Shehu Shagari

Shehu Usman Aliyu Shagari (25 February 1925 – 28 December 2018) was a Nigerian politician who was the first democratically elected president of Nigeria, after the transfer of power by military head of state General Olusegun Obasanjo in 1979 giving rise to the Second Nigerian Republic.

Shehu Usman Shagari was born on 25 February 1925 in Shagari to a Sunni Muslim Fulani family.

Shagari was founded by his great-grandfather, Ahmadu Rufa'i. He was raised in a polygamous family, and was the sixth child born into the family.

His father, Aliyu Shagari, was the Magajin Shagari (magaji means village head).

Prior to becoming Magajin Shagari, Aliyu was a farmer, trader and herder.

However, due to traditional rites that prevented rulers from participating in business, Aliyu relinquished some of his trading interests when he became the Magaji.

Aliyu died five years after Shehu's birth, and Shehu's elder brother, Bello, briefly took on his father's mantle as Magajin Shagari.

Shagari started his education in a Quranic school and then went to live with relatives at a nearby town, where from 1931 to 1935 he attended Yabo elementary school.

In 1936–1940, he went to Sokoto for middle school, and then from 1941 to 1944 he attended Barewa College.

Between 1944 and 1952, Shagari matriculated at the Teachers Training College, in Zaria, Kaduna, Nigeria.

However, his early political activities started in 1945, when as a teacher he founded a youth group called Youth Social Circle in Sokoto and became its secretary.

The organization became one of the smaller groups that came together to be part of Northern People's Congress (NPC) which was founded in 1948.

In 1948, when Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe of the NCNC was touring Nigeria to raise funds to send a delegation to London to ask the Colonial Office to abrogate Richard's constitution as undemocratic, Shehu Shagari who was a keen reader of the West-African Pilot paper was the only man of Sokoto origin to attend this meeting.

When the British provincial educational officer was informed of Shagari's attendance, his salary increment was postponed that year to serve as a punishment.

The West-African Pilot was banned in the northern region schools, and Shagari wrote for it an article for its revival in 1948.

At the same time, Shagari had started advocating for the departure of colonial rule that he had produced a Hausa pamphlet carrying poetry which he named "Anti Colonialist" and put it in circulation.

In 1950, Shagari, a young teacher at 25, was nominated by a British district officer H.A.S Johnson to participate in the Ibadan Conference to debate the Richards Constitution.

An experienced politician, he briefly worked as a teacher before entering politics in 1951; and was elected into the House of Representatives in 1954.

Shehu Usman Shagari entered politics in 1951 when he became the secretary of the Northern People's Congress in Sokoto, Nigeria, a position he held until 1956.

From 1953 to 1958, Shagari got a job as a visiting teacher at Sokoto Province.

He was also a member of the Federal Scholarship Board from 1954 to 1958.

In 1954, Shehu Shagari was elected into his first public office as a member of the federal House of Representative for Sokoto west.

At various times between 1958 through independence of Nigeria in 1960 and 1975, he held a cabinet post as a federal commissioner or as a federal minister.

In 1958, Shagari was appointed as parliamentary secretary (he left the post in 1959) to the Nigerian prime minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, and that year he also served as the federal minister for commerce and industries.

From 1959 to 1960, Shagari was the pioneer federal minister for economic development of independent Nigeria, where his ministry was responsible for drawing the 1962–1968 development plan.

Shagari's Ministry of Economic Development was also responsible for the establishment of the Niger-Delta Development Board.

From 1960 to 1962, he was the federal minister for pensions, which undertook the mission of Nigerianization of the civil service.

In 1961, he led the delegation to the tenth anniversary of Libya's independence.

The same year, he was at the GATT ministerial conference in Geneva, where he raised the issue of European Economic Community's (ECC) discrimination against African countries like Nigeria who were not then, associated with EEC.

The same year, he led a delegation to the Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference (CPA) in London.

From 1962 to 1965, Shagari was made the federal minister for internal affairs.

He became the chairman of the next CPA Conference held in Lagos between October and November 1962.

In 1962, he led the delegation to ECA meeting in Addis Ababa to the commission's third meeting, the first which Nigeria attended as a full member where he strongly urged for price stabilization arrangement for tropical products.

In 1963, Shagari was Nigeria's delegate to CPA meeting in Kuala Lumpur.

From 1965 up until the first military coup in January 1966, Shagari was the federal minister for works and had executed many important projects, including Eko Bridge Lagos, which was the first major contract of the German construction firm Julius Berger in Nigeria, and the completion of the Niger Bridge which was commissioned in 1966 by Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa.

In 1967 he was appointed as the secretary for Sokoto Province Education Development Fund.

From 1968 to 1969, Shagari was given a state position in the North-Western State as Commissioner for Establishments.

As a member of the Parliament and a federal minister, Shagari led and was part of several Nigerian missions abroad.

As Minister of Economic Development, he was a member of the Nigerian delegation to the Tangiers Conference of the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), which was led by Minister of Finance Chief Festus Okotie Eboh.

As president, Shagari presided over the mass deportation of West African migrants in 1983, which primarily impacted Ghanaian migrants in Nigeria.