The constant various calls for a detribalized, irreligious Arewa leadership are noble and emotionally appealing. Yet if we are serious about recovering the strategic unity exemplified by Ahmadu Bello and his team, as so severally eloquently put out, then we must be ready to confront an uncomfortable but necessary question – i.e. who initiated the religious rupture that ultimately dismantled the inclusive Northern coalition the Sardauna team built?
History does not permit evasions.
Following the January 1966 military coup in which the Sardauna himself was killed, widely perceived in the North as Igbo-ethnically skewed, both Northern Muslims and Northern Christians, military and civilian, fell victims. In response, they forged a united front and staged a counter-coup in July 1966. This July counter-coup was not a Muslim enterprise; it was a collective Northern reaction, involving officers and men across religious lines, operationally led by Murtala Muhammed, a Muslim.
Crucially, Murtala did not exploit that moment for sectarian dominance. Despite being firmly in control of the military, he chose continuity over ambition. In the true spirit of inclusive Northern vision, Yakubu Gowon, a Christian and the most senior Northern military officer, was brought forth and appointed Head of State. What followed was unprecedented; Gowon governed Nigeria for nine uninterrupted years with the full political and moral support of Northern Muslims, both civilian and military! Gowon also led not as a Christian but as a true Northern Nigerian.
This was Arewa at its most cohesive best!
Then came the rupture. Gowon was overthrown and Murtala took over. Now Gowon’s removal had nothing to do with religion; it followed his failure to honour the transition to civil rule. Yet when Murtala Muhammed assumed leadership, a critical section of Northern Christian elites abruptly recast his government as an Islamist project. Within six months, they conspired and assassinated him. The aftermath was devastating – 36 coup plotters were convicted and executed, 31 of them Christians. Beyond the morality of those events, their political consequence was decisive; they irreparably damaged Muslim-Christian trust in the North.
But the pattern did not end there.
In 1990, Major Gideon Orkar led a failed coup attempt that represented perhaps the most explicit institutionalisation of religious and sectional hostility in Nigeria’s military and political history. In his broadcast, Orkar unilaterally excised all predominantly Muslim states from the Nigerian federation, declaring them no longer part of the country. This was not an abstract political disagreement; it was a formal attempt to redraw Nigeria’s map along religious lines.
That episode remains symbolic. It demonstrated that, for a segment of Northern Christian political actors, exclusion – not accommodation – had become an acceptable political pattern. Seen in this context, contemporary accusations against Muslims, ranging from “Islamisation” to claims of systematic Christian genocide, do not emerge in a vacuum. They align with a historical pattern of suspicion, resistance and political mobilisation against Muslim leadership, irrespective of policy content.
Since then, every Muslim national leader, at whatever level, has faced entrenched opposition from Christian political blocs. Even policies with no coercive effect on non-Muslims, such as Hajj facilitation, Sharia courts for consenting adherents, Islamic banking, hijab wearing, Islamic Religious Knowledge in schools curriculum, etc. are reflexively framed as existential threats against Christianity, often led by the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN).
This opposition is striking, given that Nigeria’s inherited state structure as a whole remains profoundly Christian in orientation – Sunday as a national work-free day, Christian prayers and symbolism in public schools, Christian-derived education systems and Common Law traditions rooted in British Christianity – arrangements largely accepted by all religions as “neutral.”
None of this is to deny that identity politics corrodes governance. But honest diagnosis requires symmetry. The historical record shows repeated Muslim concessions in pursuit of unity, often unmatched by reciprocal restraint.
If Arewa lost its strategic coherence, it was not because Muslims abandoned pluralism after Sardauna or after Gowon. It was because trust was broken, systematically and repeatedly, under the banner of often idle suspicion, accusation, fear and exclusion.
Reclaiming the North’s legacy therefore demands more than aspirational rhetoric. It requires confronting where cohesion failed, how suspicion hardened into ideology and why inclusion gave way to excision. Only on the foundation of truth, not selective memory, can Arewa rebuild a political identity that turns diversity into strength rather than perpetual fracture.
