With the passing of Professor Adamu Baikie on Friday, 12 December 2025, Nigeria and, indeed, Africa lost a great intellectual, institution builder, and architect of modern education. He was someone who created significant impact on the lives of those he encountered as a teacher, administrator, church and community leader. We are grateful to God for giving him a full and accomplished life having lived 94 years.
For me, the Baikies are family and we grew up in a small closely-knit community. In 1934, our parents were foundation members of Christ Church, Anglican Communion in Fagge, Kano. The geographical location of the church was important. It was built at the centre of the vast empty open field that separated the indigenous Fagge community from the “strangers’ quarters” of Sabon Gari. The placement was an identity affirmation of a Hausa Christian community that was no longer assimilable in neither the Kano Muslim community nor the southern Nigerian Christian community of Sabon Gari. The missionary who led the development of the church, after establishing the earlier churches in Durumin Margarke in Zaria city, which was subsequently moved to Wusasa, Zaria, Dr Walter Miller was committed to his triple identity mission – Hausa-Christian-Anglican. And so, it was that our two families would walk from our houses in Sabon Gari towards but not quite in Fagge for our religious devotion.
Prof Adamu Baikie’s father, Batshon Bangbharyiga Abdallah, was one of the grand old men of our Church as well as chief clerk at the Kano Native Authority under the Emirship of Abdullahi Bayero. Of course, I was not born at that time, but Pa Baikie as we fondly called him was a great story teller and one of my joys as a kid was sitting by his feet and listening to the stories of his adventures. For me, the most gripping stories he told us were around the adventures by the missionaries in the first two decades of the 20th century, the intricacies of Native Administration and the construction of the rail lines to Kano.
Pa Baikie was of Shuwa Arab origin, born around 1890 in the Lai Bagharmi District of Chad and was captured by slave raiders in 1900 at age nine, just at the time the British and the French were occupying the borders between Nigeria, Chad and Niger. He escaped from his captors in Borno and eventually walked south to Lokoja and Zungeru where he met missionaries and colonial administrators that provided a new pathway for him in both religion and Western education. He adopted the name of the missionary who adopted and converted him to Christianity following their meeting in 1910, the Reverend John Ogazuma Baikie.
Professor Adamu Baikie inherited his father’s story telling skills and had an excellent gift of the gap. He was the fulcrum of every conversation he was part of. His speech making skills were legendary. I still remember with pride the eloquence with which he read addresses at Ahmadu Bello University convocation ceremonies when I was a student there and he was professor and university orator. He was educated at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science, and Technology, Zaria (1957-1961), the precursor to Ahmadu Bello University. He then received a Northern Nigerian Government scholarship as Ahmadu Bello University’s first staff development scholar to the USA where he studied in Indiana University, Bloomington. He obtained an M.Sc. and ultimately a Doctor of Education in Educational Technology (1967-1969).
On his return to Ahmadu Bello University, Professor Baikie became the architect of education studies. He was the first Nigerian Head of the Department of Education and later the first Nigerian Dean of the Faculty of Education. He initiated the B.Ed. degree programme, designing a pioneering part-time structure for serving teachers, and established the Master’s and Doctorate degrees in Education. He was also instrumental in the establishment of two new departments: Vocational and Technical Education and Physical and Health Education. Under his leadership, student numbers in Education grew from 20 to over 1,200, and academic staff grew from 8 to 48.
In his post Ahmadu Bello University career, Professor Baikie became a serial vice chancellor. He started at the University of Benin (1978-1985), where he established the Faculties of Law and Agriculture, the School of Postgraduate Studies, and the unique Institute of Public Administration, overseeing a tripling of the student population. He then moved to the National University of Lesotho (1988-1995), where he made history as the first Nigerian appointed Vice-Chancellor in another African country. There, he revised the curricula, established a new Faculty of Agriculture and Postgraduate Studies, and successfully hosted the Conference of the Association of African Universities.
He then returned to Nigeria where he served as the Pioneer Vice-Chancellor of Nasarawa State University, Keffi (2002-2009), establishing the institution as a solid academy with seven academic faculties, a Postgraduate School, a School of Preliminary Studies, and all critical service units, guiding the university to its first accreditations and a student body of over 10,000.
Professor Baikie was a well-respected scholar with deep insights into the educational crises into which Nigeria has fallen and how to address the problems. In addition to his public lectures and journal publications, his authored works include his autobiography, “Against All Odds”; has father’s autobiography titled “Baba’s Diaries: 1890-1983” (a book dear to me as he recorded his attendance at my own naming ceremony in 1954); and four other authoritative books: “Recurrent Issues in Nigerian Education”; “Nigerian Education: Ivory Towers and Other Issues”; “Boys’ Middle School: The Reminiscences of an Old Boy”; and “Sabon Gari: The Simmering Melting Pot of Kano State” – a classical work that addresses the efficacy of diversity as a basis for development and national cohesion.
For the past fifty years, Professor Baikie has been the leadership pillar for the Hausa Christian community in Northern Nigeria. He has also been able to play the role of the bridge with the Emirates we belong to. He once told me that one of the happiest days of his retirement was the arrival of the current Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II, at his house to great him and exchange pleasantries. Deep condolences to his immediate family, Garba (Dada}, Mohammed, Ado, Tanimu, Jummai, Maimuna and Zuwaira. I am glad that Prof Baikie had a definition of family that was much wider than the nuclear one and included so many of us as part of the family. May his soul rest in perfect peace.
