*Photo: Alhaji Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III*
His Eminence, Alhaji Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III, CFR, mni, the 20th Sultan of Sokoto and President-General of the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA), turns 70 this week. It is a milestone that invites more than the customary courtesies of a royal birthday. It calls for a sober reckoning with what one life, deliberately and consistently lived, can mean for the cohesion of a nation as complex and as fragile as Nigeria.
I wrote a decade ago, on the occasion of his tenth year on the ancient throne of his ancestor, Sheikh Usman Dan Fodio, that the Sultan had “succeeded in building an enduring legacy on the trail of his forefathers” and had “established a successful brand as a builder of strong bridges of understanding and brotherhood across Nigeria in just one decade.” Twenty years into that reign, and seventy years into a life that began in Sokoto in 1956 and passed through the officer corps of the Nigerian Army before ascending the two-century-old throne of the Sokoto Caliphate in 2006, that judgment has only been vindicated. What was promise in 2016 is legacy in 2026.
A Sultan for the Whole Ummah, Not Half of It
The office of the Sultan of Sokoto carries a unique burden that is often underappreciated outside Muslim circles: it is not merely a Northern institution, but the constitutional and spiritual head of the entire Nigerian Muslim Ummah, North and South. As President-General of the NSCIA- the apex body established in 1973 precisely to be, in the words of its founding charter, “the unifier and bridge among different Muslim groups in the country”- the Sultan presides over a structure that deliberately joins the North and South Deputy Presidents-General, the Shehu of Borno alongside the leadership of the Muslim Ummah of South-West Nigeria (MUSWEN), under one umbrella.
That structure only works if the man at its apex commands trust in Kano as readily as he does in Lagos, Enugu, Port Harcourt, and Abeokuta. His Eminence has spent two decades earning exactly that trust. He has stood firmly against the fragmentation of the Ummah along regional or sectarian lines, insisting- as he did during a recent Ramadan controversy- that the unity of Nigerian Muslims under one recognised leadership structure is not negotiable. It is a quieter form of statesmanship than the one that makes headlines, but it may be the more consequential one: a Sultan who has kept Northern and Southern Muslims speaking with one voice has denied Nigeria’s fault lines one of the cracks they might otherwise have exploited.
It is, however, in the space between Islam and Christianity that the Sultan’s legacy has been most visible and most vital. At the height of Boko Haram’s insurgency in 2012, when the country stood genuinely at risk of religious civil war, His Eminence and the Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, Cardinal John Onaiyekan, were jointly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts at interfaith dialogue against considerable odds. He convened an international joint Muslim-Christian delegation to Nigeria in May 2012 at a moment when few religious leaders were willing to be seen extending a hand across that particular divide. He has, more recently, told the Nigeria Inter-Religious Council (NIREC) in terms that bear repeating: that talking is better than fighting, that Muslims have no design to “Islamise” Nigeria, and that Muslims and Christians are “destined by God to coexist peacefully” and must learn to live together with mutual respect rather than mutual suspicion.
This is not the language of a sectarian leader. It is the language of a father of the nation- which is precisely how successive Nigerian presidents and political leaders across party lines have chosen to describe him on this birthday. President Bola Tinubu called him “a stabilising voice in times of turbulence, a bridge-builder across faiths and communities, and a moral compass not only for our Muslim ummah, but for our entire nation.” Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar hailed him as “a symbol of wisdom, unity and peaceful leadership.” Governor Dikko Radda of Katsina described him as one who has “provided calm leadership in times of tension and wise counsel in times of decision” and “a bridge builder whose voice carries weight in every corner of this country.” These are not the tributes paid to a merely ceremonial monarch. They are the tributes paid to a man who has repeatedly placed his personal authority behind the proposition that Nigeria’s diversity is a resource to be managed with wisdom, not a fault line to be exploited for power.
The Sultan’s moral authority did not arrive by inheritance alone, though he is the heir to a throne with few equals in African history- a caliphate that, at its height, linked more than thirty emirates and ten million people across a territory reaching from present-day Burkina Faso to Cameroon. Before the throne, there was a soldier’s life: commissioned into the Nigerian Army’s elite Armoured Corps in 1977, service commanding African peacekeepers in Chad under the old Organisation of African Unity, and a rise to the rank of Brigadier General before he was called home to Sokoto in 2006 to succeed his brother, Sultan Muhammadu Maccido. That discipline- the instinct to serve an institution larger than oneself, and to hold one’s tongue and temper in moments others might have used for provocation- has been visible in every crisis he has since been called upon to help manage, from the Boko Haram years to the banditry crisis that continues to afflict the North-West today, where he has consistently called on governments, security agencies, traditional institutions, and citizens to close ranks rather than turn on one another.
His standing has been recognised well beyond Nigeria’s borders. He has for years been ranked among the fifty most influential Muslims in the world by The Muslim 500, published by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre in Jordan- recognition rooted not in ceremony but in demonstrated influence within the Ummah and in how that influence has been used to represent Islam fairly to the wider world.
There is a particular kind of leadership that does not announce itself in slogans but in restraint: in the phone call not escalated into a statement, the provocation not answered in kind, the delegation quietly convened before a crisis becomes a conflagration. Sultan Sa’ad Abubakar has practised that kind of leadership for two decades, across a Nigeria that has given him no shortage of occasions to fail at it. At 70, and twenty years into a reign that has outlasted several political administrations and weathered the country’s most dangerous sectarian moment in a generation, he has earned the right to be remembered not merely as a royal father to Muslims, but as one of the small number of Nigerians whose personal restraint has materially kept the country whole.
I join millions of Nigerians- Muslim and Christian, Northern and Southern- in celebrating His Eminence on this landmark seventieth birthday. May the Almighty grant him continued health, wisdom, and strength, and may the bridge he has spent a lifetime building continue to stand long after the builder has gone to his rest.
*Disu Kamor is Executive Chairman of the Muslim Public Affairs Centre (MPAC) Nigeria.