On 9 March 2020 the Kano State Executive Council, presided over by Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, deposed His Highness Muhammadu Sanusi II — former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (2009–14) and 14th Fulani Emir of Kano since June 2014 — citing what the Council called 'total disrespect to lawful instructions from the office of the Governor and other lawful authorities.' Within hours, Sanusi was bundled by combined security agencies onto a military aircraft and flown to Awe, in Nasarawa State, where he was placed under restriction at the Government Lodge.
The action followed years of public friction. Sanusi had used the Friday-sermon platform of the Kano Emirate to criticise federal economic policy, northern educational under-investment, the Almajiri crisis, child-marriage practices, and what he called the 'rentier failure' of state governments. Ganduje had earlier issued, by Kano State Emirate Council Law 2019, a reorganisation that broke the historic Kano Emirate into five separate emirates — a measure widely read as an instrument to dilute Sanusi's authority.
The legal sequel was swift. On 12 March 2020 the Federal High Court, Abuja (Anwuli Chikere J., FHC/ABJ/CS/318/2020), granted Sanusi's ex parte application and ordered the immediate release of the deposed Emir from confinement, holding that his banishment to Awe violated his constitutional right to liberty under section 35 of the 1999 Constitution and his right to freedom of movement under section 41. He was released and travelled to Lagos.
The political reversal came four years later. On 23 May 2024 the Kano State House of Assembly, under Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf, passed the Kano State Emirate Council (Repeal) Law 2024, repealing the 2019 reorganisation and restoring the single Kano Emirate. The following day Yusuf reinstated Sanusi as the 16th Emir of Kano. A counter-suit by the deposed Aminu Ado Bayero produced months of duelling court orders and a brief 'two-emirs' standoff at the Kofar Kudu and Nasarawa palaces; by mid-2025 Sanusi's reinstatement was operationally settled.
The Sanusi episode crystallised three features of Nigerian governance: the political instrumentalisation of traditional institutions through state legislation; the willingness of the federal judiciary to police executive deprivation of liberty even of high-status persons; and the persistence of public-intellectual dissent inside the Northern emirate system — a dissent the throne has, in Sanusi's case, twice survived.