Abubakar Gimba: Gone too soon!

Abubakar Gimba (December 10, 2014.My President, long time really! Yes, life can be so perplexing but it’s always best not to despairOlu Obafemi. (January 3)This was my last exchange with the great mind, novelist, poet, Mandarin, humanist, bureaucrat and revolutionary pacifist, Abubakar Gimba, whom death snatched away from our unwilling clutches on February 25, 2015, […]

Abubakar Gimba (December 10, 2014.
My President, long time really! Yes, life can be so perplexing but it’s always best not to despair
Olu Obafemi. (January 3)
This was my last exchange with the great mind, novelist, poet, Mandarin, humanist, bureaucrat and revolutionary pacifist, Abubakar Gimba, whom death snatched away from our unwilling clutches on February 25, 2015, leaving us rudely shocked and haplessly surprised. This is what death  does always when it takes away those we long to keep because they are among our best and dearest; the world’s most cherished among us.  I had only recently got myself persuaded to join the family of Whatsupers, being a very skeptical social media fan. Even then, I don’t regularly engage the medium. On one of those occasions, I stumbled on the above message from Alhaji Gimba. My heart sank, as I have never known him to be stoic, he not being one to resign to fate, with any tinge of fatalism. I have not seen ’My President’ for some time.  He and I have always addressed each otheras ‘My President’ ever since we began to work together, with any degree of intimacy, in 1999 when his Executive of the Association of Nigerian Authors appointed me as Chief Judge of the prestigious ANA Prizes. I had gone ahead to be elected Vice President in his second term as President and later to succeed him as President in 2001. I called him my President and he returned it to me as soon  as I became the President.
 I saw Abubakar last well over a year ago at the NnamdiAzikiwe International Airport. I was returning from India and he was on his was to India, for medical attention, as he informed me, looking disturbingly slight and tender. We had a brief discussion and he intimated me, in not so many words, with his deteriorating medical condition. He was still as humorous as he ever was, but you could notice, if you pierced deeply into his eyes, that he had become withdrawn, pained and less the jovial and passionate personage that we have all taken him for granted as. So, when I received the above terse, unusually resigned text from him, I could only reply as I did with a gentle admonition, knowing how very unlike him the text he sent was, and feeling the urgency to nudge him to get back from the fringes,; get back to the fullness of life, with all the vivacity that characterized his life as a humane, generous, ebullient and passionate writer and leader of men. Hardly did I imagine that we were set to lose him so soon, to the brutal and cruelly cold hands of death!
The man Abubakar Gimba is a rare gem. I refuse to refer to him in the past. He belongs to us in the Art House as one of our builders and creators of the wall of imagination, carving our aspirations, our dreams and our hopes into enduring words of marble and imperishable thoughts. He is simply immortal and lives on in our minds, in our hearts and in undying and unkillable realities of memories full of dreams, ideas and vision. The first thing that strikes you about Gimba is his disarming simplicity and unparalleled humility-one that compels and commands instant respect and understanding of a man built with steel inside carried by a slim, tender and delicate frame. Then of course, his loud silence which makes you want to hear him speak, which he does, when he does, with a certain unease and difficulty as one who would rather remain silent, with an alluring quietude. The words, when they come are slow and lead-laden. They drop with spectral power, commanding, often like the original Word, with a certain uncanny inviolability. This is what makes him such a compelling leader in the house of words, in the public domain and in the communities and publics where he had led with such endearing unforced authority.  
The second unmistakable feature of the man Abubakar Gimba, one of the most valued and enduring avatars of Nigerian letters is his exemplification of how power ought to be encountered, acquired and disbursed. Unlike many an intellectual, Gimba was never afraid to take on positions of authority-as a Bank Executive, as top-notching bureaucrat having climbed in a short spanning career in the civil service as a Permanent Secretary; as a two-term President of the Association of Nigerian Authors, the most populous guild of the creative fraternity in Africa; as a Special Adviser in the Presidency, as a Chairman of the Governing Board of a University and as President of the Alumni Association of the Ahmadu Bello University (the ‘only University in Nigeria’, being my own Alma Mater) , and so on. He was not one to stand aside from power and criticize it from without. He took positions and functioned with telling effectiveness and efficiency. When he delegated, he never relegated-he made sure he was in control without being over-bearing. He taught us not to shy away from official responsibilities but to take positions without losing your head in them. He remains unblemished and  unstained whenever he wore the garment of power and came out of it unscathed. Gimba epitomized deploying power to serve humanity. I know that he gave out of his immense means in the service of the Nigerian literati, through the writers Association. He gave much of his resources to the work of philanthropy,improving the lot of society, the under-privileged lot in our midst, within his ambit.
Above all, he replenished our lives with his literary offerings-his numerous novels and poetry. In his seeming pacifism, he interrogated the socio-spiritual decadence of our landscape, inflicted by dysfunctional and sleazy leadership and never minced words in the corrective direction. His literature was one of protest, pressing always for freedom and for social change. Our literary Tribute will follow this direction next week.
Good night My President. So many literary heroes await you beyond the firmament. So many others remain here to carry on the war against the predators. Only it is too soon to say good night.