Sardauna Was Not Perfect, But This Attack Is Historical Mischief
I read this article some weeks back but ignored it, only to see it being mischievously recirculated by Bichiia Maisango, a confirmed atheist and an ardent critic of Islam and everything the Islamic faith represents. He has now found a new role as an arrowhead of a so-called Hausa Renaissance — a grand plan by the West, through its agents, to weaken Islam and Muslims in the North by hiding behind the campaign of “Hausa Zalla.” The aim is to break the strong cohesiveness and unity of Northerners in order to achieve the long-term objective of weakening the North and destroying its power base, so that it will no longer be a threat to certain vested interests, both in Nigeria and in the West.
By any fair standard of historical argument, the article titled “Sardauna Built the North — But He Built It on Tribalism” is not a serious historical intervention. It is a passionate outburst dressed as truth. It throws heavy accusations at Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, but fails to provide the basic evidence required to sustain such a grave charge.
The writer accuses Sardauna of building Northern Nigeria on tribalism, religious suspicion, hatred of the Igbo, fear of Christians, ethnic superiority, and a doctrine of domination. Yet throughout the article, there is no quotation from Sardauna proving this. There is no policy document. No speech. No archival reference. No administrative decision. No concrete historical incident showing that Sardauna deliberately taught Northerners to hate Southern Nigerians, Igbo people, Christians, or other ethnic groups.
That is not history. That is emotion.
A serious accusation must be carried by evidence, not by anger. The writer cannot simply say “this is truth” and expect readers to accept it as truth. Truth is not established by dramatic language. Truth is established by facts. Yes, Sardauna can be criticised. No historical figure is beyond scrutiny. His politics of “One North” and the Northernisation policy can be debated. But there is a difference between criticising a policy and fabricating a moral crime. There is a difference between saying Sardauna pursued regional protectionism and saying he planted hatred in the soul of the North. One is a legitimate historical debate; the other is reckless mischief. Historically, Sardauna’s politics must be understood within the context of colonial Nigeria. Northern Nigeria entered the independence period with a severe educational and administrative disadvantage compared to the South. British indirect rule had preserved traditional institutions, restricted missionary expansion in many Muslim emirate areas, and slowed the spread of Western education. By the time Nigeria was moving toward independence, many key positions in the Northern civil service and economy were occupied by Southerners because they had earlier access to Western education. That imbalance created anxiety among Northern leaders.
This was the background to Northernisation. The International Crisis Group notes that Sardauna and the NPC pursued “One North, One Destiny” and a Northernisation policy that favoured Northerners “of all religious persuasions” in regional and local administration. The same report explains that the policy was driven by fears that better-educated Southern migrants would dominate administration and the economy. It also notes that Christian minority groups in the North benefited widely from the policy because of their higher level of missionary education, giving many of them a sense of belonging. This is important. If Sardauna’s policy favoured Northerners of all religious persuasions, how then can the writer lazily reduce it to anti-Christian hatred? If Christian minorities benefited from Northernisation, how does one honestly claim that Sardauna built a North that saw every Christian as an enemy? The facts are more complex than the writer’s emotional accusations.
The writer also ignores Sardauna’s actual record of institution-building. Sardauna did not merely shout slogans; he built structures. Encyclopaedia Africana describes him as one of the founding fathers of modern Nigeria and records his role in establishing major institutions such as the Northern Regional Development Corporation, later known as NNDC, the Bank of the North, the Broadcasting Company of Northern Nigeria, and Nigeria Citizen Newspapers. These were not tribal war machines. They were instruments of development, administration, communication, finance, and regional modernisation. A man who invested in schools, media, development corporations, banking, agriculture, administration, and higher education cannot honestly be reduced to a cartoon villain who only taught people to hate. Even Ahmadu Bello University, founded in 1962, carried a broad intellectual vision. The university’s own published vision attributed to Sardauna says ABU should be a world-class university serving “men and women of all races” and generating ideas relevant to its immediate community, Nigeria, and the world.  That is hardly the language of a man whose only legacy was tribal hatred.
The article also commits a major historical error by blaming Sardauna for almost every modern failure of Northern Nigeria: poverty, insecurity, almajiri crisis, religious violence, educational decline, political backwardness, and lack of innovation. This is intellectually lazy. Sardauna died in January 1966. Since then, Northern Nigeria has passed through military governments, civilian governors, federal ministers, local government chairmen, traditional rulers, religious leaders, business elites, senators, representatives, and decades of federal allocations. To blame one man who died sixty years ago for every failure of today is not analysis; it is escapism. If the North is poor today, ask what its governors have done with budgets. If schools are collapsing, ask what ministries of education have done. If insecurity is destroying villages, ask those who controlled security, governance, local intelligence, justice, and rural development after 1966. If children are begging on the streets, ask the religious, political, and social elites who kept exploiting the almajiri system for decades. Do not dump every modern failure on the grave of Sardauna simply because it sounds bold. The writer also ignores the colonial roots of Northern Nigeria’s contradictions. Long before Sardauna became Premier, the North had already inherited emirate politics, indirect rule, educational imbalance, religious complexity, minority grievances, and colonial administrative structures. The International Crisis Group notes that colonial rule in Northern Nigeria reinforced some existing identities while stimulating new ones and, in some respects, set the stage for long-lasting identity conflicts.  Any honest discussion of the North’s crisis must begin from this layered history, not from the convenient demonisation of one dead leader. Another dangerous weakness in the article is its sweeping condemnation of the entire North. It says the North cannot tolerate differences, cannot embrace new ideas, cannot love its neighbours, fears books, and builds only walls. This is not courage. It is prejudice turned inward.
Northern Nigeria is not one tribe, one religion, one language, or one mind. It is Hausa, Fulani, Kanuri, Nupe, Tiv, Jukun, Igala, Gbagyi, Berom, Bachama, Sayawa, Ebira, Shuwa Arab, Tangale, Margi, Idoma, and many more. It contains Muslims and Christians. It contains scholars, soldiers, farmers, traders, civil servants, reformers, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and activists. To speak of “the North” as if it is one ignorant, hateful, backward creature is not enlightenment. It is the same kind of stereotyping the writer claims to oppose. The article also dishonestly presents emotion as bravery. Phrases like “ashes of silence,” “lies that chained his people,” “caged by history,” and “we will die slowly, painfully, blindly” may sound powerful, but they do not prove anything. They are literary decoration, not evidence. A serious writer would have asked: What exactly did Sardauna say? Which policy proves tribal hatred? Which appointment proves religious exclusion? Which speech instructed Northerners to hate Igbo people? Which archive supports this accusation? Which historian has established this conclusion?
The article answers none of these questions.
The truth is simple: Sardauna was a regional leader operating in a fiercely competitive First Republic. He defended Northern interests, sometimes strongly and controversially. He pursued Northernisation, which can be criticised as protective, exclusionary, or regionalist. He promoted “One North,” which can also be debated, especially from the perspective of Middle Belt minorities. But to twist all that into the claim that he built the North on hatred, tribalism, anti-Christian fear, anti-Igbo hostility, and anti-progress thinking is a dishonest exaggeration. Sardauna’s legacy is not beyond criticism, but criticism must be rooted in history. What this article offers is not history. It is frustration looking for a symbolic enemy. It uses Sardauna as a punching bag for failures created by many generations of leaders after him. The North does need reform. It needs better education, security, economic renewal, religious tolerance, accountable leadership, and honest self-examination. But reform built on false history is dangerous. A people cannot cure themselves by poisoning their memory. We can criticise the past without lying against it. We can demand a better North without destroying the reputation of those who genuinely built institutions in their time. Sardauna was not perfect. No leader is. But he was a builder, organiser, moderniser, and one of the founding fathers of Nigeria. To reduce him to the father of tribal hatred is not courage. It is mischief. The article raises an emotional argument, but it fails the test of evidence. It accuses loudly, but proves nothing. It condemns broadly, but explains little. It mistakes anger for truth and drama for scholarship.
History deserves better. The North deserves better. And even Sardauna’s critics must do better than this.
