peasants or ‘the talakawa’ in Hausa parlance.
My father worked for the ministry of agriculture of the northern region at the time. After retiring from
the ministry, he acquired a farm in Daudawa and went into full-time subsistence farming, not a huge
farm, but a modest sized one, enough to grow the food we needed as a family. He lived in Daudawa
with two of his wives, including my mother, his third wife. The oldest wife, whom he visited every
month after collecting his monthly pension of three Nigerian pounds, lived in Zaria.
So I suppose my father would have been considered one of the mallams, putting us somewhere in the
middle ranks. of a largely impoverished community. Everyone was generally poor, so relatively
speaking, nobody felt noticeably different, though it was around that time that the emergence of a
middle class was beginning to be defined by those who had Western education (“Yan Boko”).
There was the Government Reservation Area (GRA) where senior civil servants of the ministry of
agriculture lived, and then the rest of the village where everyone else resided. We lived in the village
because our father was on the junior staff of the ministry. The village had no electricity, no running
water and no paved roads. I think it was about 1967 or 1968 when the first television set got to the
village, running on a generator, I suppose – I was about seven or eight years old at the time. There
was a telephone system in the GRA part of the village, which connected the agriculture ministry and
the GRA to the rest of the country because Daudawa was a major agricultural settlement at the time.
An annual agricultural show - a trade fair of sorts took place there every harvesting season. The
village was also a major cotton buying and processing centre, so a telephone network was necessary
to facilitate these.
Out of this simple life and upbringing, I was fortunate not only to acquire a decent educational
foundation in a supportive family environment and survive diseases like measles and tuberculosis that
killed several infants around the same time, but to have had the opportunity to cross paths with
remarkable individuals that became early role models, whose inspiration continues to impact upon
me today.
My Father, Ahmad Rufai Muhammad
I still remember the day my father died. It was the 9th of May 1968 in Zaria. I did not realize it at the
time, but two immediate consequences of his death would not only define the rest of my upbringing
but also continue to influence my personality and decisions for many years afterward, even as I write
this. One immediate consequence was the role of education; the other was a shift in my attitude
toward adversity and in particular how I responded to antagonism directed against me. The latter took
more time to develop and I will discuss it in due course; the former came straight from my father’s
deathbed.
My father was a self-educated man. He never really went to school, but he taught himself to read and
write, and to speak English. He gained entry into the agriculture ministry by writing an application in
Hausa dated November 1, 1928 to the local agricultural officer at the time, a white man, asking for a
job as a vet assistant. [15] The man called upon my father, interviewed him, asked him which school
he went to, and when my father replied that he never went to school, the man asked him who wrote the
application. My father responded that he wrote it himself, and the man then asked my father to rewrite
the application again on the spot. The white man was so impressed that he hired my father right there
and then. This was in Samaru, Zaria, where he worked until the early 1940s. From Zaria, my father
transferred to Kasarawa near Sokoto. It was while working at the agriculture ministry in Kasarawa
that he met, courted and married my mother, whose maiden name was Fatima (Umma) Ibrahim. She is
now about 79 years of age and in good health, Alhamdulillah, Thanks be to God. He finally ended up
in the ministry of agriculture in Daudawa, and retired to live there on his three-pounds-a-month
pension and a small farm where we grew mostly food crops – corn, millet and grains that we
consumed in the household.
After he retired, - I was about five then, I was told – he took up full-time what he had already been
doing part-time for some years, which was serving as a sort of teacher-imam-cleric in the village. He
received the grounding for this role from his father, Muhammadu Kwasau who was such a famous
cleric in Zaria, that the Emir offered the hand of his daughter in marriage to him. My father became
the imam of the neighbourhood mosque and was probably the leading Islamic scholar in our village
after he retired from the agriculture ministry. Every evening, people would come for him to recite,
translate and interpret the Qur’an and other Islamic books for them.
Sometime during 1967 he fell ill, a state which lasted many months up until his death in 1968. He was
hospitalized in the Zaria General Hospital (now ABUTH) with what I later learnt was terminal
cancer. I do not recall which cancer or details of the treatment, but there came a point when the
hospital discharged him with the comment that there was nothing more they could do. He was taken
back to our family home in Zaria and we all came from Daudawa to stay with him – I therefore
dropped out of school for some four months – until he died.
That day our father died, it was as if he had the premonition. He called each of his children present
into his room for a two to three minute conversation, one-on-one. While waiting my turn to see him,
one of my sisters came out of his room crying. I asked her why she was crying and she said, “Well,
the way our dad spoke was as if he is going to die soon.”
Being so young at the time, I had only some conception of what death meant, but not enough to fully
appreciate what she was saying. But soon it was my turn to enter his room in the darkness, and
approach his bedside for what would be my last conversation with my father. With clear sense of
effort and focus, he turned to me and said, “You know, you are a very good boy, a clever boy. One
thing you must do all your life, is to take your schooling seriously. Education is the key to your
success. So whatever you do, make sure you take school seriously.”
I promised that I would do exactly as he instructed, and that was all. That was his advice to me. I left
his bedside to rejoin my confused and frightened siblings outside, and two hours later, he was dead.
We wept at his loss and he was buried the same evening as required by Islamic law and custom. My
mother, the third wife, who had the youngest children, was more worried than most about being a
young widow with no education, skills, savings account or any pension to fall back on.
In accordance with the Islamic law of inheritance, our father's estate was valued and distributed
amongst his three wives and fifteen children. My share consisted of more than a dozen Islamic books
and the sum of eleven shillings and three pence, which was slightly more than half of one pound.
These were handed over to my uncle, Alhaji Hamza Gidado, who adopted me on my father's death,
which meant that I had to move to Kawo, then a suburb of Kaduna, to live with him under the care of
his second wife, Hajiya Dije, who had no biological children of her own. From that point on, I saw
my mother pe
rhaps once a year, when I visited her in Daudawa (and later, Funtua) during the long
vacation. Foremost on my mind then was how to fulfil my promise to my deceased father to take my
education seriously always, while adjusting to my new, strange and uncertain environment.
My Elder Brother, Bashir Ahmad El-Rufai
Like most young people with older siblings, my very first role model is and remains my immediate
elder brother, Bashir El-Rufai. Bashir not only taught me to read and write before I was formally
enrolled in school, but has remained a mentor, an adviser and guiding light of my life. At virtually
every turning point in my life, whether it was education, career, and family matters, Bashir has been
prominent and my biggest advocate and defender. A brilliant marketer and the most kind-hearted man
I know, Bashir is more responsible than anyone in directing my innate abilities in the right path, and
shaping my varied forays into business, telecommunications, public service and politics. He will
feature prominently in this story because he has remained a substantial and consistent counsellor in
my life.
It was from observing and discussing with Bashir that I learnt some patience, fidelity to family and
loyalty to friends. Bashir taught me the importance of keeping one's friends through thick and thin and
standing up for them. Unlike most people, Bashir's circle of friends has remained with him from
childhood, and even when he was more successful than some of them, he never changed towards
them. Generous to a fault, populist and altruistic, Bashir is the kind of person ideal for public service
and politics. That he was prematurely and compulsorily retired from NITEL by the Abacha regime at
the prime of his career was indicative of what was wrong with our type of military rule and the
poisonous politics it bequeathed to our nation. Bashir remains a success in the private sector,
establishing Intercellular Nigeria Limited which was acquired by Sudan Telecom in 2006, and sits on
the boards of several telecommunications and financial services companies.
Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto
When Sir Ahmadu Bello came to visit Daudawa for the annual agricultural show around the end of
1964 or the start of 1965, it was a rather big deal, given the very basic conditions in which we lived.
Ahmadu Bello was the premier of the northern region and it was the first time in my memory we had
the premier in the village. In my childish mind the premier was like the king of the region, considered
a political as well as spiritual leader.
Around the time that Ahmadu Bello visited our village, I remember asking my father why Ahmadu
Bello was the premier, what that meant, what government was and what the relationship was between
the government and our village head, among other questions. My father explained that government
provided security, built the primary school I was about to begin attending, and provided the primary
health care centre, or the dispensary, in which I was to be circumcised.
About a year after Ahmadu Bello’s visit, the military coup of January 1966 took place and he was
assassinated. My father was very depressed and there was a lot of weeping and sadness in our
household because when Ahmadu Bello visited Daudawa, he along with Sarkin Maska Shehu, the
District Head of Funtua, had a private audience with my father as well, so we considered ourselves
part of the Sardauna's larger family. One of my sisters, Lanti, is married to Sani Gwandu, the eldest
son of Alhaji Ahmadu Gwandu- one of Ahmadu Bello's close friends then, which linked us to the
premier's extended circle of family and friends. Indeed, my sister still recalls the traumatic events of
15th January 1966, when armed soldiers stormed the residence of Alhaji Ahmadu Gwandu looking to
arrest (and perhaps assassinate) him after killing the premier. Both Ahmadu Gwandu and his son had
to be secreted away to safety by their neighbours.
Ahmadu Bello’s assassination brought my first awareness of the lengths that people went to over
disagreements in the political realm. Shortly after that came the counter-coup of July 1966, rioting and
killings largely targeting south-easterners who were blamed for the assassination of northern and
south-western military and political leaders. These mistakes, misfortunes and mishaps eventually led
to the Nigerian civil war that lasted till January 1970 and cost millions of Nigerian lives. I was not
yet in school at the time, and even years later, we were not taught any civics in primary school, but I
still came to understand a bit of what government meant, for better or for worse, during that turbulent
period.
Ahmadu Bello was a selfless, fair and inclusive leader. He was a visionary, focused on the
development of the region he administered. He saw the north larger than his immediate Hausa-Fulani-
Muslim roots and tried to give all the ethnic minorities of the north and south a sense of belonging.
Ahmadu Bello’s fairness and integrity enabled the forging of personal friendships and political
partnerships with many leaders of the ethnic minorities of the south like Harold Dappa-Biriye and
Melford Okilo. Sadly, his political successors largely failed to sustain his visionary, just and
inclusive leadership style and our nation as a whole and the North in particular have been the worse
for it.
Sheikh Abubakar Mahmud Gumi
Another larger-than-life figure from those early years that impacted my views on public life was
Sheikh Abubakar Mahmud Gumi. I never personally met him, but his presence in the public sphere
was palpable even from my standpoint as a growing child. He was an Islamic cleric who was unique
in that he was not afraid to express unpopular sentiments in those days. Among them: western
education is not sinful, building schools was more important than building mosques, Muslims should
join the military, own hotels, and invest in banks. Until Gumi came onto the scene, the traditional
view of Islamic scholars was that because hotels sell alcohol and their existence would 'enable'
fornication and adultery, a Muslim should not own any shares of a hotel company; because banks
charge interest on loans, which is prohibited in Islam, Muslims should not own banks; because the
only war Islam allowed as lawful is religious war, jihad, Muslims should not enlist in a secular army.
Gumi started campaigning alone against these extremist tenets and interpretations for a long time.
Of course, Ahmadu Bello, who was a great-grandson of Sheikh Usman Danfodio, the great Islamic
reformer and founder of the Sokoto caliphate, did not accept some of the extreme views held by the
Islamic establishment at the time either. Under his leadership, the northern regional government
established hotels[16] which sold alcohol, and the Bank of the North which charged interest on
loans.[17] Even though Bello was under pressure to adopt strict Sharia law in the north, he refused.
He adopted the penal code, which was applicable in the Sudan and Pakistan, with some variations,
but his overarching attitude was that the north was an inclusive society of Muslims and Christians that
must learn to coexist without either one imposing values on the other.
Ahmadu Bello was not a cleric, however, but a political leader, so he could afford that kind of
flexibility in interpretation of Islamic doctrine. All other Islamic scholars at that time held the
fundamentalist
, traditional views of strict prohibition and it was Gumi that started a very public
campaign, effectively saying, “If all Muslims do not own banks, then how will Muslims get loans for
their businesses?” For him, it was a practical matter – the banking system depended on interest and
Muslims must be part of it, they must invest. Similarly, if all hotels are owned by non-Muslims, then
Muslims may be discriminated against when they need accommodation. He even led by example
when he encouraged at least two of his sons to join the army.[18]
Not only did Gumi have a very pragmatic interpretation of Islam, he undertook the first translation of
the Qur’an into the Hausa language so more people could read the holy book for themselves rather
than rely on clerics (mis)interpreting for them. He co-founded the leading Islamic organization in
Nigeria - the Jama'at Nasril Islam, and several schools including Sheikh Sabah College (renamed
Sardauna Memorial College) in Kaduna. Sheikh Gumi died in 1992 and I firmly believe that if people
like Gumi were alive in 1999 when the political Sharia movement[19] started, it would have gone
nowhere. Gumi had the standing and stature of a respected and objective public voice to come out and
call it precisely what it was: political posturing and nothing more. It would have died away faster
than it finally did.
What impressed me most about Gumi at the time, and this was internalized in my attitude, was
primarily his conviction plus courage, and also the fact that he had the clear-headedness to promote
pragmatism above fundamentalist ideology and beliefs – something that I have done my best to
embrace in my own career and platform in the public domain. He was a very courageous man to do
what he did at the time as nearly all the voices in the Islamic establishment attacked him.
Nevertheless, he always stood his ground, relied on the Qur’an and Sunna of the Holy Prophet
The Accidental Public Servant Page 7