Opinions

When Enemies Share a Bed

January 28, 2026

By Babayola M. Toungo

When Abba Kabir Yusuf assumed office in 2023, power announced itself theatrically. Demolitions followed inaugurations; allegations followed investigations. The new order sought moral distance from the old by staging a public rupture with Abdullahi Ganduje – a politics of negation, where legitimacy was derived not so much from a forward-looking vision as from the dramatic unmaking of the past. In classical terms, this was politics as purification: the city must be cleansed to be reborn.

But philosophy is suspicious of spectacles that confuse action with virtue. Nietzsche would remind us that moral crusades often conceal a will to power dressed as righteousness. The destruction of buildings and reputations functioned symbolically – to reassure supporters that a new moral universe had arrived – even if the deeper structures of power remained intact.

Seismic political tsunami to hit Kano as gov Abba dumps NNPP for APC today

APC to harvest more high profile defections soon – Speaker Abbas

Fast-forward to the present: Abba Kabir Yusuf and Ganduje now share partisan shelter in the All Progressives Congress. The supposed abyss between virtue and vice collapses into a handshake. What, then, becomes of the earlier moral fury?

Here lies the philosophical tension: Nigerian party politics operates less as a contest of ideas than as a marketplace of survival. Parties are not ethical communities but convenient vessels. Aristotle’s polis, ordered toward the common good, gives way to Machiavelli’s principality, ordered toward endurance. Yesterday’s villain becomes today’s ally because ideology is thin and power is thick.

Hannah Arendt warned that when politics loses its grounding in shared principles, action becomes mere motion – busy, loud, but hollow. The Kano episode illustrates this hollowness. If Ganduje’s era was genuinely ruinous, then alliance is an ethical failure. If it was merely politically inconvenient, then the earlier demolition campaign was theatre, not justice.

There is also a Hegelian irony at work. The thesis (Ganduje), the antithesis (Abba’s scorched-earth repudiation), resolve not into a higher synthesis of ideas, but into a coalition of interests. History moves, yes – but not necessarily forward. Sometimes it moves sideways, sometimes in circles.

For citizens, the deeper injury is epistemic. Public trust depends on moral consistency. When yesterday’s sins are forgiven without explanation, truth itself becomes transactional. The electorate is invited to suspend memory, to accept that outrage has an expiry date determined by political convenience.

In the end, Kano’s story is not about personal hypocrisy alone; it is about a political culture that treats principles as expendable and memory as disposable. Power here is not ashamed of contradiction – it feeds on it. And until ideas, not just alliances, carry political weight, the cycle will repeat: demolition today, reconciliation tomorrow, amnesia forever.

Toungo writes from Kaduna.