it out.

Over time the PRP vision suffered the elite conspiracy to supplant it with a diffused form of political activism. This got a life from the military’s tinkering with the nation’s political superstructure creating their phoney “little to the left” and “little to the right” New Breed (otherwise and more properly labelled New Greed) political culture and the leprous political fingers that gave birth to the three unholy political party musketeers of 1999, the AD, APP and PDP. It was them that transmuted into the merged contraptions we have in APC fusing all of the three.

Yet we still have the PRP blooming and now drawing in all who truly care for Nigeria.

With us today we have the PRP of Malam Aminu Kano, of Hassan Yusuf, of Muhammadu Abubakar Rimi and of Malam Abdulkadir Balarabe Musa in the firm grip of a Professor of History, a scholar of contemporary political economy, Malam Sule Bello who had the party handed over to him formally, legally by Malam Balarabe Musa after a still-birthed effort to try out an alternative to fit the new breed political culture that insists on monetisation of politics. A culture brought over from the conservative everything-for-sale politics that has dominated the Nigerian political scene. A culture finetuned by the incursion of the military and their lackeys into politics. That culture is what has failed us as a nation, that has led us down the path of aggravated insecurity caused by the sustained primitive accumulation of those “elected” and “anointed” by the establishment, by their election agencies, by their security apparatuses, and sadly of recent by their pawns parading as intellectuals given the chance to midwife credible polls by a well intentioned assumption of quality and integrity in the most educated and/or certificated of us.

The last few years of Malam Balarabe Musa’s life as Leader of the PRP had been as trying as those of the Late Malam Aminu Kano. Those assigned the role of directly manning the political party and the PRP political views turned to agents of the devilish agenda of those whose focus is to snuff out the light of change that the Talakawa have seen in the NEPU and PRP.

By the Grace and Mercy of God, the handover of the baton of the PRP to an Interim Management started with the reregistration of the party in 2002 that has to be confirmed by the Courts and laggardly so accepted after lots of foot-dragging only a little over five years ago by the INEC.

The tussles that followed since the temporary handover of the PRP to overstayed chairman Malam Falalu Bello in 2018 to plan and execute a convention as provided by the PRP and the 1999 Nigerian Constitution came to unravel after breaching his leadership’s terminal post in 2019. To save the PRP, late Malam Balarabe as National Leader and the BOT Chairman reconvened the platform, used to select the Falalu Bello interim leadership. The platform known to PRP as the NDC (national delegates conference) populated by the relevant State apparatus representatives took back the Party and elected a new Interim leadership. Prof. Sule Bello a progressive intellectual and veteran of the PRP of 1978/‘79 was named interim national chairman to complete the convention process that Falalu Bello failed to do within the timeframe given to his executive opening the PRP up to all forms of danger.

Now that the PRP has returned home to Kano, under Interim National Chairman Prof. Sule Bello, our National Leader, Malam Abdulkadir Balarabe Musa returned to his Maker in peace, a couple of months after putting the finishing touches he had been working on for the last five years of his event filled life, a life lived fully in the democratic service of humanity to please God Almighty.

Malam Balarabe Musa transmuted to Higher Glory like his leader and mentor Malam Aminu Kano did having established the primacy of the Democratic Humanist politics he preached.

The PRP remains the only shining light of hope to salvage the Nigerian nation as the turmoil unleashed by its wanton rape continues to fester, as insecurity caused by poverty, by bad governance, by inordinate greed, by the passive complicity of the elite reach a peaking crescendo.

The PRP of Malam Aminu Kano, its nationalist and truly pragmatic progressive world view is the last hope as Nigeria hops on the precipice, as disaster sits with us and envelops us all.

May Allah guide us all to the right choices, and save us the horrors of the evils we do and the evils we allow, knowingly or unknowingly.

We pray for the repose in aljannatul firdaous of our late Leader Malam Aminu Kano who is 38 years dead today.

We pray for the repose of Late Kano PRP Governor, Alhaji Muhammadu Abubakar Rimi, Late Kano PRP Governor, Alhaji Muhammad Aliyu Sabo Bakin-Zuwo, late Kaduna PRP Governor Malam Abdulkadir Balarabe Musa and all the leading PRP and NEPU leaders, believers and cadres we have lost over the years. And we pray fervently too for all the Talakawa who were hastened to their untimely graves by the rascality of the ruling elites that has kept the nation down.

Our appeal today is for all who genuinely believe to rally round the PRP.

It is time to come together, to work to the program and the object of the PRP. It is time to try what has been tested and trusted. Truly and genuinely.

It is time for ideas.
This is not a time for blame games. It is time to come together.

The time is now. In exactly two years, the 2023 general election year, Malam Aminu Kano would be 40 years gone and his PRP, our PRP would be 45 years on ground.

Its record in Kano and Kaduna (under Muhammad Abubakar Rimi, Sabo Bakin Zuwo and Abdulkadir Balarabe Musa) and its offsprings in Kano and Jigawa in the last decade (under its sons, Sule Lamido and Rabiu Kwankwaso) even under the tainted new politics are a pointer to what hopes it has on offer.

It is time to show what principled ideals mean, what ideas can do.

To paraphrase a prominent and illustrious son of Kano, a military general with a difference, late General Murtala Ramat Muhammad, “our destiny is ours to make or to mar..”

It is time to change the change.
To revert to the right path.
PRP is all yours. Don’t miss the train.
Signed
KABIRU MUHAMMAD GWANGWAZO
PRP Interim National Publicity Secretary
Saturday 17th April 2021
4th Ramadan 1442