About the Foundation.

The founder, Sulayman Abu-Bakr comes from three generations of public service in Northern Nigeria and Niger State, across both his paternal and maternal lines, a lineage in government, traditional institutions and health that shapes his own work and the Foundation built in its honour.

His father, Alhaji Abu-Bakr Sulayman, Maiyaki Lapai, carried that tradition forward. A Sociology graduate of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, he spent 35 years in the Niger State and Federal Civil Service, a career that often retraced his own father’s steps: he rose to Acting Permanent Secretary of the Niger State Liaison Office in Lagos, before transferring in 1987 to the Federal Civil Service at State House, Dodan Barracks, the same seat of government where his father had served a generation earlier, as Liaison Officer to the President and Commander-in-Chief. When the seat of government moved to Abuja, he continued at State House as Chief Personnel Officer, Special Services, and rose to Assistant Director, Finance, Supplies and Special Services, a post he held until 1998, spending over a decade at the heart of the Presidency in all. He went on to hold senior positions in the Federal Ministries of Commerce, Interior, Petroleum Resources and Transport, rose to Director of Planning, Research and Statistics at the Federal Ministry of Environment, served on the board of the Nigerian Export-Import Bank, and chaired both the Niger State Roads Maintenance Agency and the Niger State Housing Corporation. Like his father, he serves the Lapai Emirate: first as Wambai Lapai, and today as Maiyaki Lapai.

The maternal line runs through health and education. Sulayman’s maternal grandfather, the late Alhaji Jimada Gana Mohammed of Muye, Lapai (1940-1990), is honoured as the father of nursing education in Niger State: the pioneer Principal of the School of Nursing, Bida, and later Chief Nursing Officer (Education) of Niger State. He built the School of Nursing, Bida from the ground up, led it to a 100% pass rate in the Nursing Council’s qualifying examinations, and laid a foundation on which more than four thousand nurses have since trained. A Gold Medallist in Nursing Education and a respected administrator, writer and mentor, he served the Nursing and Midwifery Council of Nigeria as an examiner and on its Education, Examination, Standards and Accreditation, and Registration committees, and was Deputy National President of the Nigerian Nurses Association (N.N.A.), which later became the National Association of Nigerian Nurses and Midwives (NANNM). His daughter, Hajiya Rakiya J.G. Mohammed, Sulayman’s mother, is an educationist who taught at Queen’s College, Lagos and Federal Government Girls’ College, Bwari, before serving with the Federal Scholarship Board and the Federal Ministry of Education, Abuja.

Both lines converge in Sulayman Abu-Bakr and, through him, in the Foundation itself: administrative service and institution-building on one side, health and education on the other, the same two threads that run through SLF’s own scholarship programme, named for all four grandparents in turn.