PEOPLE AND POLICTICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Adamu Jibrin (1951 – 2006): Victim of Failure of the State

kudugana@yahoo.com

The death of my colleague, friend and brother, Adamu Jibrin, from the murderous hands of a gang of armed robbers last Thursday, is possibly the most shocking and traumatic experience of my life in recent times; in the last two and a half years alone, I have had four encounters with armed robbers. They came, about half a dozen of them, armed to the teeth, at about two in the morning. At that time Adamu had just returned to the living room from easing himself in the toilet of the room I was sleeping in. My room was the second of the two-bedroom guest chalet that I always shared with Halilu Makun, also a friend and a medical doctor with the Federal Capital Territory, anytime I was in Abuja, which was very often.

Because the rooms were not so big, both Adamu and another friend, Mohammed Ndaliman, that had both traveled with me to Bida penultimate Friday, for a wedding and then on to Abuja the following Monday for business, slept in the living room.

That fateful Thursday, Adamu, whose movement into my room had half-woken me up, had just finished easing himself and had, as I said, just returned to the living room when I heard a loud bang. At first I thought it was the sound of a big fruit dropping on the roof from the large tree overhanging the guest chalet at the back of the house. Then I heard an even louder bang and then voices. It then dawned on me that these were armed robbers.

I then got up and sat on the bed waiting for them to charge into the living room and then in to my room anytime. They never did, thanks to the courage (or foolhardiness, depending on how you see it) of Adamu. For some not so inexplicable reasons, he decided to fight them: Adamu was over six-foot tall and retired from the army as sergeant-major having joined it in the last days of our civil war. He was what you might call a gentle giant; hard to provoke but not easily calmed once provoked.

At first he succeeded in keeping the armed robbers at bay. At a point I heard one of them say, “you wan show us say you strong!” Then there was silence. Meantime, Mohammed had been pleading with him in vain not to fight them. A little after that the robbers returned and a louder scuffle ensued. This time they succeeded in breaking down the door. Then I heard him shout Allahu Akbar, Lailaha Illallah several times as the scuffle got louder. Each time he shouted the shahada, I heard a loud bang. The bangs turned out to have been gun shots they fired at him no less than three times at close range.

After they must have killed Adamu, they proceeded to break down the door to Halilu’s room and to force Mohammed into the room. They then told the two to bring all the money and valuables they had or they will kill them too as they had just killed their “brother” in the living room. Without waiting for any response, they proceeded to ransack the room.

All this time I was sitting on my bed terrified with fear and expecting them to barge into my room anytime. All the while I kept whispering prayers rather incoherently.  Then I heard them open the door. Perhaps it was the possibility that by now they may have become agitated from murdering someone, perhaps it was the fact that the door was not locked and it was dark in the room, but they shut the door as soon as they opened it.

They then proceeded to the main house and broke into the master bedroom. There they demanded money, dollars in particular, from Alhaji Ibrahim Zukhogi, our host. When he replied that he had no dollars they hit him with the butt of their guns in the face. They then proceeded to ransack the room and its toilet.

After what seemed like eternity, I began to hear voices that sounded friendly. Then I heard Halilu’s voice calling out my name. For a while I seemed to have lost my voice. Then I heard him tell some one to check my room and switch on the light. A policeman came in and did so.

That was when I finally found my voice. The first thing I did was to ask Halilu if the robbers had killed Adamu. He confirmed my worse fears and for the first time in a long while I completely broke down in tears.

Adamu’s death would not be the first time I had lost a dear one. Indeed I had lost people dearer to me, but I never cried. But then those people did not die from the cold hands of blood-thirsty armed robbers. And the gang that killed Adamu  were  apparently as blood-thirsty as they come. And what was particularly frightening about them was that three of them, according to my friends, wore police uniforms while one of them, presumably their leader, wore a bullet proof vest.

Adamu Jibrin or “Long Journey” as we called him on account of his height and size and his penchant for walking long distances during our childhood days, was one of the hardest working and most dependable men I have ever known. As a marketing officer when Citizen, the newsmagazine I co-founded in 1990 was still alive, Adamu could be relied upon to deliver our magazines and follow-up on payments in the farthest corners of Nigeria.

Adamu also loved his family even more than he loved his work and he scrapped and saved to cater for them and make them happy. He also love kids, oh, he loved them. One of them, Larai, now a big girl at 25 cried her eyes out and excused herself from work when she heard of his death. She told me later that she remembered with fond memories those days when she was a child and Adamu would pick her and throw her up in the air and play with her and other kids anytime he came to visit the New Nigerian quarters in Malali, Kaduna, where myself and her father, Musa Shafi’i, lived. Adamu never stopped teasing her about those days until he died.

Perhaps because he suffered no complex at all, Adamu made friends very easily. He always gave strangers the benefit of doubt until they disappointed him. He would then keep his distance. Even then he would still maintain cordial relationships with them. Life, he often said, was too short and too unpredictable to make a permanent enemy of anyone.

It was not surprising then than by the time we arrived with his body at the Nupe Road / Ibadan Street neighbourbood in Kaduna where we all grew up, the entire neighbourhood and others from farther a field, had poured into the streets, regardless of tongue and creed, to await the final prayers for the repose of his soul.

Until Adamu died, I used to think that that peculiarly Nigerian expression “The wicked have done their worst” which was a refrain in most obituaries in Nigerian newspapers, especially the Daily Times in its days of glory, was a bit of an amusing overkill. Now I understand the depth of the emotion behind those words. With Adamu the wicked have truly done their worst and it is not just those six or so blood thirsty robbers who snuffed the live out of him last Thursday.

No, the wicked include those politicians at all levels of government who, in the last seven years have turned Nigeria into a failed state even as the country earned enough income from oil alone to make our country livable and safe.

The clearest evidence of a failed state is its inability to protect its citizens from violence and destruction. Adamu’s death last Thursday at the hands of armed robbers is merely one more evidence of the abject failure of the Nigerian state to lift the siege which the criminal elements in society have put the country under. What is even more frightening about the situation is that it is more likely than not to get worse as politicians seem to have concentrated body and mind on getting or retaining power by hook AND crook than in solving the problems of insecurity, instability and poverty that has increasingly bedeviled out dear country the past seven years.

My God help us all. And may He grant Adamu aljanna firdaus – Ameen.