By Abdulrauf Aliyu
Some books we read for information; others we return to because time keeps proving them right. Mahmud Tukur’s “Leadership and Governance in Nigeria: The Relevance of Values” belongs emphatically to the second category. Published in 1999, at the very threshold of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, the 600-page work was already asking questions that Northern Nigeria has not adequately answered more than two decades later. Tukur’s concern was not leadership as celebrity, nor leadership as electoral arithmetic, but leadership as a moral, institutional, and developmental enterprise. His comparison of the values embedded in the Sokoto political tradition with contemporary Nigerian governance was ultimately an inquiry into a profound question: what happens to a society when power survives after the values that once disciplined power have disappeared? The question is uncomfortable because much of contemporary Northern Nigeria appears to be living inside its answer.
The architecture of Tukur’s argument is especially important. He examines leadership through a cluster of values associated with the Sokoto intellectual tradition: justice; ease and kindness; humility and modesty; abstinence and moderation; integrity and honesty; and service to the community. He then identifies process values such as consultation, advice and consent, and obedience, alongside community values including unity, consensus, primacy of the public interest, welfare and social justice. This is not merely religious vocabulary. It is a theory of public administration. Leadership is restrained by values; decision-making is disciplined by consultation; authority is justified by service; and the welfare of society is placed above the appetite of the office-holder. Contemporary scholarship summarising Tukur’s framework confirms this threefold structure of leadership, process, and community values.
The first lesson, and perhaps the most neglected, is “justice.” Tukur’s treatment of the Sokoto thinkers places justice at the foundation of political survival. One formulation attributed to the tradition is stark: “A kingdom can endure with unbelief but not with injustice.” The contemporary meaning is unmistakable. Northern Nigeria cannot build durable peace while millions experience exclusion, insecurity, educational deprivation, and economic marginalisation. Justice is not simply the absence of judicial bias. It is visible fairness in the allocation of opportunities, public investment, security, and state protection. A young person who watches the government distribute political patronage while his school lacks teachers does not experience the state as an instrument of justice. He experiences it as an arrangement for the fortunate.
Tukur’s second major lesson, “ease and kindness,” may sound deceptively gentle in an age of hard politics. Yet its administrative meaning is severe: government should minimise unnecessary hardship imposed upon citizens. Authority should not become an obstacle course. The contemporary Nigerian state often does precisely the opposite. Citizens queue for documents, permits, passports, licences and public services; businesses negotiate bureaucratic uncertainty; poor families encounter policies whose administrative burdens they are least able to absorb. Good governance should make ordinary life easier, not manufacture needless friction. The leader’s question should therefore be, “What inconvenience does this policy impose on whom, and is that inconvenience necessary?” Tukur’s insight anticipates modern ideas of citizen-centred government, regulatory efficiency, and administrative justice.
Then comes “humility and moderation,” qualities that appear almost subversive in today’s political culture. Tukur’s framework challenges the North’s contemporary obsession with the spectacle of office: convoys, titles, entourages, ceremonies and the economics of political hospitality. But leadership is not an expensive costume. It is a burden of stewardship. The more resources entrusted to a leader, the greater the obligation to demonstrate restraint. In Tukur’s logic, moderation is not personal asceticism for its own sake; it is a public-economic principle. Resources consumed by elite extravagance are resources unavailable for schools, hospitals, irrigation, water systems and productive infrastructure. The Northern political class must therefore ask an unflattering question: have we turned leadership into consumption?
The fourth lesson, “integrity and honesty”, strikes directly at the heart of Nigeria’s political economy. Tukur’s discussion of the Sokoto tradition links integrity to the legitimacy of government and condemns the official who extracts benefits beyond legitimate remuneration. Contemporary commentary drawing from the book cites Tukur’s observation that, in the Nigerian political environment, electoral success has too often depended upon wealth, vote mobilisation, promises of patronage and the capacity to distribute the “benefits of office.” That observation, written decades ago, has acquired an almost prophetic quality. If political office is treated as an investment vehicle, then public expenditure becomes the dividend. Once politics becomes commercialised, development becomes collateral damage.
Tukur’s fifth value, “service to the community” is perhaps where Northern Nigeria has most visibly lost the plot. The old conception of leadership assumed that authority imposed obligations upon its holder. Contemporary politics increasingly reverses the equation: communities are expected to serve politicians. Constituents mobilise crowds, praise leaders, defend them online, organise receptions and celebrate appointments; in return, they receive occasional gifts, contracts, jobs and political favours. This is patronage, not development. A governor who distributes food during a crisis may be compassionate, but if his administration does not improve agricultural productivity, storage, irrigation, security and markets, the relief merely treats the fever while leaving the disease untouched.
Tukur’s emphasis on “consultation” is equally instructive. The Sokoto tradition, as represented in his analysis, regarded consultation as an essential process value; the ruler who refuses advice risks error because power narrows perception. The contemporary North has developed an unfortunate political ecosystem in which proximity to power can become more valuable than competence. Advisers are sometimes selected because they are loyal, familiar or politically useful rather than because they possess the intellectual capacity to challenge assumptions. The result is an echo chamber disguised as a cabinet. Serious government requires people capable of telling a governor that his preferred policy is wrong, a minister that his programme is underperforming, and a political leader that his constituency is suffering. Consultation without dissent is theatre.
The economic implications are enormous. Tukur’s intellectual project connects values to material development. A society that rewards rent-seeking will attract rent-seekers; one that rewards productive enterprise will attract entrepreneurs. This insight is supported by broader Nigerian political-economy scholarship. In “Crafting the New Nigeria”, Tukur argued that patrimonial politics encourages the pursuit of rents rather than wealth creation, weakens accountability and raises transaction costs. He also linked weak institutions, poor education and inadequate public-service capacity to Nigeria’s economic underperformance. Northern Nigeria cannot escape this equation. If political connections remain more profitable than enterprise, young people will rationally pursue connections. A society gets more of what its institutions reward.
This brings us to the most painful question: where did Northern Nigeria lose its way? Not at one moment; not through one administration; not because of one political party. The erosion has been gradual. The older tradition of scholarship, consultation, public service and modesty was increasingly displaced by the economics of political brokerage. The politician became a distributor of access. The businessman sought contracts before markets. The young graduate sought an appointment before developing a skill. The community sought a benefactor rather than demanding an institution. Traditional authority, political authority, religious authority and economic authority sometimes became entangled in a web of mutual accommodation. The result was an elite capable of negotiating power but increasingly less capable of producing transformation.
The evidence today is unforgiving. Northern Nigeria carries a disproportionate share of Nigeria’s educational, poverty and insecurity burdens. UNICEF reported in 2024 that two million children were out of school across Borno, Adamawa and Yobe, while the crisis in the North-West also disrupted schooling on a massive scale.These figures should make every northern leader uncomfortable. The question is not how many political appointments the North controls in Abuja. It is how many children can read. Not how many billionaires attend political dinners. It is how many young people acquire productive skills. Not how impressive a convoy looks. It is whether farmers can safely reach their fields.
Tukur’s framework also exposes the poverty of leadership succession in the region. A leader who genuinely serves should be concerned with what remains after his tenure. Yet Northern politics often rewards short political horizons. Infrastructure may be inaugurated, but maintenance is neglected. Programmes are announced but not institutionalised. A governor’s successor is sometimes treated as an enemy rather than as the next custodian of public assets. Development requires continuity because human capital cannot be built within a four-year electoral cycle. The child entering primary school today will need consistent policy for fifteen years before becoming a productive professional. Leadership must therefore think in generations while politics thinks in election cycles.
The remedy is not to romanticise the Sokoto Caliphate or pretend that the past was flawless. Tukur’s work should not be read as a call to recreate a historical political order. Its enduring value lies elsewhere: it asks whether indigenous moral and administrative traditions contain principles capable of strengthening contemporary governance. Scholars discussing Tukur have specifically noted his argument that values such as justice, integrity, public interest, humility and service can provide a broader Nigerian ethical foundation, rather than merely a sectarian model. That distinction matters. Justice is not Muslim; honesty is not Hausa; consultation is not northern; public service is not religious. These are universal political virtues.
The North must therefore undertake a leadership audit. Every governor, legislator, minister, permanent secretary, traditional ruler and political aspirant should be judged against measurable questions: Has poverty fallen? Have learning outcomes improved? Has maternal mortality declined? Have farms become safer and more productive? Has internally generated revenue increased? Has youth employment expanded? Has public procurement become more transparent? Have institutions become stronger than the personalities occupying them? If the answer is no, political popularity should not disguise developmental failure. Tukur’s moral vocabulary becomes useful precisely because it converts leadership from an aesthetic question into an ethical and empirical one.
The future requires a new northern leadership compact: justice before patronage; competence before loyalty; service before status; production before consumption; consultation before proclamation; institutions before personalities; and long-term development before short-term political survival. The North does not lack resources, history or human talent. What it needs is a leadership philosophy capable of converting these assets into public capability. The tragedy would be to possess an extraordinary intellectual heritage and use it merely as ceremonial decoration. Tukur’s great warning is not that the North has forgotten its past. It is that it may remember its values rhetorically while abandoning them operationally. A society cannot eat nostalgia. It must build institutions.
The final lesson is therefore brutally simple. Leadership is not the ability to occupy the front seat of the political car; it is the ability to know where the road leads, keep the vehicle roadworthy, protect the passengers and leave the road better for those coming behind. Northern Nigeria needs leaders who understand that office is temporary, but consequences are permanent. The old wisdom says that when a man sees a snake and merely announces that there is a snake, he has not solved the problem. He has only described the danger. Northern Nigeria has described its problems for decades. The time has come to govern them.
