Transcription
There is a geography in Nigeria that most Nigerians have never thought carefully about. It runs like a scar across the center of the country through Benue, Plateau, Nasarawa, Taraba, Southern Kaduna, parts of Niger, Kogi, and Kwara. It is called the Middle Belt. And for 70 years, it has absorbed more violence, more displacement, and more political neglect than almost any other region on the continent.
Now, a bill sits before the Nigerian Senate: Senate Bill 546, formerly titled the National Council of Traditional Rulers of Nigeria Establishment Bill 2024. It was introduced with extraordinary irony by a senator from the Middle Belt itself. And buried inside it is a single clause that has triggered a political earthquake this country has not felt in decades. That clause proposes to make the Sultan of Sokoto a permanent co-chairman of a new National Council of Traditional Rulers with authority over traditional institutions across every region of Nigeria, including the Middle Belt.
The Middle Belt Forum, representing 45 million people, has used words in its official response that Nigerian political bodies almost never use: words like boycott, like resistance, like refusal to recognize. For the first time in a generation, credible voices from the Middle Belt are asking whether this country actually includes them or merely contains them.
Most channels gave you the headline and moved on. We stay until we find the architecture underneath it. If you have never been here before, you just found the channel that tells you what the headline was designed to hide. Subscribe, because what comes next is the part someone in Abuja is hoping you never connect. >> [snorts] >>
But before we go into what this bill changes, you need to understand exactly what it says, who introduced it, and why a son of the Middle Belt became the most controversial legislator in Nigerian politics this year without most people understanding how. Because the timing of this legislation is not administrative; it is political. And the politics underneath it run deeper than most Nigerians have been told.
**What Senate Bill 546 Actually Says**
Senate Bill 546, formerly titled The National Council for Traditional Rulers of Nigeria Establishment Bill 2024, was first introduced in the Nigerian Senate on the 8th of October, 2024. It was sponsored by Senator Simon Bako Lalong, the APC Senator representing Plateau South, a former governor of Plateau State, the immediate past director-general of the Tinubu-Shettima Presidential Campaign Council, and—this is the detail that matters—the Gwadd-Gwemai of the Gwemi ethnic nation. A man who is himself a son of the Middle Belt.
The bill passed its second reading in the Senate on the 13th of March, 2025. It is currently before the Senate Committee on Establishment and Public Service, chaired under the oversight of Senate President Godswill Akpabio. A parallel version sponsored by Representatives Onyinye Ugwuochinyere and Ibrahim Ali sits simultaneously before the House of Representatives.
The stated purpose of the bill is to formalize the role of traditional rulers in Nigerian governance by altering Section 220 of the 1999 Constitution, which currently provides no legal framework for the operations of traditional institutions at the national level. In Senator Lalong's own words during the second reading debate, "Traditional rulers are well-educated, provide crucial non-kinetic roles in tackling insecurity, and deserve formal recognition so that their roles and functions are facilitated."
That is the version designed to keep you comfortable. At the heart of the bill sits a single provision that has united the Middle Belt Forum, Ohanaeze Ndigbo Worldwide, the Ijaw National Congress, the Niger Delta Congress, and even concerned Hausa stakeholders—a coalition that almost never agrees on anything—in shared forceful opposition. That provision proposes that the Sultan of Sokoto, His Eminence Muhammadu Saad Abubakar III, and the Ooni of Ife be installed as permanent co-chairman of the proposed National Council for Traditional Rulers of Nigeria: not elected, not rotational, not subject to review—permanent.
In the words of Luka Biniyat, national spokesman of the Middle Belt Forum, in a statement issued on the 27th of July 2025: "At the heart of the controversy lies a deeply troubling clause in the bill which proposes that the Sultan of Sokoto and the Ooni of Ife be made permanent co-chairman of the proposed National Council for Traditional Rulers of Nigeria. This is an attempt to institutionalize religious and ethnic dominance. The forum warned that if this clause is retained, Middle Belt traditional rulers will neither recognize nor attend any council permanently skewed in favor of the Sokoto Sultanate."
**Why October 2024?**
This bill was introduced 7 months into a presidency whose director general of campaign was the bill's own sponsor. The Tinubu administration needed to consolidate northern traditional institutional support for its 2027 re-election architecture. The bill was introduced 14 months before the earliest possible gubernatorial primary season. It landed during a period when the Middle Belt was already fragile from ongoing security violence and at precisely the moment when 2027 alliance calculations between northern political blocks and Middle Belt governors were beginning in earnest. Timing is always the most revealing detail. Nothing in Nigerian federal legislation is accidental.
The Sokoto Caliphate was founded in 1804 by Usman dan Fodio following a jihad that swept across Hausaland and reorganized the governance of most of northern Nigeria under Fulani emirs. At its height, it was one of the largest empires in sub-Saharan Africa. The British colonial administration, when it arrived in 1900, chose to govern the north through the existing caliphate—what Lord Lugard called indirect rule—because it was easier to govern millions of people through one established authority than through the hundreds of independent ethnic polities the caliphate had conquered or absorbed.
The Middle Belt communities, ethnically diverse, majority Christian, and historically resistant to the caliphate's expansion, were absorbed into the northern region by colonial administrative decisions, not by consent. The Kwarafa Confederacy, which predates the Sokoto Caliphate by a thousand years (documented to circa 800 to 1700 AD), never fell under caliphate control. The Tiv nation was never conquered by Usman dan Fodio's jihadists. The Attah of Igala represents a kingdom that flourished from the 14th century entirely outside the caliphate's reach. The Middle Belt has been contesting the colonial settlement that placed it under Caliphate-aligned administrative structures ever since. Senate Bill 546 is not the beginning of this contest, but it may be its most consequential chapter.
Senator Simon Bako Lalong was the Director General of the Tinubu Shettima presidential campaign council in 2022 to 2023. He introduced this bill in October 2024, 16 months after his candidate won the presidency. The question—whether this bill was a legislative initiative or a presidency-directed political instrument—depends entirely on what communications, if any, occurred between the presidency and the bill's sponsor before October 8th, 2024. That question has not been publicly answered. Its answer changes this bill's authorship, and therefore its meaning entirely. We return to this later.
The Middle Belt Forum has threatened not just opposition, but the formation of a parallel regional traditional institution if the bill passes with the contentious clause intact. In Nigerian political history, the last time a major regional group threatened to form a parallel governance institution was in the lead-up to a constitutional crisis. Whether this threat is a negotiating posture or an operational plan is the question that determines whether this is a political dispute or the beginning of something Nigeria has not experienced before. We return to this as we go on.
But what I just told you is the version they want you to believe—the version that keeps you passive, confused, and watching from the outside. What is actually happening, and who is really behind it, is something else entirely. And that is where this analysis begins.
**The Institutions Involved**
The Nigerian Senate. The bill seeks to alter Section 220 of the 1999 Constitution. Section 220 currently contains no provisions for traditional rulers; it concerns transitional provisions. The bill sponsors argue they are filling a legislative gap. Critics argue the National Assembly is arrogating authority over a domain—traditional rulership—that the Constitution places within state residual powers, not federal concurrent powers. The constitutional basis for federal legislation on traditional rulers is at minimum contested.
Section 315 of the 1999 Constitution is the provision most critical to the Middle Belt's legal grievance, and almost no commentary has addressed it. Section 315(5D) specifically preserves the Land Use Act of 1978. The effect: a constitution drafted in 1999 continues to protect a colonial governance architecture that the Middle Belt never agreed to, and that this bill, if passed, would extend and formalize.
At the national level, the Sultan of Sokoto, His Eminence Muhammadu Saad Abubakar III, holds no formal constitutional office. His authority derives from his position as spiritual head of all Nigerian Muslims across the 19 northern states and the FCT, and from his role as the highest ranking Fulani traditional ruler. He is a religious leader, not a secular monarch in the constitutional sense.
The Middle Belt Forum's core argument is precisely this: institutionalizing a religious leader as permanent head of a National Council of Secular Traditional Rulers violates the secular character of the Nigerian state as protected under Section 10 of the 1999 Constitution, which prohibits the adoption of any religion as state religion.
**The Constitutional Provision at the Center**
The bill proposes to amend Section 220 of the 1999 Constitution to formally recognize and establish the rules and functions of traditional rulers within Nigeria's governance framework. In Senator Lalong's own words during the second reading, "between 1910 and 1960, Nigerian traditional rulers functioned as the executive, legislature, and judiciary under the British indirect rule system." The bill's logic is that restoring formal recognition to that authority is a correction of post-independence diminishment.
Here is the constitutional problem that this argument walks into. The indirect rule system was applied unevenly. In the north, it operated through the emirate system, meaning caliphate governance structures. In the Middle Belt, it was applied by grafting Middle Belt communities onto the very emirates they had historically resisted. Restoring traditional authority to its pre-independence status in regions where that status was the product of colonial imposition is not the restoration of indigenous governance; it is the constitutionalization of colonial conquest.
Here is what Section 315 of the 1999 Constitution actually preserves and what nobody in the commentary around this bill has been willing to say directly. The colonial administrative instruments embedded in that section were designed by Lord Lugard's administration to maintain northern political cohesion through the Sokoto Caliphate. The Middle Belt communities were placed under emirate-aligned administration against their historical reality because it was administratively convenient. What Section 315 continues to protect and what Senate Bill 546 now seeks to extend is a settlement that was never consented to.
The Kwararafa Confederacy predates the Sokoto Caliphate by a thousand years. The Tiv nation was never conquered. The Attah of Igala's kingdom predates the Caliphate by 500 years. These are not grievances; they are documented historical facts, and they are the constitutional argument the Middle Belt has not yet made before the Supreme Court, but may be about to.
Now you understand the legal machinery. But knowing the machine exists is not the same as knowing who is running it, why they turned it on now, and what they intend to do before the next election. That is what we go to next.
**Follow the Power, Not the Statement**
Senator Lalong did not introduce Senate Bill 546 as an independent legislative project. He was, until very recently, the director general of the campaign that put Bola Tinubu in Aso Villa. He did not leave that relationship at the campaign headquarters. Federal legislation by a senator with that relationship to the presidency is never purely personal. The question is not whether coordination existed; the question is what the coordination was designed to produce.
**Who Benefits?**
The APC's 2023 presidential victory was built on a coalition architecture that required the buy-in of northern traditional and political institutions. Delivering federal recognition and permanent institutional authority to the Sokoto Sultanate through a bill that appears bipartisan because a Middle Belt Christian senator sponsored it is a patronage instrument of extraordinary elegance. It gives the northern political establishment something that ministerial appointments cannot: a constitutional anchor for Caliphate institutional authority that no future southern president can easily dislodge. And it appears to come from the Middle Belt itself, which is the most sophisticated move in this story.
**Who Is Bleeding?**
The Middle Belt. In the words of Luka Binniyat of the Middle Belt Forum, "Any attempt to impose a permanent religious figurehead on a national institution of traditional rulers is a violation of Nigeria's secular character. We shall resist it using every lawful and democratic means available to us."
**Documented Fact: International Crisis Group, 2018**
In 2018 alone, the farmer-herder conflict in the Middle Belt of Nigeria was six times deadlier than Boko Haram, with 1,949 documented deaths in 12 months.
**Documented Fact: Foreign Affairs and ICG Combined**
Over 10,000 people have been killed in the Middle Belt farmer-herder conflict in the last decade. In Benue state alone, more than 7,000 fatalities were recorded between 2015 and 2020, next year 2023.
**Documented Fact: Search for Common Ground Nigeria**
Between 2010 and 2015, 6,500 killed, 14.7 billion dollars in economic losses, and 62,000 persons displaced across 850 documented conflict incidents in the Middle Belt region.
Into this context—this unresolved, under-prosecuted, and still ongoing violence—arrives a bill that proposes to install the Sultan of Sokoto as permanent head of a national traditional institution. The Middle Belt Forum has specifically cited the Sultan's historical association with the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association, or MACBAN, whose leader Bello Bodejo was tried for terrorism in 2024 (charges that were eventually dropped), and which has repeatedly been linked to violent herdsmen attacks across the region. The political signal this combination of facts sends to farming communities in Benue and Plateau is not subtle.
**The 2027 Calculation**
The Middle Belt, encompassing Plateau, Taraba, Nasarawa, Benue, Kogi, the FCT, Southern Kaduna, and parts of Bauchi, Borno, and Gombe, is the decisive swing corridor in Nigerian presidential elections. In August 2025, the Northern Ethnic Nationality Forum warned President Tinubu directly: "If the APC repeats the Muslim-Muslim ticket in 2027, it could lose the entire Middle Belt." The North Central APC Forum simultaneously claimed it could deliver 90% of votes from the North Central for Tinubu, provided he does not alienate the region.
Senate Bill 546, if passed with the contentious clause, threatens to trigger precisely the alienation that Tinubu's 2027 coalition cannot survive. The question his strategists are answering is whether to let the bill advance to signature, delivering Northern establishment patronage, or to allow the Senate Committee to amend it enough to neutralize the Middle Belt's constitutional objections before it reaches his desk. That calculation is being made right now, and it is not being made in public.
**The Silent Stakeholders**
Watch who funds the legal infrastructure being assembled to challenge or defend this bill. Watch the Benue Trough oil and gas exploration licensing rounds currently before the federal government. Watch the solid minerals corridor in Plateau and Nasarawa, where mining licenses worth hundreds of billions of naira are under active negotiation. The person whose name never appears in a constitutional dispute of this kind is often the person with the greatest financial stake in its outcome.
Now, I want to stop here because I have been telling you this story as a northern establishment move against the Middle Belt, but there is another way to read Senate Bill 546. What if the Sokoto Sultanate itself was not the initiator of this legislation? What if the bill was constructed by interests closer to the presidency who needed a political vehicle to deliver institutional patronage to the north, and the Sultan's name was chosen because it was the only name with enough symbolic weight to make the legislation politically durable? If that reading is correct, the Sultan of Sokoto is not the power in the story; he is the instrument of a power that has not been named, and the person you think is winning this moment is the person most exposed when the instrument breaks.
If what I just laid out changes how you see this story, drop a comment right now. I want to know where you stood before this video because what comes next is going to change it again. Everything I just told you about the political calculation, it assumes one thing is true—one assumption that if it is wrong, changes the entire picture. I want to test that assumption now because if it fails, then what is really happening here is far more serious than anyone in the press has been willing to say.
**The Identity Question: What the Middle Belt Actually Is**
The Middle Belt is not a state. It is not a tribe. It is not a religion. It is a historical condition: the condition of being the people between—between the caliphate north and the Yoruba Igbo south, between Islam and Christianity, between the grazing roots of the Sahel and the farming values of the Nigerian Plateau. In this in-between space live the Tiv, the Berom, the Angas, the Berom, the Jukun, the Igala, the Nupe, the Tarok, and over 300 other ethnic groups—people who share a geography, a colonial history of administrative imposition, and a present-day experience of political invisibility.
When Middle Belt communities ask, in the context of this bill, whether this country includes them or merely contains them, they are not asking a rhetorical question. They are asking the question that every Nigerian should be able to answer. And the fact that most Nigerians cannot answer it is the damning verdict on 70 years of Nigerian federalism.
**The Security Dimension**
The Nigerian Army's third armored division is headquartered in Jos, Plateau State, the geographic heart of the Middle Belt, and the epicenter of its most deadly ethno-religious conflicts. The Middle Belt is the security buffer between the insurgency-affected northeast and the economic south. When Middle Belt communities lose confidence in the federal government's willingness to protect them—and Senate Bill 546, whatever its intentions, reads in those communities as the federal government formally empowering the institutional leadership associated with those committing violence against them—the security architecture of the entire center of the country begins to fracture. Intelligence cooperation, community policing, civil-military relations, early warning mechanisms for intercommunal conflict—all of these depend on a population that believes the state is on its side. Senate Bill 546, as currently drafted, risks destroying that belief in the region where the state can least afford to lose it.
**The Economic Consequence**
Benue State is documented as Nigeria's food basket, the state with the highest proportion of arable land in the federation. Plateau State hosts one of the most significant solid minerals corridors in Africa, including tin, columbite, lead, zinc, and limestone deposits. Nasarawa hosts the Ajaokuta-Kaduna-Kano gas pipeline infrastructure. These are not peripheral assets; they are foundational to the federal government's economic diversification agenda. Investor confidence in these assets, already suppressed by security instability, does not survive a constitutional crisis in which Middle Belt state governments are seen as constitutionally outmaneuvered by federal legislation. Foreign mining companies, agricultural development funds, and multilateral infrastructure investors all have due diligence processes that treat constitutional disputes in rich regions as deal breakers. Nigeria cannot afford deal breakers in Plateau and Benue right now.
Does Senate Bill 546 strengthen or weaken Nigerian democratic institutions? The answer, in the framework of political analysis rather than political partisanship, is unambiguous: it weakens them. Not because the goal of formalizing traditional rulers' roles is inherently wrong, but because the method—embedding permanent non-rotating ethnic and religious leadership into a national institution without transparent constitutional debate, without meaningful consultation with affected communities, and in defiance of the federal character principle—is precisely the method that has eroded Nigerian institutional trust for 70 years. A democracy that legislates in the dark is not governing; it is maneuvering.
And if the domestic picture is complicated, what is happening at the international level is something else entirely because Nigeria is not just being watched right now; Nigeria is being positioned. And you need to understand by whom and for what.
**Senator Lalong's Actual Position**
Senator Lalong has denied publicly and in writing that the bill proposes to make the Sultan of Sokoto a permanent co-chairman. In his official response to the controversy: "for clarity, the bill provides that the chairman and two vice chairmen representing north and south shall be appointed from among the members of the council. The process remains open, inclusive, and in line with democratic principles." He has accused critics of deliberate misrepresentation and called for memoranda to be submitted to the Senate Committee's public hearing. This denial is significant. If Lalong's reading of the bill is accurate, then either the Middle Belt Forum, Ohanaeze, the Ijaw National Congress, the Niger Delta Congress, and concerned Hausa stakeholders all misread the same document, or the contentious clause is sufficiently ambiguous to generate two entirely incompatible interpretations. In either case, the bill has produced a crisis of trust, which is itself a political event regardless of the legal text's precise meaning.
**The Strongest Case for the Bill's Defenders**
**Argument One: The Stabilization Argument**
Traditional institutions are documented stabilizing forces in fragmented post-colonial states. The Sultan of Sokoto has on multiple occasions publicly condemned violence against farming communities and used his moral authority to de-escalate intercommunal crises that formal security agencies failed to resolve. A bill that gives a peacemaking authority formal institutional tools is not a bill that arms one side of a conflict.
**Argument Two: The Negotiating Posture Argument**
The Middle Belt's most politically experienced voices are using the language of separation strategically. They understand that in a federation where the center cannot afford peripheral collapse, threatening exit is the most powerful negotiating tool available. The MBF's threat to boycott the council and form a parallel institution is a leverage instrument, not an operational plan.
**Argument Three: The Legal Opportunity Argument**
If the Middle Belt traditional rulers want equivalent national institutional recognition, the constitutional space for a parallel legislative push exists. The second schedule concurrent legislative list does not preclude it. The Middle Belt traditional institutions—the Tor Tiv, the Atta of Igala, the Etsu Nupe, and the Amaoko were I lagi—are constitutionally equal to the Sokoto Sultanate. This bill could be amended to reflect that equality. The question is whether the political will to amend it exists inside the Senate committee.
**Correcting the Social Media Misconceptions**
**Misconception One: This Bill Creates Sharia Law Across the Middle Belt**
False. Sharia personal law already exists in 12 northern states under the constitution's provisions for state religious matters. Senate Bill 546 is about governance structure, not religious law. Conflating the two is factually wrong and politically dangerous.
**Misconception Two: The Sultan of Sokoto Personally Sponsored or Directed This Bill**
Not established. The bill's sponsor is Senator Lalong. The Sultan's role in the bill's conception is not documented in any publicly available source. Assertion without documentation is not analysis.
**Misconception Three: The Middle Belt Separation from Nigeria Is Imminent**
False. There is no military structure, no economic self-sufficiency framework, no international recognition pathway, and no internal political consensus for secession. The separation rhetoric is a constitutional pressure instrument. It is effective precisely because it is credible enough to alarm and untrue enough to be walked back.
Now, you have heard the strongest case the other side can make, and you have heard where it holds and where it breaks. So, let me tell you what comes next and why, regardless of which side of this argument you are on, what I am about to say should concern every single one of you.
**The Next Moves**
**The Senate Committee on Establishment and Public Service**
A public hearing is expected. Watch for whether the committee recommends expunging the permanent co-chairmanship clause entirely or amending it to introduce rotation. If the clause survives in any form that preserves the Sultan's primacy, the bill cannot pass without a constitutional crisis in the Middle Belt. If it is amended to rotational leadership, Senator Lalong will claim vindication, and the Middle Belt will claim a political victory. Either way, the original architecture of the bill will have been publicly dismantled.
**The Middle Belt Governors: Benue, Plateau, Nasarawa, and Taraba**
Watch for a coordinated press statement, likely after the public hearing, that reframes their position from opposition to the bill as a demand for a constitutional conference on restructuring. This posture is harder to dismiss as tribal agitation and easier to market to international observers watching Nigeria's democratic health.
**The Tinubu Presidency**
The presidency will maintain public ambiguity until after the committee process. Tinubu will not sign a bill that costs him the Middle Belt before 2027 primaries, but he also cannot afford to publicly withdraw support from legislation sponsored by his own former campaign director general. Watch for back-channel signals, delays in committee scheduling, leaks from the committee about amendment proposals that indicate the presidency is managing the bill's trajectory without fingerprints.
**The Sultan of Sokoto, His Eminence, Muhammadu Saad Abubakar III**
His Eminence has not made a direct public statement on this bill. That silence is the statement. The Sultan's political genius has always been the maintained ambiguity of his institutional position: above the fray, available for resolution, never formally implicated in controversy. That tradition will hold until the moment it no longer can.
**Three Signals to Watch**
**Signal One**
Whether the Senate Committee on Establishment and Public Service schedules or delays the public hearing within 30 days. Delay means negotiations are ongoing. Early scheduling means the committee has already decided its recommendation.
**Signal Two**
Whether any Middle Belt state governor files a formal constitutional referral at the Supreme Court challenging the federal legislature's authority to legislate on traditional rulers national governance. Filing is escalation. Not filing, while maintaining the boycott rhetoric, is negotiation.
**Signal Three**
Whether the Middle Belt Forum's leadership holds formal meetings with any of the declared or likely 2027 opposition presidential aspirants, currently including figures associated with the ADC, NDC, and PDP, before the end of 2025. That meeting, if it happens, signals that the Middle Belt has made a strategic decision to trade constitutional grievance for electoral leverage, and that the 2027 presidential map just changed.
Senator Simon Bako Lalong was the director general of the Tinubu Shettima campaign council. He introduced Senate Bill 546 16 months after his candidate's inauguration. The bill formalizes institutional authority for northern traditional institutions in a way that benefits Tinubu's 2027 northern coalition architecture. Whether a meeting occurred between the presidency and the bill sponsor before October 8th, 2024, has not been publicly established, but the pattern of a campaign DG introducing a bill that delivers institutional patronage to a key political constituency of his principal within the first legislative year is not a coincidence that requires a meeting to explain. The architecture explains itself.
The Middle Belt Forum's threat to form a parallel regional traditional institution is not—based on everything we know about the forum's organizational capacity and its relationship with Middle Belt governors—a operational plan. It is the most extreme version of the negotiating position. What it signals is that the forum has calculated that the threat of institutional fracture is the only leverage strong enough to force a Senate committee amendment. The resolution of this loop is not military or geographical; it is procedural. The clause will be amended at committee. The forum will declare victory, and the fundamental structural question—whether Middle Belt communities have genuine constitutional equality with caliphate aligned northern institutions—will remain unanswered. That is how Nigerian federalism has survived every crisis by deferring the question that cannot be answered.
There is a geography in Nigeria that most Nigerians have never thought carefully about. We began here; we return here. Senate Bill 546 did not create the Middle Belt rage; it revealed it. The bill is not the wound; it is the moment the wound became impossible to ignore. 65 years after independence, a senator from the Middle Belt, a son of the same region now in open resistance, introduced a bill that would constitutionalize the authority of an institution that conquered the north in 1804, but never conquered the Middle Belt. And the Middle Belt, for the first time in a generation, is saying so, loudly, formally, in press statements signed with full names, in threats of boycott, in the language of people who have decided that silence is now more dangerous than speech.
The question for Nigeria is not whether Senate Bill 546 passes or fails. The question is whether the political class that produces bills like this in the way that this one was produced will ever be held accountable by the 220 million people who live with the consequences. You are not passive observers of this story. You are part of the country that must answer it. You now know something that most Nigerians watching the news tonight will never be told. What you do with it—whether you share it, argue with it, or build on it—that is how a democracy survives its own political class. Afro News HQ, Nigeria deserves better analysis. I will see you in the next one. >> [music]