The late British Queen Elizabeth II once described the year 1992 as her “annus horribilis,” i.e. horrible year, because three of her children, Prince [now King] Charles, Princess Anne and Prince Andrew all divorced their spouses that year, in addition to a blitz of negative publicity for the monarchy and a fire at Windsor Castle.
Many big people died in Nigeria in 2025, including Afenifere chieftain Ayo Adebanjo on February 14, Ijaw leader Chief Edwin Clark on February 17, former Education Minister Prof Jibrin Aminu on June 5, business mogul Aminu Dantata on June 28, former President Muhammadu Buhari on July 13 and Tijjaniya Muslim sect leader Sheikh Dahiru Bauchi November 27. I follow in Her Late Majesty’s footsteps and declare the year 2025, which ends tomorrow, as my personal Annus Horribilis because of the departure of nine very close friends and associates within this year.
The year opened with the loss on January 4 of Prof Nuhu Yaqub.I first knew Prof Yaqub in 1981when he arrived at the then University of Sokoto as a Graduate Assistant while we were students. We met at an underground meeting of the Communist Party. For the next four decades, through his rise in academia to become Vice Chancellor of University of Abuja and pioneer Vice Chancellor of Sokoto State University, we remained close to Prof Nuhu for ideological inspiration, intellectual direction and just plain good social manners. I last saw him at Prof Jibo Ibrahim’s birthday celebration at Yar’adua Centre, Abuja in late 2024, and he was his very cheerful self. I didn’t know it was to be the last meeting.
In May, we lost my townsman and close family friend AlhajiIbrahim Yahaya Bawa. I had known his brothers many years before I knew him because two of them, Hassan Yahaya Bawa and Umar Yahaya Bawa, were my secondary school classmates. Their father, the late Alhaji Yahaya Bawa Tafidan Gwandu, was the first chairman of Jega Local Government in 1976. When I went to live in Kaduna in 1990, I found that Alhaji Ibrahim, who worked at NNPC, was a very close friend of my close friend, Lawal Mada, now late. As a result, we became very close socially. He was the epitome of a gentleman; soft spoken, very courteous and with a very generous spirit.
On July 26, we lost a titanic African intellectual, Professor Okello Oculi. As university students in the early 1980s we heard a lot about the ABU Zaria Political Science lecturer Professor Okello Oculi, the Uganda-born poet, philosopher and artist who narrowly survived Idi Amin’s brutal regime in his native country. Okello organized the famous Mock OAU Summits at ABU. He assigned roles to students after the most notable African leaders of those days such as Mobutu Sese Seko, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Jerry Rawlings, Daniel arap Moi, Kenneth Kaunda and Anwar Sadat. He coached them very well, from dressing to speech to ideological posture. I first met Okello in 2006 on the Editorial Board of Daily Trust. He was very gentle, amiable, courteous and deeply knowledgeable. Okello was obsessed with Africa’s colonial history. Many decades after African countries became independent, he tended to blame colonialists for most of our problems. I last saw Prof Okello at Prof Jibo’s birthday celebration. A colossal African intellectual had fallen.
Hajiya Ramatu Ali Ohioma’s sudden passing on August 26 was painful to me. Even though I knew her from her byline in New Nigerian in the 1980s, where she reported from Jos, I only got toknow her personally when I went to work in New Nigerian in 1995. We served together on the Group Editorial Board, of which I was the Chairman for a six years while she was Associate Editor a Permanent Board Member. We were also together for many years on the Editorial Board of Daily Trust. Hajiya Ramatu had a large circle of friends from her days at Queen Elizabeth College, Ilorin and ABU Zaria. She maintained close contact with many of them and one by one, she broughtme professionally close to many of them. She got involved in many book projects and she dragged me into each one, including to review her own book, to review her uncle Colonel Ahmadu Ali’s book, and to be co-author of the biography of her other uncle, the late Brigadier Musa Usman.
The sudden death in mid-September of former Sokoto State permanent secretary Tukur Umar Mohammed, whom we called Tee Kay, shocked me no end. I spoke to him on phone one evening and he told me he was to undergo surgery the next day.Hours later, he passed away in the night. We were university classmates but became exceptionally close due to left-wing ideological activism. Tee Kay was so fervently left-wing that when he arrived at my house one day in December 1984 and I [sadly] told him that US President Ronald Reagan had just won re-election, Tee Kay said it was not true. When I tuned in the BBC and he heard it, he said he did not recognize the election!
Even after we mellowed down over the years, Tee Kay and I remained very close family friends. On every festival occasion in Sokoto, he took gifts to my parents’ house, and his house in Sokoto was always one of my first ports of call whenever I was in town. He told me numerous stories about career ups and downs during his years of service, especially since he was in the Security Division of the Governor’s Office under successive military and civilian governors. Towards the end of his life, he became a devoted rice and fish farmer, a rearer of horses, and the Sultan bestowed him with his family’s traditional title of Sarkin Tamburra, which he really cherished but never got to celebrate.
A week after Tee Kay’s passing, our close mutual friend, Associate Professor Garba Ahmed Gusau, known to friends as Garus, also passed away. I had called Garus to condole with him on Tee Kay’s passing, and it turned out to be our last call. Garus was a year ahead of Tee Kay and I at the university. We soon landed together in the left-wing movement. I remember a day in the 1980s when Tee Kay and Garus breathlessly arrived at my house and asked me to help settle a hot argument. Prof Ali Mazrui said in one of his documentaries that “both Israel and Cuba are client states [of the US and USSR respectively], but Israel shows more independence of action than Cuba.” Garus thought Mazrui was right but Tee Kay said it was not true. Knowing that agreeing with Mazrui could cost me Tee Kay’s friendship, I skirted around the subject, showered praises on Fidel Castro and roundly condemned Israel as an American stooge.
September dealt me yet another cruel blow with the passing on September 18 of Malam Muftau Baba-Ahmed. I knew Malam Muftau’s brothers Dr. Hakeem, Khalifa and Mahmoon Baba Ahmed many years before I got to know him. In the 1970s in Sokoto, my family lived next door to their elder sister, Hajiya Labiba Ahmed Tahir. I got to know Malam Muftau around 2011, especially during the Occupy Nigeria protest following President Goodluck Jonathan’s failed attempt to remove fuel subsidy. Terrific organizer that he was, Muftau set up an email based [no WhatsApp then] Nigeria Collective discussion group, made up of nearly 100 of the country’s leading intellectuals, academics, journalists, diplomats and assorted technocrats. I was amazed that he brought me into it. Discussion in that forum was wide-ranging, intense but nearly always polite.
In years that followed, I became much closer to Muftau and discussed with him nearly every day. He was widely and deeply knowledgeable, discussing everything from Islamic texts to Western literature, national history and technology. It helped a lot that my father and grandfather were close to his father, and he saw it as a continuation of those family ties. He was also very patriotic; in 2017 when a Northern youth group “served notice” on Igbos to leave the North in response to IPOB activity, Muftau hosted late-night meetings in his house, attended by a dozen select patriots, to discuss ways to prevent endangering national peace.
On November 17, came another news of the passing of the great journalist, newspaper editor, columnist, media administrator and author Mr. Dan Agbese. I had been reading his very rich writings in various publications, especially in Newswatch, since the 1980s, but I only got to meet Oga Dan around 2006 when I moved to Abuja. It was no small honour that be cited one of my articles in his book about column writing. We became even more acquainted in the Northern Media Forum, of which he was Chairman. In 2017 or so, when I was at Daily Trust, Leadership publisher Sam Nda-Isaiah launched a heated attack against the paper for publishing the Yobe State Government’s advertorial in response to Sam’s attack on it in his column.
The matter was slated for discussion at a Northern Media Forum meeting, and I was curious to see how the discussion will go. It did not go far; in his opening remarks, the Chairman [Agbese] firmly dismissed Sam’s insistence that Trust should not have accepted an advertorial attacking him; he said a newspaper is a public trust, that it must accept a paid advert from a responsible party provided the content does not breach any law; and Oga Dan concluded by saying that there cannot be two rules, one for us media people and another rule for others. I was amazed at his professionalism and firmness that day and many other days.
Alhaji Abubakar Chika Yarima’s passing on November 23 was another very painful loss. It was his brother, Bello Yarima who was my secondary school classmate but Alhaji Chika being more outgoing, soon took over the friendship and we were to remain close to the end of his life. During the Second Republic, when his father was Secretary to the State Government under Governors Shehu Kangiwa and Dr. Garba Nadama, Alhaji Chika was our encyclopedia of political stories. He knew in intimate detail every political manoeuvre in the old Sokoto State [I dunno where he got his stories from]. When soldiers returned to power in 1984, Chika’s stories suddenly dried up. My father succeeded his father as SMG and Head of Service under the soldiers but I had no source of stories like his. Over the last decade, Alhaji Chika suffered from diabetes; once very plump, he shed a lot of weight, but remained active within his large circle of friends and also in local politics.
Dr. Abubakar Sokoto Mohammed, who passed away on December 11, was our left-wing ideological mentor since our student days. Then a lecturer at ABU Zaria, he was an indefatigable organizer of the underground Communist Party and he took me to numerous meetings in Zaria, Ilorin, Ibadan, Benin and Lagos. In the early 1980s he wrote an M Sc Thesis on Satiru, the village where a Mahdist rebellion against British rule took place in 1906 and which the British colonial regime quelled with the severest force. It was one of the most impactful pieces of Nigerian History I ever read, and several decades afterwards, I still called Dr. Abubakar to ask follow up questions, which he always supplied promptly and in great detail.
There was never a year in which I lost so many close friends and associates. May their souls find rest in perfect peace.
