19TH MARCH 2021, THE DAY OF MY COMPLETE MISERY AND DISTRESS

My family and I have been thrashed into abject melancholy for your sudden demise. Despite your humanly fragile nature, you are still the best father I could gladly have wished for in the next world, your love for the human race and of course your offspring was non-negotiable. Am deeply saddened and downhearted by your departure but takes solace in the fact that you had lived a descent and godly life and I trust you’re happily with your maker.

The gathering of well-wishers saw people from all walks of life. I saw great scholars lowered head just short of shedding tears. I saw acquaintances, former great Government functionaries and a number of our Assembly Members. I saw chiefs, Islamic clerics and I saw the teeming youth that thronged the cemetery. I saw people that hitherto you would see cruising in their big motorcycle walk from our family residence to the cemetery; damming the heat of scorching heat of the sun and the dusty distance. The sadness on their faces gave away the fact that it was least expected that #Baba #Mumuni as you were affectionately called would leave very soon. You were full of life and had even made a call to one of your offspring the week before.

There was a tacit agreement in the atmosphere that regardless of your status in life, you will one day be bathed, wrapped and left in the belly of the earth to rot. After all, a great man had once driven the point home well when he stated that “there is an amazing democracy about death. It is not aristocracy for some people, but a democracy for all of the people. Kings die and beggars die, rich men die and poor men die; old people die and young people die; death comes to the innocent and it comes to the guilty. Death is the irreducible common denominator of all men.”

So a great man died. Death had robbed the world of a beautiful soul today. A giant, a colossus, and a walking- institution all rolled into one. Unfortunately, you did not capture your life in a single document for posterity to glean from. You never codified your life experience for the upcoming ones to aspire to. You never gave life to the statement you made when you were admitted at the Presbyterian Hospital yesterday but you have imbibed in us your children the hunger for integrity and boldness.

You devoured any initiative that bring grudges among us but rather so keenly encourage for the drive towards prosperity of your offspring and the human race in general. It’s my fervent prayer that the lacuna created by your demise would be accepted as nature’s way of sanitizing our conscience and consciousness. May Allah forgive your shortcomings and grant you Jannah without reckoning. Aamiin!

Note: The Adua (Funeral) is slated for Thursday the first day of April 2021!