On 11th December 2025, we lost our dear comrade and friend, Abubakar Sokoto Mohammed. Sokoto, as we all called him, was the very definition of a progressive. His life was a permanent struggle to leave society better than he found it, to improve the lives and livelihoods of the downtrodden and to defend causes that would improve justice, equality, social harmony and peace. Sokoto joined the Department of Sociology of Ahmadu Bello University as a graduate assistant in 1976 only after a petition teacher and friend, Dr Patrick Wilmot, who had discovered that there was a plot to drop all four proposed graduate assistants of the 1976 set for their excessive radicalism – the gang of four were Ntiem Kungwai, SA Nkom, Richard Umaru and Abubakar Sokoto. They were all radical intellectuals with a commitment to social transformation. 1976 was indeed the year that radical students trained by the rich corps of radical lecturers started transiting into faculty positions to initiate the rich tradition of radical scholarship that was to define the university for the next three decades. Abubakar Sokoto Mohammed remained a shining star of the tradition in spite of numerous intrigues to get him out of the university and he resisted for as long as possible.
Abubakar Sokoto Mohammed: The passage of a committed comrade, By Jibrin Ibrahim
