Among his oft cited giant strides are that he established the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, which at the time was the largest university South of the Sahara; he set up the largest polytechnic in Africa, i.e the Kaduna Polytechnic; created one of the largest investment conglomerates in Africa, the New Nigerian Development Company; established one of the biggest printing presses on the continent, the New Nigerian Newspapers; and formed one of the leading banks in Africa, the Bank of the North.
Indeed, Sir Ahmadu was credited with the modernisation and unification of the diverse people of Northern Nigeria, hitherto seen as a very rustic part of the country that had no potential of coming out of the woods. It was previously a mere administrative entity created by the colonialists; he moulded it into a strong political entity, a force to reckon with.
Perhaps the Sardauna’s biggest political contribution to the North was he put the region at the centre of the Nigerian political power. His party, the Northern People’s Congress, won Federal power in the first elections after Independence, and so led the coalition government. According to his biographer John Paden, the Sardauna tilted the centre of the nation’s political gravity from the coastal to the hinterland. “This singular act created the stage for national unity, otherwise the entire expanse of the country would have been consigned to the position of primitive backwardness of development,” he wrote.
Since then, the North had, in one way or the other, controlled Federal power until recent events.
Today, most of Sir Ahmadu’s political and economic legacies are in shambles. The NNDC is suffering from poor funding by the 19 northern states. The New Nigerian Newspapers owes staff salaries of up to 10 months. Since his death, political leadership in the North has been diminishing in quality. There are 19 state governors, most of who are unpopular, ineffective and overly selfish. The Sardauna’s ethos of probity, accountability and the common good have caved in to voracious appetite for plunder of public treasury and blind pursuit of power. Traditional institutions also dipped in quality and power. Monarchs were the sole heads of the then native authorities. Today they are not even mentioned in the Federal constitution, and are therefore reduced to being yes-men of the state governors and other top politicians.
Perhaps the biggest manifestation of Sardauna’s passage is in the dwindling unity of the North. Ethnic and religious hostilities have come to symbolise the region, which was hitherto an epitome of peace and tolerance. Kaduna and Jos, two places that most symbolise the receptive nature of the peoples of the region, have now become hotbeds of internecine ethno-religious clashes. The North’s political fabric has been torn into pieces and Federal political power has moved southwards.
In a tribute to the late premier, a public commentator, Mr. Paul Mamza, painted a picture what Sardauna would see today if he were to come back: “He would have seen his hard earned ideals crumbled due to in-continuity of the standard set up by him. He would not have understood why a Northerner could be a second-class citizen in Nigeria. He would have queried the miscalculations of the northern political elite. He would not have allowed the systematic weeding of the northerners occupying strategic positions.
He would have prevented a situation where northerners were engaged in a fight with each other. He would have faulted the erroneous methodologies that paved way for institutional degeneration of the North....”
Today, as the region reels in poverty and political crisis, the common feeling is that leaders in the North have failed the Sardauna. Sultan Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar once said at a commemoration of the late Premier in Kaduna that “the North has failed to live by its ideals and the leadership aspiration bequeathed to it by Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto… Many critical areas of the societal development of the North have betrayed Sardauna, and Northern leaders at all levels of state and society must take responsibility for this unfortunate situation.”
He added: “Sardauna of blessed memory dedicated his life to the service of his people. He worked for their effective participation in the Nigerian polity. He worked for the economic upliftment of the North. He ultimately sacrificed his life for the North and Nigeria pursuing the ideals which binds us together as a nation.
We must admit that this commemoration evokes mixed feelings….
“What has happened to the legacies of Sir Ahmadu Bello, like the groundnut pyramids and other agricultural commodities that were raw materials for our industries? What has happened to our textile industries, to the infrastructure that Sardauna built? Why is it that the rest of the world is adding value to its industrial infrastructure? What had happened to the economic and media outfits established by Sardauna?”
Father Matthew Hassan Kukah said in an article for the Daily Trust: “While the Sardauna tried to accommodate the North’s ethnic and religious minorities, the succeeding elite did the exact opposite. These days we hear stories of how northerners of ethnic minority origins are discriminated from appointments in northern based public institutions.”
Given the predicament of the North, a question people ask is, can the North get someone who could fill the Sardauna’s shoes? Or, in the least, what could be done to sustain the late premier’s legacies? Clearly because of the changes in the political structure, it is not feasible to have another Sardauna having the same political powers that the late Ahmadu Bello had. There are 19 states in the region, with 19 different governors, each elected with a different mandate for a different set up people, albeit all within the geographical entity called the North.
The then president Umaru Yar’adua said it would be difficult to fill in the Sardauna’s shoes because the late premier was “a born leader who worked hard, prepared well and learnt well.”
Governor Mu’azu Babangida Aliyu of Niger State, who is also chairman of the Northern Governors’ Forum, said in an interview with Daily Trust on Tuesday that the situation has changed over the past 40 years and therefore it is not possible to have another Sardauna who could be what Sir Ahmadu Bello was to the North.
“We can never have the North of the Sardauna’s days,” he said. “We will never, by history, have the period of the Sardauna in the North because certain things have changed.”
So what should the people and leaders of the region do to sustain the late premier’s legacies? Governor Aliyu said, “We must realise that through changes that have occurred, we must be ingenious to sustain that our historical oneness and the understanding that we must not allow our differences to be used against us….
“The North must adopt an enlightened self-interest to be able to negotiate with the other regions, and to come to terms with the fact that Nigeria has now passed the 50 years of independence and over the years certain variables must have changed.”
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