Bishop Hassan Kukah and Transformational Leadership

[Toyin Falola]

His Lordship, Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah, has transformed the Sokoto Diocese of the Catholic Church, as well as the city itself. I spent quality time with him, first at dinner, and later in his office. I visited him years earlier, when he was laying the foundation of what is now an extraordinary achievement.

 

With a magisterial command of Nigerian politics, our topics shifted from encounters with major figures, old and recent, revealing the values of oral histories, the pitfalls of relying on published accounts. What a library? His retentive memory is far superior to mine, with the capabilities to remember names, dates and events with accuracy.

 

He is at home in the world of the Nigerian academy, lamenting the decline in its culture. He has nostalgia for the great scholars of the 70s.

 

His missionary work is full-scale—he has built a school, a clinic, an events center, a hotel and a sprawling secretariat complex. His views are realistic, even if some are political in nature.

 

Bishop Kukah is at once a Catholic missionary as he is a human rights activist, a philanthropist, a crusader for the rights of the downtrodden, an outspoken nationalist and, of course, a highly prized intellectual on the global scale.

 

We agreed on many things in the 1980s. Strikingly, we still agree on many things today, not the least our unfulfilled dreams.

 

As I left him, thinking of a trip to Maiduguri, I began to realize that His Lordship, while looking onto the future, is also reaching back to the ground zero of missionary work: the beneficiaries of his largess are not necessarily Catholics, as many are Muslims. This is where his vision is located—that the core of our humanity does not lie in identity politics, but the oneness of our humanity.

 

This is not even a preface!