Dr. Aminu Shuaib Safana was too good to die for Madam Patricia Etteh the Obasanjo-imposed carpet crossing hairdressing Speaker. I say this because I know that Safana was a good man. I know that Safana has been quite close to Umaru Yar’adua. I also know from Safana that Yar’adua has always been a good man like the Dr. Safana I have had the privilege of knowing some 14 years ago.

The Dr. Safana I know is a man I met sometime late 1992. My brief interaction with him showed that he was a deeply religious man. I met him for the first and last time in “my son”, BBC Hausa section’s recently retired veteran Hausa broadcaster, Abubakar Kabir Matazu’s London home. He was then the one who’d wake us up for the Subhi (morning) prayers. Even after a marathon debate most of the night on issues of interest about Nigeria, about Muslims and the North. We have not met since our London meeting. I must confess I feel bad that I never made much of an effort to link up with him even while he was secretary to the state government of Katsina during the first term of Umaru Yar’adua as Katsina Governor, though Sagiru, my younger brother who incidentally lives and used to work in Katsina did confirm meeting him after he’d left the SSG’s office in the course of his work in the state after I’d asked him to check out whether he was the same doctor I’d met in Britain years back. Nor was I able to meet him while he was in his first and latest and final term. May be it was all because I was not in PDP all the while. It was during that brief London encounter that Safana educated me on the VVF. He actually granted some kind of an informal newspaper interview to me, which I planned but never got round to write for my local newspaper, The Triumph on my return to Nigeria. I still have a passport photograph I got from him looking all so smart and alive in a sweater and necktie, which I referred to, to confirm he was the same person I met so many years ago when I saw his pictures on NTA’s National Assembly program on Tuesday (October 23rd 2007). Dr Safana also gave me a message to deliver to Dr. Kees, the Surgeon who leads vesico-vaginal fistula (VVF) operations in Kano. Right now I honestly can’t remember what exactly the message was. May be it was to tell him he had been trying to get to him on the phone and hadn’t been able to or something but that he was just getting set to travel to the school he’d come to the UK to further his medical studies or some such thing. That was either August or September 1992, I think. And unfortunately I am still not quite sure why I was not able to meet Kees for him on my return.

Working with Abubakar Kabir Matazu at the Bush House BBC Hausa section where I was a casual staff translating and reading news and reports in Hausa, I met Dr. Safana at Matazu’s house. Like Matazu, he is also from Katsina state. And from the little I got to know of him then, just like Matazu he was a sober and focused person very much concerned with his religion, Islam. He was furious at the insinuations by women libbers and ignoramuses who claim that the Northern Nigerian Muslim practice of early marriage was behind VVF incidences in the North. He told me that some European women who are mature before childbirth, Scandinavian women in particular, I think are prone to VVF because of their physique. And they are so far away from Africa, Muslim Africa and its traditions. He also told me how many mature women giving birth for the umpteenth time develop VVF.

I found in Late Dr. Safana, not only a deeply religious person but also one so passionate about his beliefs. He was passionate about politics. Even though he wasn’t quite active then he was still a member of the Late General Yar'adua's PDM faction of the SDP. The doctor as I said educated me on VVF and also on the behind the scenes manouvers that saw Umaru Yar'adua emerge as SDP candidate for Governor in Katsina, despite stout opposition from many quarters. He also tried very hard to convince me as to why I should understand the rationale for Umaru Yar’adua contesting the Governorship under SDP. He educated me as well as he could on the good that Yar’adua could and would do if he got the chance, arguing that on his own he had all it takes; that he was not just a candidate because he was simply General Shehu Musa Yar’adu’a’s younger brother which was why some of us who considered ourselves “Progressives” in the Santsi camp of SDP where not too happy with his candidature at that time.

Safana then educated me the more on the finer points of Umaru Yar’adua of SDP, of 1991/1992. Today, I must say most Nigerians, not just the people of Katsina can well attest to this - from Mallam Umaru’s efficient handling of Katsina and his rather sober management of Nigeria’s affairs so far. Safana was truly a good man, a man who wanted only the best for his people. That must be why he detoured fully into politics from his initial training as a medical doctor. That is why he may have agreed to certain apparently unexplainable and I must admit sad compromises while he was politicking; because he believed in the goodness and correctness of his cause. That, I repeat, is why I was surprised finding Dr. Safana on Madam Etteh's side. It got to a stage as the battle for the assembly and the minds of Nigerians flared on at the House that I began to wonder whether deposed speaker Etteh’s cause (and her PRACTISE, as has been the unfortunate sleazy standard of many of my fellow politicians at all levels) was somehow not any worse than the cause of those opposing her. And there were many stories to suggest that even my friend and one-time mate at Bayero University Kano the erudite poet (of “The Dictator” poem fame) and three term National Assembly member from Shanono/Bagwai Federal Constituency in Kano State, Honourable Faruk Lawan of the Integrity Group may have himself fought the battle simply because he had been slighted after all the effort he had put to assist in installing Madam as Speaker. Not because of any “Integrity” he and his colleagues may have, as the cynics will say. Not that I have any personal doubts about Honourable Farouk’s Integrity, mark you! Despite the fact that all this “dem say, dem say” is an integral part of politics; and I should well know. For politics has been my vocation for the most part of these three decades past, next to my first love, Journalism.

Dr. Safana in view of this may well have been on assignment for his friend and boss, President Umaru Musa Yar’adua. To keep an eye on things for the President on matters in the Etteh camp knowing that good old Umaru is not one to support any shady deals from his records thus far. And Etteh’s are so shady, or are they! Whatever the case I felt so awful bad that Safana would die defending what everyone clearly accepts is the wrong cause. He must have had his reasons. For the kind of person I believe he is.

I am truly saddened that Safana, this good man, died the way he died. But then no one has control of how he would be born and where; nor too how or where one would die. Or the circumstance. My prayer is that the good he'd done in his life would be the measure of the late Honourable Dr. Aminu Shuaib Safana. I pray too that Allah wipes his negative slate clean and forgive him his sins. And admit him to al-Jannatul Firdaus, for what good he'd done, in medicine and in his short-lived political career.

The lesson in all this for those of us who are yet to get to our final bus stop on earth is that we must be conscious and take cognisance of the circumstances of this truly good man's death and try all we could to always do good and stand by causes that we can always defend wherever we find ourselves, here and in the hereafter. With patently and clearly justifiable reason! That we deny all negative causes. For death comes stealthily, with no warning. May Allah forgive us all our sins. Amen.