Memories of Shehu Shagari 

I first saw Alhaji Shehu Shagari at his house at Gobirawa Quarters, Sokoto, sometime in 1972. Earlier that year, my elder brother Ibrahim entered Koko Secondary School, then at its temporary site in Birnin Kebbi, and he found himself in the same class with Shagari’s son, Ahmadu. During the holidays, Ibrahim took me to see Ahmadu Shagari and there we saw the Federal Commissioner for Finance, who had a very simple and very gentle disposition. 

Even before I first saw him, I knew Shagari very well as a public figure. In the late 1960s he was the Secretary of Sokoto Provincial Education Fund. That volunteer fund made major contributions to educational development in the old Sokoto Province. It was the fund that built Ahmadu Bello Academy, Farfaru. In 1969 Shagari also became a Commissioner in the North Western State. On our primary school’s wall there was a calendar of all the commissioners, the SMG Abdullahi Kure Muhammadu, Police Commissioner Mr. Dimka, Army Brigade Commander Brigadier Ahmadu with the Military Governor, Chief Superintendent of Police Usman Faruk in the centre. 

In 1970 when Malam Yahaya Gusau resigned as Federal Commissioner for Reconstruction, General Gowon appointed Shagari to replace him. A year later, when Chief Awolowo resigned as Federal Commissioner for Finance, Gowon moved Shagari to replace him. Even in that powerful capacity, I saw Shagari on two occasions at the Sultan of Sokoto’s palace on Sallah day, walking unescorted to the public stand. 

I saw more of him when he returned to Sokoto after the overthrow of the Gowon regime in July 1975. It was the second time this happened to Shagari; he had returned to Sokoto in 1966, highly traumatised after he and his cabinet colleagues “handed over” to General Ironsi when soldiers took away and killed the Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar. On two occasions when we were going from Sokoto to Jega, Shagari overtook us on his way to Shagari, and I admired the speed of his Mercedes 200 car. 

During the first, non-party local government elections of 1976, I was surprised to hear Shagari’s name contesting for councillor in Yabo Local Government. He easily won the election. Shagari also became chairman of the Sokoto Urban Development Authority, SUDA in 1976. SUDA became very popular in Sokoto in those days for its efficiency in clearing refuse and building drains. It also built the new Sokoto Central Market after the old one burnt twice in the 1970s. The contractor was Julius Berger and Shagari won much local praise for it. 

In 1976, when the military ordered a one year national debate on the draft constitution, I attended a lecture that Shagari gave at the College of Education (now renamed Shehu Shagari College of Education) Sokoto. I still remember what he said, that “there are Fascists in Nigeria.” I did not know what that word meant and had to check in the dictionary. In 1977 he was elected (by Yabo Local Government Council electoral college) as delegate to the Constituent Assembly.

Fast forward to November 1978, when we saw on NTA Network News that Shagari finished first in the first round of voting at the NPN “nominating convention” in Lagos. 

A second round was averted when both Yusuf Maitama Sule and Malam Adamu Ciroma stepped down for him. Soon after that Shagari chose Dr. Alex Ekwueme as his running mate. The newspapers said then that he turned down Dr. J.O.J. Okezie and Chief Jerome Udoji, the latter of the Udoji salary fame. Shagari later told the story of how Alhaji Aliyu Makaman Bidda cajoled him to run for president when he previously said he was running for Senate. It was a long and interesting story; there isn’t enough space to retell it here.

Shagari’s nomination as NPN presidential candidate had a bombshell effect in Sokoto. Sultan’s Abubakar III’s eldest son, Muhammadu Maccido Sarkin Kudu, was the state chairman of GNPP, which was seen as the Sultan’s endorsement of Waziri Ibrahim’s party. When NPN held its state congress at Sokoto Cinema in December and nominated Alhaji Shehu Kangiwa as its governorship candidate, it also elected Sarkin Kudu, in absentia, as its state chairman! For many days Maccido was chairman of both GNPP and NPN. He finally appeared at an NPN function and ended the mystery. 

The very day he returned to Sokoto after his nomination, Shagari sent Mukhtar Shehu Shagari [who later became deputy governor] to invite Sokoto State Students Association (SOSSA) leaders to see him. Seven of us went to seed him. When I was introduced, he said, “Mamman Jega [my father] and I schooled together and taught together for many years.” He appealed for our support and criticized both Chief Awolowo and Malam Aminu Kano, rival presidential candidates. He gave us N100, which we refused to take but Mukhtari Shagari forced us to take it.

By NPN standards, Shagari was of modest means despite the seven federal ministries he once headed. At several NPN fund raisers in Lagos, Ibadan and Kaduna, the presidential candidate donated N5,000 while the chief launcher, Chief M.K.O. Abiola gave N100,000 and above. The campaign leading up to the 1979 elections was long and arduous. Shagari’s campaign train visited each state [there were 19 then] several times by road and air, stopped over at every major town and spoke at endless rallies. NPN’s strength was quite visible; a Daily Times political reporter wrote at the time that in almost every town he visited, Shagari stayed at the best house in town.

There were five elections in 1979 and on the day of the first one, on July 7, I saw Shagari hurriedly come out of his house and send his son, Abdurrahman to Emir Yahaya Road to buy a large radio set. He was glued to it the next day listening to the senatorial election results, which NPN won with 36 seats out of 95. While the elections lasted, he would come from Lagos on Friday and leave on Monday. Although NPN led in the first four elections, it won a quarter of the votes in 12 states in each of them. It was widely assumed that two-thirds of 19 was 13 states so we were headed for a run-off in the presidential election.

When counting was going on three days after the presidential election, NPN’s national legal adviser Chief Richard Akinjide appeared on NTA Network News and dropped a bombshell. He said the law was talking about votes, not states, and that two thirds of 19 was twelve states and two thirds of one quarter in the thirteenth state. That would give Shagari a first round victory since NPN averagely got 20% in Kano State. Lo and behold, FEDECO agreed and on Thursday Mr. Frederick Louis Oki Menkiti, Returning Officer Presidential Election, declared Shagari the winner. 

Chief Awolowo went to the Election Tribunal headed by Justice Bonyamin Kazeem, and lost. He then went to the Supreme Court. Awo was his own lawyer and he brought a truckload of books, some of which the justices had to borrow from him. Chief Justice Atanda Fatai-Williams led five of the seven justices to uphold the result. One judge, Obaseki, ruled that two thirds of 19 was 13 but he allowed Shagari’s election on grounds of “substantial compliance” with the law. The last judge, Kayode Eso, nullified the result. 

As president, Shagari recommended to the National Assembly an annual salary of N25,000 for himself. When the Assembly approved N30,000 Shagari annually donated N5,000 to five charitable groups. He first returned to Sokoto in early 1980, and the state NPN Youth Wing hired 100 white Vespa motorcycles which rode in front of his motorcade from the airport. I heard at the time that the day before he came, palace courtiers phoned Shagari and asked him what time he will arrive so that Sultan Abubakar III will be at the airport. Turaki was scandalised; he begged the Sultan not to go to the airport and said his first port of call upon arrival was the palace.

NPN’s rule was something else. The party was very cohesive and very powerful but its chieftains were flamboyant and given to excess. Although nearly everyone agreed that Shagari was a decent man, the newspapers regularly described him as a weak leader who was unable to control his party men. In 1981 oil prices collapsed and Shagari was forced to announce “austerity measures,” which made his regime quite unpopular. There were also many scandals such as the Shugaba Darman affair, the rice import task force and the alleged distribution of import license at rallies. 

When Governor Shehu Kangiwa died in a polo accident in November 1981, I was standing at Sokoto Airport when Shagari arrived from Lagos. He received Kangiwa’s remains, together with Deputy Governor Dr. Garba Nadama, and they took it to Argungu for the funeral. A similar thing happened to Shagari’s remains last Saturday. Though his visits to Sokoto were initially thrilling, they later became a nuisance to residents because the police blocked roads and diverted traffic hours before he arrived. 

The 1983 election was tough for Shagari. Many of his ministers wanted to become governors, so NPN governors forced a resolution in the party NEC saying any minister who wanted to contest for governor must first resign. In Sokoto, it affected Shagari’s close friend Alhaji Ibrahim Gusau, the Minister of Agriculture. Ibrahim Gusau and Governor Nadama split the state NPN in two and people wanted to see whose side Shagari was on. When the president addressed a rally in Birnin Kebbi, he said, “Is it possible to love God and not love the Holy Prophet?” With that he endorsed Nadama and Ibrahim Gusau’s supporters defected en masse to UPN.

We heard at the time that when Ibrahim Gusau went to cast his vote, NPN agents, in collaboration with FEDECO officials, took the serial number of his ballot paper and relayed it to officials at the counting centre. They traced his ballot paper, saw that he voted for UPN, and allegedly took it to Shagari. To be fair, it was reported in 1979 that UPN agents traced Head of State General Olusegun Obasanjo’s ballot paper. He voted for Shagari, which aggravated his enmity with Awolowo and UPN.

Of Shagari’s children, Abdurrahman Shehu Shagari, who died in the ADC plane crash of 2006, became closest to me and my brothers. One day in 1980 Abdurrahman came to our house directly from Sokoto airport. He had gone to Lagos to show his father, the president, his admission letter to study for a diploma in tourism at the Ahmadu Bello University. Shagari didn’t seem to like the course but he told his son, “When you go back to Sokoto, ask your friends. Ask the children of Mamman Jega to advise you.” We carefully steered him away to another course. In 1984 when his father was in detention, Abdurrahman came to me with a letter he was going to send to the Supreme Military Council asking for his father’s release. I gently convinced him not to send the letter. 

The coup of 1983 was greeted silently in Sokoto. People were fed up with NPN; essential commodities had completely vanished from the shops. Shagari’s security guards managed to spirit him out of Aguda House, Abuja to Group Capt.Usman Jibrin’s farmhouse in Nasarawa, from where the Buhari military regime took him into detention. The atmosphere was so tough in 1984 that my father, who was the Secretary to the Military Government and Head of Service [SMG] told me what happened in February 1984 when Magajin Shagari Alhaji Muhammadu Bello died. He was the former president’s elder brother who however brought him up from age 5. Civil servants and even businessmen in Sokoto were too afraid to visit the family.

The death occurred on a Tuesday but my father said he waited until Friday afternoon when the Military Governor, Brig Garba Duba, returned from his last assignment for the week. After escorting him home, he took the governor aside and asked for permission to go to Shagari to offer condolences because he was Shehu Shagari’s next-door neighbour at Sokoto Middle School. Duba, who was relatively soft, agreed but he said, “Go alone. Go in the night. Don’t use your official car. Make sure nobody sees you,” and then added, “Please extend my condolences to them.”

Between 1990 and 2013, I made three trips to Shagari to try to get an interview with the former president. When I went there in 1990, I found him at his Janzomo Farms, outside Shagari town. He said, “I often see you on television commenting on international issues. Some people on TV don’t know what they are talking about.” I thought he was referring to me so I said, “Sir, it is the NTA people that force me to talk.” But he quickly said, “I don’t mean you. You are very knowledgeable.” He however refused the interview. When my managing director at Citizen magazine Malam Mohammed Haruna sent me back two years later, Shagari complained that on the day he visited Maiduguri in 1981, Mohammed Haruna published a story in New Nigerian which he said was meant to incite the military against him. Because of that, he said, he will never speak to Citizen magazine. He also told me that when he was in detention, he read a Letter to the Editor by Na’Allah Zagga who urged the soldiers not to free him from detention because he was “vicariously responsible” for everything that happened in the Second Republic.

In 2013, I was again sent from Daily Trust to seek an interview with him. From Sokoto I sought the help of my childhood friend Atiku Nuhu-Koko, head of the Shagari Leadership Centre. We found him sitting in front of his house at Shagari. As soon as I was introduced, he handed to me a copy of Sir Ahmadu Bello’s 1961 autobiography My Life and said, “Look at this book. They said Sardauna wrote it.” I took the book and said, “Yes sir, the book is very popular.” But he said, “I have never seen it.” At that point, I knew that an interview with him was not possible.

It was also the last time I saw Alhaji Shehu Shagari. Nigeria has lost a genuine statesman, a great teacher and administrator, one of the last of the founding fathers, a public servant with an unequalled record of local, state and national service, one of the few men who did not lose their head despite the trappings of great executive presidential power. May Allah grant Alhaji Shehu Shagari, Turakin Sokoto eternal rest in Aljannat. 

This article first appeared in Daily Trust