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For AB Ahmed

Two of the Ahmed siblings have crossed my path and they are brothers. It is sad to lose either of them, but as our elders…

Two of the Ahmed siblings have crossed my path and they are brothers. It is sad to lose either of them, but as our elders say, twenty children cannot play together for twenty years. Life happens, and death happens and so the incredibly cerebral AB Ahmed has left us. 

I met both brothers over the last decade and a half, two continents apart. I was covering the National Assembly for Newswatch magazine when AB Ahmed was appointed Media Adviser to the late Chuba Okadigbo. We were invited to lunch at the Hilton Hotel where AB, as he is fondly called, was residing pending accommodation arrangements in the federal capital city. 

We ‘met’ in the good company of other political reporters, but since I was making a first contact, I recalled trying my best to make a good first impression by not exposing my ebullience. But it’s almost impossible to be a good boy before AB Ahmed, and in less than ten minutes when I hung my guard. 

As we picked through the menu, AB reminded us not to be like the uppity lady who ordered what she was not familiar with in a quest to impress and ended up not eating dinner. It was a curious anecdote that I would use days later MCing events in Abuja. 

The romance between the presidency of Olusegun Obasanjo and Chuba Okadigbo’s senate was not to last, and AB Ahmed is too dainty to be passed on to the bureaucracy or the succession, he simply fizzled out for a while only to resurface first in an electoral sub-committee of a northern politician, one of whom Obasanjo vowed to hand over power. From the moment you met AB Ahmed, you were sure to understand that this man is an enigma even if you did not know that he was the one-time virulent editor of the old New Nigerian. His knowledge of issues and topics are incredibly vast and he would intellectually engage and challenge without being offish.

Later, we would meet and interact at the Editorial Board meetings of Media Trust Limited where AB would show up like a restless spirit and disappear. Traditionally, you do not disrespect people who were older than you if you were well brought up, but AB does not request respect, he commanded it without throwing it in your face. He would crack jokes with you in a way and manner that says – there are no boundaries with me. There was no ‘how dare you’ stance to his interaction with you whether you were younger than him. You could tease him to no end and call him agbaya, without him losing his cool. Basically agbaya would mean an old fool, but AB would take the literal meaning – an older one who has taken his own baggage to the chest level – i.e. now capable of completing the task! So he’ll respond with ‘mo gbe temi d’aya’, literally ‘at least I’ve carried mine to the chest level’.

This encyclopaedia of knowledge and effortless debater and writer appeared to have been beaten to submission by the state of the Nigerian state. No matter what you threw up as a source of disappointment or progress, AB’s response seems to be the reaction of someone whose been there, done that! In other climes, this intellectual would be back in the ivory tower moulding the minds of young writers and philosophers. Nigeria did not start killing talents today, the journey has taken so many before and there’s no assurance that things are about to change anytime soon.

AB Ahmed’s generation were the last crop of professionals whose balloon of hope was deflated by the sharp pin of years of unfulfilled dreams; dashed hopes and constant bungling of their quest at nation-building. In his quips are the shattered dreams of a generation that did not recover from the shock of witnessing and chronicling dashed hopes and shattered dreams. 

Years of mediocrity and lack of planning foisted on the nation by half-brained coupists and hare-brained civilian lackeys reflected in his interactions on the Nigerian question. They were the generation of people who invested hope in Nigeria and reaped nothing but gross disappointment in return. 

As Obasanjo continued in his habit of using one piece of cake to pacify several children, you could see a deeper and prickly disappointment at a nation that instead of moving forward dives back to a yesterday that is anything but glorious. We recycled Obasanjo, a gross disappointment and a monumental mistake; it must have been shocking to see us recycle Buhari. What’s more, as I write this tribute, there are reports of the ganging up of ex-military bigwigs. As we worked in the strategic committee of one of the promisees of the Obasanjo conundrum AB Ahmed would make his contributions with casual aloofness and incredible doubt.

Although he would talk about his younger brother in faraway Canada, I had no inkling that I would meet him several years later. The younger Ahmed, who answers to the dualisation of his two first names like his brother is a medical doctor, forensic psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry. He would welcome me into his household before even getting to know whom I was and would continue to help my family as we settled to life in a foreign land. 

It was AG Ahmed who called on the morning a cold January morning to break the sad news of the passage of his elder brother and as tough as I’ve come to know him, he broke down in tears. We all know that when we cry for loved ones, it is not that we wished they’ll never die, it’s the pain that a country like ours harvested only a tiny percentage of what they had to offer. It is with the pain that nearly six decades after the flames of independence lighted up the dreams of paradise, the systems we’ve installed consistently raise and dash hopes while it garlands mediocrity, ineptitude and sham in all spheres. 

Thank you AB for sharing your pen with us, but more importantly for raising and sharing AG Ahmed. One day, Nigeria would exhume the blueprint of your hopes like sunshine at dawn. When that day comes, I am sure that you and others like you would finally be able to – rest in peace!

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