Two Years Remembrance of Late President Shehu Usman Aliyu Shagari

The late President Shehu Usman Aliyu Shagari (Turakin Sokoto), who died on December 28, 2018, is being remembered this Monday, two years after.

Abubakar Atiku Nuhu-Koko, Founder/Pioneer Executive Director (1996 – 2011) of the Shehu Shagari World Institute for Leadership and Good Governance Sokoto, Sokoto State, in a statement on Monday expressed that the past two years gone were just as if late Shagari left the family, relatives, friends and associates and above all, Nigerians and Nigeria two days ago! He observed that in these past two years, a lot of water had passed through the bridge; full of nostalgia.

According to Abubakar Atiku Nuhu-Koko, “the past two years left a very wide open space or void in the hearts and minds of all the people whom in one way or another, he positively made little or great impacts during his sojourn on this earthly planet; from the time he was “Beckoned to Serve” humanity when he was just in his mid-20s of age to the time he was no more; at the ripe age of 93. The space or void is everlasting indeed.” Shagari was elected first Executive President in Nigeria in 1979, re-elected in 1984 after the first tenure elapsed in 1983.

According to the statement, “the 93 years he productively lived in this world were years that every mortal will like to attain; and if by Allah’s will, go beyond that age in good health and prosperity. It is a rarity for one to have lived that long, especially, in this part of the world. All thanks and praises be to Almighty Allah for the blessed longevity.”

The statement further read: “It is within these blessed historical years he lived; going back to the early 1940s, which he began serving this great nation and its peoples in various public and corporate service positions up to the time of his demise in 2018.

“Astonishingly to date, no one, dead or alive, among his peers and or age group ever had the rare opportunity of serving the country and Nigerians in the various positions he held in his rendezvous with destiny. For instance, it was in-between the period of being an ordinary grade-level classroom teacher in the rural Northern Nigeria of the then British protectorate in the mid-1940s, to the historical year 1979 when he was inaugurated as Nigeria’s first democratically elected Executive President that he set the indelible record of public service and political career in Nigeria that is unmatched to date indeed.

“This was a public service career that traversed the length and breadth of the British colonial bureaucracy, post-British colonial civil administration and to the post independent civil administration from 1960 to the late-1960s. It continued into the period of military interregnum from 1967 to 1979 after the transfer of power by military head of state General Olusegun Obasanjo.”

It was further highlighted that the period 1979 – 1983 was Nigeria’s democratic watershed once again; the period of his epoch-making elective political career that gave birth to the Second Republic; with him being the first democratically elected Executive President of Nigeria (nominated by Alhaji Isyaku Ibrahim, International Business Mogul-cum-national politician/then head of Benue-Plateau delegates to the National Convention of the now defunct National Party of Nigeria – NPN).

“As an elder statesman from 1983 to 2018, he was the country’s moral compass; a man of splendid integrity, unassuming patriotism and the man who served Nigeria and its good peoples with honor, dignity and very highly respected and regarded. May Almighty Allah forgive his shortcoming and reward his good deeds with Aljannat Firdausi, Ameem Thumma Ameen,” the statement read.