Sardauna vs Northern Governors
At an event that had then presidential candidate Bola Ahmed Tinubu in attendance in Kaduna in October 2022, then Governor of the State Malam Nasir El-Rufai, said, among other things, that: “The 19 northern Governors and the Minister of the FCT are the direct inheritors of the legacy of Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto, Allah […]
At an event that had then presidential candidate Bola Ahmed Tinubu in attendance in Kaduna in October 2022, then Governor of the State Malam Nasir El-Rufai, said, among other things, that: “The 19 northern Governors and the Minister of the FCT are the direct inheritors of the legacy of Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto, Allah ya masa rahama (May Allah be pleased with him/grant him mercy)”. El-Rufai invoked Sardauna in defence of the endorsement of now President Tinubu by the northern APC Governors, yet his statement is notable and should be better understood as template for leadership and governance in the northern region today.
If, as El-Rufai rightly said, northern governors are the torch bearers of Sardauna and his peers like Tafawa Balewa, Aminu Kano, Kashim Ibrahim, etc, what then should we expect of them? Are they even aware of Sardauna’s legacy or their historical connection to it beyond the opportunistic endorsement of a presidential candidate? How should we assess today’s leaders in light of the northern region and the Nigerian nation envisioned by their forebears?
The North is at a governance crossroads, and has been throughout this republic, and I think that reclaiming Sardauna’s legacy of leadership and governance should at least in part form part of any attempt to forge a viable path for the present and future. So, what is this legacy and how should we now assess his inheritors, as El Rufai put it? In my rereading of John N. Paden’s 800-page tome, Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto: Values and Leadership in Nigeria (1986) for this series of articles, I would summarize Sardauna’s political leadership into three core features—as unfair to both Paden and his subject as such as summary would be.
First, Sardauna genuinely loved the people he led, in the sense of what today’s political scientists would call paternalistic, that is, as a father loves his children enough to take their welfare and future seriously, but without the authoritarian impulses inherent in the modern term. Because of this, it was easy for him to regard his leadership as truly a call to service, and to act like it every day. Moreover, Sardauna saw himself as one with the people he led, not above them or removed from them. He was probably the most powerful politician of the age in this country, but also among the most accessible. Students and low-level employees could see Sardauna as much as his cabinet colleagues could, even though, he was also a blue-blood of the highest order. Sardauna attended events at primary schools and township markets, and often ate the same food as his drivers and servants, and sometimes with the same bare hands as they.
Above all, Sardauna was clear-eyed about his identity as a northerner, which he embraced wholeheartedly without being blindsided to his broader Nigerian identity. He was also clear-eyed about the North’s social and economic disadvantages at the time, and saw it as his duty, and the duty of the northern leaders of his generation, to speak and stand up for the northern region within a wider national politics that had been effectively regionalized even by 1945.
This is what Sardauna had the most in common with his staunchest rival in Nigerian politics, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who a decade before Sardauna’s rise, had himself sought to redress the perceived dominance of the Southeast in national and southwestern (Lagos-Ibadan) affairs. That most people do not see this is precisely because Awolowo was more effective in achieving his regional agenda within Nigerian affairs than Sardauna ever was, since Awo had more time—1945 to 1987—unlike Sardauna whose life and leadership were both cut short in 1966. The late President Buhari’s unambiguous embrace of his identity as a northerner, regardless of what others thought of it, also accounted for much of his huge popularity in the north, as compared to several of his political peers in the region.
In contrast to Sardauna, however, the most distinctive thing about northern governors today is their complete dissociation and utter removal from the people they claim to lead. In terms of accessibility, an important feature of leadership anywhere, it is difficult to even characterize what being a governor in many a northern state means today. Most northern governors today are not even accessible to the very cabinet commissioners they appoint by themselves, let alone being assessable to the wider public in their state. This is open knowledge across many states, and is likely true of the majority of the about 80 people who have been governors in the 19 states combined since 1999, particularly those who have held the position from 2015 to date.
As a regional premier, Sardauna also rarely visited Lagos, then seat of the federal government, except for serious state or party events that could not hold in Kaduna, a point Paden stresses as a conscious choice on his part. He also spent quite a lot of time travelling across every part of this vast region, and was constantly on the move, touring provinces (today’s so-called states!), emirates and even within the places we now know differently as the Middle Belt (the term was there then, but it didn’t mean the same thing as it does now). Sardauna met with emirs and chiefs, district and village heads (the local government officials of the day) to discuss policy, inspect development projects, speak with farmers or cooperatives, launch new communal initiatives, mobilize people for elections or for policy implementation, and sometimes just to give everyone a sense of belonging and community, as a part of One North, One People.
Today’s northern governors, however, spend the bulk of their time shuttling between their “Government House” mansions in the state capitals and Abuja, and almost nowhere else. I have seen many a northern governor at events here in Abuja that even as a journalist I have often felt inconvenienced to attend, and always wondered what a governor or their deputy was doing there, since a commissioner representing them would have sufficed if they had serious things to do. This is not true of all the northern governors, now or before, of course, but the broader point holds as those who know Abuja’s politics of unserious events than me will readily admit.
Moreover, while Sardauna knew exactly what his leadership represented, and especially who he represented as a political leader, today’s northern governors are not even sure who they represent, except for during moments of political opportunism. Sardauna spoke and stood up for the north and its people within Nigeria’s fractious regional politics. Today’s northern leaders are ambiguous about their northern identity, and like to present themselves as “national leaders”, which is empirically a complete nonsense in Nigerian politics. If you look closely at body language, rhetoric or policy, you would struggle to find any leaders in Nigeria who match that description from anywhere, and when you do, they are even more likely to be northerners.
Politics, everywhere, is a blend of push and pull between the provincial and the national, particularly in federal states. But you would struggle to find a northern governor who has carefully articulated the place of his state or the north within Nigeria’s national politics since 1999, certainly not anywhere near the ways in which current President Tinubu stood up for the southwest, not just Lagos, throughout the time he was governor and even beyond.
In other words, there is a vacuum of serious and genuine leadership in this aspect of Sardauna’s legacy, among the cohort of northerners El Rufai claims as his heirs. But this is just one of the three features of Sardauna’s legacy of leadership I mentioned at the beginning. The second is that Sardauna was also prepared for leadership. In fact, he was very prepared, as we shall see.