22/06/2025
SARDAUNA BUILT THE NORTH — BUT HE BUILT IT ON TRIBALISM: IT’S TIME WE REBUILT OUR MINDS
By khaleed yazeed.
This is not an insult. It is not an attack on legacy. It is not a desecration of history. This is truth. Raw, painful, and necessary truth, spoken by a young man from the North who has watched his region sink into confusion, darkness, and stagnation while everyone keeps pointing fingers everywhere but backward.
Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, built the North. He established institutions. He left hospitals, schools, cooperative unions, and cultural pride. He made many sacrifices and shaped a generation. That cannot be denied. But we must say this: he also embedded a dangerous idea into Northern politics, a tribal and religious ideology that has crippled our thinking and frozen our progress.
He didn’t build the North to be free, he built it to be suspicious of others. He built a North that fears Southern Nigeria more than it fears poverty. A North that is taught to hate the Igbo before it is taught to love innovation.A North that sees the Christian as a threat, and not as a fellow citizen. A North that values ethnic loyalty more than national unity. A North that believes in holding power, not using it for good.
This political mindset didn’t die with him. It survived. It became a system. It became doctrine. And today, it is the reason the North is broken, poor, confused, and dangerously directionless.
Say what you want about me. Insult me. Curse me. Call me a traitor to the legacy. But I would rather be cursed by men than be cursed by history for keeping quiet while my region dies from within.
I am not saying Sardauna left nothing good. He left many noble legacies. But his politics were not perfect. In fact, some of them have poisoned generations. If we don’t admit this and reform them, the North will never move forward.
We will keep living in darkness and denial.
We will keep burning in the fires of religious and ethnic violence.
We will keep dying without knowing who to blame, or where to go.
Today, what we inherited from that ideology is the reason why Northern Nigeria:
Cannot define its future.
Cannot tolerate differences.
Cannot embrace new ideas.
Cannot love its neighbors without suspicion.
Cannot build bridges, only walls.
We have made enemies of progress. We have made friends with ignorance. We have turned arrogance into culture. And worst of all, we have called it pride.
The North must wake up.
It’s time we stop pretending that the enemy is outside. The enemy is the mindset that was planted in us. That we are superior. That we must dominate. That we don’t need to learn from others. That we must always rule. That we must fight before we understand.
That mindset has become our prison. That mindset is why we kill each other in the name of religion. That mindset is why our children beg on the streets while the South builds tech cities. That mindset is why we fear books, but celebrate politicians. We are not cursed by God, we are caged by history.
But we can escape. We can begin to think new thoughts. We can choose to be humans first before tribes. We can begin to relate with other Nigerians not as enemies, but as brothers in the same struggle.
I do not write this out of hate. I write this out of deep love for the North, for the land that raised me, for the people I still believe can rise again.
But we must bury tribal politics. We must reject inherited bigotry. We must rise beyond the old doctrines that have only kept us behind.
This is not 1960 anymore. This is not the Nigeria of coups and propaganda. This is 2025. And we must think for ourselves.
If we do not change how we think, if we do not confront the rot in the past, if we do not evolve, we will die slowly, painfully, blindly.
Khaleed Yazeed
A Northern son, born from the ashes of silence, rising to confront the lies that chained his people.
