Sardauna vs Northern Governors II

Sardauna was the classic example of preparation meets opportunity in political leadership. He was prepared for leadership not because he was a prince, but because he actively learned. At Katsina College, Sardauna learned what colonial policy had designed for the school to teach in the first place: advanced studies, administration, discipline, and most importantly, to […]

Sardauna was the classic example of preparation meets opportunity in political leadership. He was prepared for leadership not because he was a prince, but because he actively learned. At Katsina College, Sardauna learned what colonial policy had designed for the school to teach in the first place: advanced studies, administration, discipline, and most importantly, to learn and understand the overall framework of leadership for the northern Nigeria of the near future.

Today’s northern governors, on the other hand, are a mixed bag of difficult to say. Some represent a case of opportunity without preparation; some can be described as the clash of luck against responsibility; while others show us what happens when rank opportunism meets stark reality. Of course, there have been a few good governors in the region since 1999, and a few now still. But overall, it’s a cohort of under-preparation and under-performance.

Sardauna understood the age he lived and the demands it placed on leaders. He quickly learned that history had just changed; that the aristocracy to which he belonged was no longer solely in charge; that the old world of religion and tradition—the world of his parents and grandparents—must find common ground with the new one of modernity. In time, Sardauna would regard himself as embodying both continuity and change, and position his leadership as the bridge between these two worlds in harmony, not conflict, in northern Nigeria. Sadly, newspapers and political commentators of the time, more out of ignorance or a lack understanding, dubbed this tendency to balance the new with the old harmoniously as a “conservative” political attitude. In fact, however, it was well ahead of its time in its liberalism.

Bello also had a clear sense of purpose: a clear idea of what the problem was, and what the leadership needed to do to help the situation throughout the northern region. He knew that the northern region had a unique set of problems that were different in kind, not just in degree, with the rest of the country. On the social and economic realms, he knew that the north lagged far behind the south in education, infrastructure, and general economic development.

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Sardauna, therefore, took education very seriously. He wanted the northern region to train not just enough cadres of civil servants, military officers and modern professionals, but also to build a northern private sector from the ground up. It is remarkable that some of the policy initiatives, Bank of the North for example, to generate and nurture the private corporate and professional sectors in the north are to date still the most ambitious ever in the region, sixty years after. Today’s governors build pointless flyovers and bridges even where there are no rivers, but they have no idea individually or collectively about how to grow the private sector in the northern region, without which we will remain an economic tail of the south.

Instead of building these flyovers, the governors might as well burn the cash or throw the money into the River Niger: the two actions would have the same long-term effects. In fact, the flyovers being erected in most northern states, including in Kano and Kaduna, the only two places where there are any genuine needs for them, are symptoms of a deeper leadership malaise in the northern region today. Whereas Sardauna turned himself into an expert in several fields, from agriculture to industry, taxation and finance, to education and health, etc, to enable him lead effectively, few northern governors have given themselves that sort of broad-based leadership education, precisely because they are effectively isolated from the people they claim to lead, and more so because their leadership lacks any serious sense of mission or purpose.

As northern Premier, and even before, Sardauna made it his job to talk to everybody and learn from all: farmers, extension workers, marketing board people, or whoever. There was not much of what we now call “data” at the time, but there was sincerity and sense of purpose. He was always saying that the office he held was not for personal vanity but a position in trust on behalf of and in the service of the people. More than that, he lived this pledge in every possible way. As many have recounted, it was hard to be around Sardauna and not be infused by his energy and sense of commitment to service. Most of those who worked directly with Sardauna have now died, but like him, many carried that commitment to service to their graves.

That’s one of the more striking differences between Sardauna and most northern governors of the past half century. Sardauna inspired belief and trust in nearly all of the people he led. Few northern governors, on the other hand, can inspire the people they lead in any direction, except perhaps in sectarian directions, as we have seen since 2000. Few governors have a clear idea of the social and economic problems of their states, let alone a set of workable solutions to them. Few governors embody any values that inspire the people around them.

On the cultural and political realms, Sardauna knew that the North was—as it remains today—the most diverse part of Nigeria in terms of ethnicity, language and religion. Above all, he knew the north’s ethnic and religious diversity, and relative economic disadvantages, made it political gunpowder in a wider Nigerian context, unless a genuine and enduring sense of unity and oneness, which scarcely existed before even during caliphal times, were forged.

Sardauna did not care much about political diversity or differences. He didn’t care much if you were NEPU or UMBC politically. He just didn’t want sectarian divisions to spill into politics, period. And so, to hold the region’s diversity together, he emphasized mutual respect, compromise and justice for all. Sometimes, development projects did not favour the immediate areas that raised the revenues for them. But he was minded only by the greater good. It is for these things that he was able to hold the north’s diversity together. And for three decades after him, what Sardauna feared the most—that religion should burst onto the plane of politics in northern Nigeria—did not happen. It certainly didn’t happen under his watch.

In many northern states today, to be a governor is to possess the ability to divide the people, to see yourself as belonging to one side of the divide, and some of your people on the other. To be a governor in some states today is sometimes to be directly responsible for mayhem or the rhetoric that causes mayhem in the very state you lead. No doubt, the northern region has been relatively calm since at least 2015, despite the sporadic outbreaks of strife here and there or now and then. Yet, the open wound of mutual sectarian hate festers underneath in part because neither the leadership nor the followership has realized what Sardauna knew above all: there would, forever and ever, be no winners of sectarian strife in northern Nigeria. Whether the north remains a part of Nigeria or becomes a separate entity, the only model of peaceful co-existence is Sardauna’s model of cultural harmony even amid political diversity.

No one can bring Sardauna or the old northern region back. But we can sure learn a thing or two from that era. If you are a northern governor, you certainly will.