Tukur Abdulrahman, the good man we lost

Probably the most lavish testimony that I ever paid to the good character of a departed colleague was on Daily Trust’s late Managing Editor Malam Sulaiman Mohammed, who passed away in 2013. Everything that I wrote about Sulaiman, import it wholesale into this tribute to Malam Tukur Abdulrahman, Managing Director of New Nigerian Newspapers [NNN] […]

Probably the most lavish testimony that I ever paid to the good character of a departed colleague was on Daily Trust’s late Managing Editor Malam Sulaiman Mohammed, who passed away in 2013. Everything that I wrote about Sulaiman, import it wholesale into this tribute to Malam Tukur Abdulrahman, Managing Director of New Nigerian Newspapers [NNN] who passed away at an Abuja hospital on Thursday last week.

I had my last phone conversation with Malam Tukur four days before his passing away. I apologized for not calling him earlier because I was told that doctors stopped him from answering phone calls. He said he only began to answer calls the day before. New Nigerian’s management members, he said, had come to brief him about the protracted effort to get the Federal Government to pay pensions to the company’s ex-staffers. All that is holding up the payment, he was told, was for the Attorney General of the Federation to authorise the Ministry of Finance to make the payment in line with an Appeal Court ruling that NNN’s staffers who served when the company was owned by Federal Government are entitled to pension. He also said he would be brought to Abuja on Tuesday for some more tests. On Thursday his condition suddenly deteriorated and he passed away after sunset. 

I first met Malam Tukur Abdulrahman at a seminar organized by the US Information Service [USIS] in Kaduna in January 1994. I was then an Assistant Editor with Citizen magazine and he was with Gaskiya Tafi Kwabo, New Nigerian’s Hausa language sister. There were about 15 reporters at the seminar, which was handled very intensively by two resource persons that USIS brought from America. As a result, we became very familiar with one another while it lasted. At lunch hour on the first day Tukur asked me whether I was from Jega, as my name suggested. I then asked him where he was from. He said, “I am Badauri.” When I appeared confused because it was the first time I heard that word, he said, “From Daura.”

As it happened, at the end of that course, Tukur and I were selected to join eight other journalists from Lagos and Ibadan for a two-month tour of the United States. We spent two weeks in Washington, DC attending seminars at the International Center for Foreign Journalists and also visiting major institutions in the DC area including the State Department, White House, US Congress, Smithsonian, Lincoln Memorial, World Bank and IMF. After two weeks we broke into five groups of two persons each. Each group went to a different American city. As it happened, the organisers paired Tukur and I together and we went to Beaver County, Pennsylvania where we were hosted by the Beaver County Times newspaper and its extremely hospitable Associate Editor Jack Mitchell, now late.

Tukur and I were placed in two adjoining apartments. We cooked our food together. The last time I cooked any food was during my NYSC days but Tukur was a much better cook. We however didn’t have to cook much because during our one month’s stay, we were invited to dinner by an American family nearly every day. We also had a very tight program of visits to schools, hospitals, factories, youth centers, museums, courts and the county prison. Tukur and I could not believe how two Nigerians could be so popular in rural America. Once the host newspaper announced our presence, every school in the county wanted us to pay a visit and dozens of families phoned to invite us to dinner. One family, of a young German-American priest, was so excited when we accepted their dinner invitation that they took their kids to a library in Pittsburgh where they studied Nigeria, made huge maps of Nigeria and had the Nigerian flag fluttering over their house when we arrived. All they ushered us in, all their neighbours were gazing at us, apparently envious that our hosts had “international” visitors.

We were also mobbed at shopping malls, with kids and mothers running to us and saying, “You must be the visitors from Nigeria! Or, wonderful!” I think it helped a lot that we wore native cloth, which made us easily recognizable. Tukur attracted the most attention because he wore flowing babbar riga, which American kids found very fascinating. In one school he was made to remove the riga to show them the yar ciki underneath. After Beaver County we spent another two weeks in New York visiting institutions such as Newsweek, AP, UN Headquarters and the Committee for the Defence of Journalists on the 65th floor of the World Trade Centre, the Twin Towers that fell on 9/11.

Tukur and I sat together for many hours each night and chatted about everything. He spoke lovingly about his wife, who had gone for the Hajj in 1994 just when he went to America. There was a stampede at the Jamrat that year and many people died. In those days, before the coming of mobile phones, it was very difficult to hear any information and Tukur was extremely concerned until he heard that she was okay. 

Through that very close together, I came to regard Tukur Abdulrahman as one of the most gentle, warmest, most level headed and most considerate men I have ever known. That assessment did not change in the next 24 years. He was deeply religious but had a very liberal world outlook. In 24 years I never saw Tukur lose his temper or raise his voice despite the often-heated nature of NNN editorial board meetings. In 1995 when I went to work in New Nigerian, he had become its State House reporter in Abuja. He later headed the Abuja Bureau.In 2000AD when NNN’s new managing director Dr. Omar Faruk Ibrahim appointed new editors, he brought Tukur back from Abuja as Editor of Gaskiya Tafi Kwabo while I was made Editor of New Nigerian. For the next five years, together with other editors Tawey Zakka, Ibrahim Auduson and Zakari Adamu, we worked very closely together and became like family. Tukur told many family stories, including the day he went home and his son Umar rushed out to tell him that his mother removed her hands from the steering wheel while driving a car that morning.

In March 2006 when I was sacked as editor of New Nigerian, the MD appointed Tukur to take over. Ever the gentleman, Malam Tukur was embarrassed by the appointment and he approached me very apologetically. I however comforted him and said someone had to take over the job and I was very glad that he was the one. An extremely good and compassionate man has departed. May Allah grant him eternal rest in Aljannat and may the Almighty comfort his very loving family.