Top 10 Nigerian Leaders in Nigeria’s First Republic (1960–1966)

3. Sir Ahmadu Bello – “The Sardauna of Sokoto”

Role: Premier of Northern Nigeria (1954–1966), Leader of the Northern People’s Congress (NPC)

Here was a man who could have been Prime Minister – and chose not to be.

The Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, was arguably the most powerful individual in Nigeria’s First Republic. As Premier of Northern Nigeria and head of the NPC – the party that controlled the federal government – he wielded influence that extended far beyond his region’s borders. The North had more seats in the federal parliament than the East and West combined, and Bello was the undisputed powerbroker behind that dominance.

His decision to remain in the North rather than take the Prime Ministership – a role he gave to his deputy, Tafawa Balewa – was one of the most consequential choices in Nigerian political history. Southerners viewed it with deep suspicion, reading it as the strategy of a man who preferred to run the federation from Kaduna rather than answer to it from Lagos.

A descendant of the great jihadist reformer Usman Dan Fodio and the Sultan of Sokoto, Bello was deeply committed to Islamic values and Northern cultural identity. He was a skilled administrator who transformed Northern Nigeria’s infrastructure and education system, even as critics accused him of perpetuating feudalism and suppressing dissent.

On the night of January 15, 1966, Ahmadu Bello was shot dead in his residence in Kaduna. He was 56 years old.

Legacy: He is revered in Northern Nigeria as the greatest political figure in the region’s history. Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, the largest university in sub-Saharan Africa, is named after him.

4. Chief Obafemi Awolowo – “Awo,” The Lion of Yorubaland

Role: Premier of Western Nigeria (1954–1959), Leader of the Opposition in the Federal Parliament (1960–1962)

No name in First Republic Nigeria is simultaneously more admired and more tragic than Obafemi Awolowo.

Born in 1909 in Ikenne, Western Nigeria, Awolowo was a self-made man who studied law by correspondence while working multiple jobs, eventually qualifying as a barrister in 1947. He founded the Action Group (AG) in 1951 and became Premier of the Western Region in 1954, where he introduced revolutionary free primary education and free healthcare – the first region in the whole of Africa to implement such sweeping social programs.

By independence in 1960, Awolowo led the opposition in the federal parliament. He was eloquent, principled, and fiercely critical of what he saw as Northern dominance under the NPC-NCNC coalition. In 1962, however, a crisis within the Action Group – partly engineered by his own deputy, Samuel Akintola – gave the federal government the opening it needed. Awolowo was arrested, tried for treasonable felony, and jailed in 1963.

He spent the remainder of the First Republic in prison.

Many Nigerians, then and now, believed the trial was a political hatchet job designed to silence the most dangerous opposition voice in the country. His supporters called him the best president Nigeria never had.

Legacy: Awolowo’s legacy in education and progressive governance continues to define political discourse in Southwest Nigeria. He remains arguably the most quoted Nigerian politician of the 20th century.