By Abdullahi Inuwa
Former senator Shehu Sani has stirred fresh reflections on leadership and integrity with a striking account of the late Premier of Northern Nigeria, Sir Ahmadu Bello, revealing a paradox that still echoes across Kaduna decades after his death.
According to Sani, the Sardauna’s official residence stood in Ungwan Sarki ward, Kaduna. Around him lived those who served him: his driver, the late Aliyu Sarkin Mota; his aide popularly known as Sani “One Minute”; his chef, orderly, security officers and guards — all with personal homes scattered across Badarawa, Unguwan Shanu, Ungwan Rimi, Kawo and Malali wards. Members of his cabinet owned houses in the Government Reserved Areas (GRAs) within today’s Kaduna North Local Government.
Yet, amid this web of privilege and proximity, one fact stands out starkly: the Sardauna himself owned nothing.
Shehu Sani wrote that the late Premier had no house, no plot of land, no farm and no personal property in Kaduna — or anywhere else. While he allocated choice lands and issued titles to others, he deliberately excluded himself and his family. Many of those properties, Sani noted, are today inherited by the families of prominent figures of that era.
One vivid anecdote captures the spirit of the man. A top chef from Cross River State who worked in the Sardauna’s household later owned a large house around Lagos Street roundabout, Kaduna, which she converted into Queen’s Hotel — now a shopping mall. Others prospered. The Sardauna did not.
After his assassination and the collapse of the First Republic, Sani recounted, the Premier’s entire personal belongings were reportedly loaded into a single truck and sent to his family home in Sokoto — a quiet, almost unbelievable end to the material life of one of Nigeria’s most powerful men.
Perhaps most telling is a story from the late Aliyu Sarkin Mota, the Sardauna’s driver, who lived in Ungwan Sarki. He told Sani that when the Sardauna’s relatives visited Kaduna and asked for money, he would keep them in his house until his own salary was paid — only then would he settle them.
Shehu Sani says he hopes to retrieve and share a video of his brief discussion with the late driver, a living testimony to a brand of leadership defined not by accumulation, but by restraint.
In an age obsessed with wealth and possession, the Sardauna’s legacy, as retold from Kaduna’s wards and GRAs, reads less like history — and more like a moral challenge to the present.
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