Isyaku Rabiu
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Isyaku Rabiu (1928) is a prominent Nigerian businessman from Kano. In 1984, he was one of the commodity traders arrested and jailed by the administration of General Buhari on charges of hoarding rice.
[edit] Life
Isyaku Rabiu was born into the family of a religious scholar, Rabiu Dan Tinki. Isyaku's religious upbringing influenced his development as a young man, as a youth, he embraced Islamic scholarship and was popularly known as a Malam. It wasn't until the early 1960's that Isyaku delved into commercial enterprise. As a close confident of Kano businessman, Ibrahim Musa Gashash, he established a procurement agency for textiles produced by the Kaduna Textile Factory, a firm controlled by Gashash. After success in trading textiles, he established his own textile factory, and was also involved in selling sewing machines. In the 1970's, three economic events helped cement his status among Kano's industrious elites. The oil and construction boom and the movement towards indigenization. He capitalized on the favorable conditions by building housing estates and buying up shares of some foreign nationals in the country.
During the 1980's, Isyaku built for himself a palatial mansion near the Goron Dutse Mosque, and for the society, he constructed a Jummat mosque in Kano.
[edit] References
- Roman Loimeier, Islamic Reform and Political Change in Northern Nigeria, 1997
