Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un
I woke up around ten this morning and reached for my phone the way I always do, looking for something to laugh about. There is a friend I send every skit and every absurd tweet to, and she sends them back, and that is how our mornings usually begin. I sent her something. I was already waiting for the reply that would make me laugh. What came back was not laughter. She said, “Wait first, did you see the news about this man’s death?”
Then she sent a screenshot—a Facebook post. My friend and my leader, Mallam Umar Sani Bebeji, was dead.
I did not believe it. I want to be honest about that because disbelief is its own kind of prayer. I spoke to him only yesterday. Less than an hour before that screenshot reached me, he had posted a WhatsApp status. A man who is posting cannot be gone. So I called Professor Salim Magashi, the Dean of Law at Ahmadu Bello University and his closest friend, because if anybody could tell me it was a lie, it was him. He did not pick up. I called others, and one after another, they took the disbelief from my hands and left me holding the truth. There had been an accident. He did not survive it.
I called him Mallam although he never taught me a single course. He came into the Faculty as a lecturer while some of us were still students, young and full of vibes, still carrying the exuberance of the activist he had once been. Because I was almost always somewhere in the middle of whatever controversy the Faculty was boiling over, he noticed me early. Other people looked at me then and saw trouble. Bebeji looked at me and saw himself. He had been President of the Students’ Representative Council of Ahmadu Bello University, the paramount student body in the institution, the same council where I would later serve as Secretary-General. He had been Principal Partner of Attorneys Chambers, which, by some quiet coincidence, became my own chambers. When he returned to the Faculty as a lecturer, he became one of the coordinators of the ABU Law Clinic, where I served until I rose to become Director of Litigation before graduation. Wherever I turned, I found his footprints already in the sand. That is why I called him my leader. Whenever any of us was in trouble, he was the one we went to.
In 2015, when Sadiq Samaila was Chief Judge of the SRC Court, we pushed for a road excursion to the University of Ghana, Legon. The management resisted it for a long time, and when they finally relented, they attached a condition: a lecturer from the Faculty had to travel with us. The Dean gave us Bebeji, and I still remember the relief that went around. Of all of them, it was him. That journey was pure laughter from beginning to end. We played games on the road, we hosted talk shows on a moving bus, and we dragged that man clean out of every comfort he had ever known. He complained about it for the rest of his life. Years later, he was still recounting what we did to him on that road, and he was still laughing while he said it. That was his way of telling you that he had loved something.
He was also the last man on earth you wanted to see in an examination hall. He would put me in the front row every single time, where there was no cover and no mercy, and we laughed about it long after I had graduated. But when my final year nearly collapsed over an error on the student portal—when I had written and passed every paper, yet none of the courses had been registered for the results to count—it was M. K. Abdallah who told me to go and see Bebeji. I had already gone to the lecturer I was closest to, the one I had always assumed would help, and had been turned away. Bebeji listened for less than a minute. He said, “This is easy, Shettima. Let us go to the exam officer.” The exam officer was Dr. Salim, his best friend. He walked that manual process with me for the better part of a week until the academic office approved it and my results appeared. I have carried a debt to those two men ever since. He was strict where strictness cost you nothing and generous where generosity cost him his time.
We became friends properly on Facebook, and the friendship never left. We were both fanatical Buharists in those days, defending that government against everybody the sympathisers dismissed as wailers. I jumped the fence first. He stayed and only came down from the bus after PMB won a second term. But it is not the politics I will remember. It is how well the man could write. I told him many times that writing was his real gift. He could weave words and build an argument you could not walk away from, and he would give you his opinion straight even when he knew it would cost him your peace. We fought over El-Rufai’s policies more times than I can count. He mocked me openly and called me naïve whenever I raised the possibility of an Igbo presidency or argued for restructuring Nigeria into a true federation. He was hardest on governance and hardest of all on security. When Lt. Col. Mohammed Abu Ali was killed in a Boko Haram ambush and the whole country was raw with anger, he wrote that Buhari had failed even in the one thing he had spent his entire life promising to do, which was to provide security. Coming from a man who had once defended that government, that line has never left me.
When Facebook suspended my account and I sulked, saying I could not begin again and could not rebuild that followership from nothing, he refused to let me be. He was stubborn about it. He harassed me until I opened another account, and when Facebook closed that one too, he kept his calm and simply kept calling to check on me.
Whenever he was in Abuja, I was the last person he saw at the end of the day before he retired to his hotel. He was much older than me, and he never once made me feel it. We could fight on Facebook in the morning, and by afternoon he would call, laughing, and we would spend hours talking about Nigeria and everything that was wrong with it. We hardly ever talked about ourselves.
Every wedding anniversary, I would post his pre-wedding pictures with his wife and caption them Sakamakon Canji, teasing that the reforms had improved his looks. And every time, he gave me the same answer: that it was a lie and that I was only using style to inform his online crushes that the man was married.
There will be no reply this time. There is no morning call coming this afternoon.
They are burying him in Kaduna as I write this. My condolences go to his wife, his children, and the entire family; to our teachers at the Faculty of Law; and to the Facebook family that read him, argued with him, and knew, even while he lived, exactly what they had.
Ya Allah, forgive him, have mercy on him, and make his grave a garden from the gardens of Paradise.
Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un.
All bold formatting has been removed while preserving the corrected grammar and formatting.
