Opinion: Remembering a detrabilised northerner, Durbin Gombe, Lamido Abubakar – By TUNJI AJIBADE
[email protected]; 08036683657
I had fervently hoped he would live for many more years. But on December 15th, 2020, the Durbin Gombe, former Commissioner of Health in Old Bauchi State, former Gombe Local Government Chairman, Member of the Gombe Emirate Council, kingmaker and the District Head of Ajiya Dawaki, Alhaji Lamido Abubakar, passed to the great beyond. He was 79 years old. Durbi, as I fondly called him, was not a man one would have contact with and forget in a jiffy. This is an excellent northerner for want of even a better description on my part. It’s been almost thirty years since I came in contact with him for the first time. As the man who was my first window into northern views and orientation, he had left a lasting impression on me over the years.
I came to the north for the first time to do my NYSC programme in Gombe town when Durbi was presiding over Gombe LGA. I happened to have a lot of questions I wanted to ask him about the north. I always wanted to learn about things and possibly put them down in writing if they were worth it. So, both at the office and at home in the evening, I liked to visit Durbi. He was a hospitable person, perhaps surprised and curious about a southerner like me who took a liking to a northerner like him. But Durbi exuded such a personality that I never thought of him only as a northerner. He had this worldview that was balanced. I think this had to do with the many places where he had worked across the country, as well as many people across tribal and religious lines that he had worked with in the many leadership positions he once held in the police as well as the prison service. At the time the first military coup happened on January 15, 1966, Durbi was the Chief Of Police of the Gombe Native Authority. Just a few weeks back in December 1965, he had completed his full training at the Kaduna Police College and was awarded a prize as the Overall Best Graduating Police Officer, personally by the Sarduana and Premier of Northern Region, Sir Ahmadu Bello. Years later Durbi joined the Nigerian Prison Service where he rose to become State Director of Prisons. It was from this post he became Commissioner of Health in 1982.
Since I couldn’t speak Hausa at the time I arrived the north, the fact that Durbi could communicate with me in English made my drawing close to him easy. In those days, his friends would arrive, ask him who I was, and once he said I was a Corper serving with him at the LGA, I was accepted. While I was in Gombe from August 2018 to March 2019, I was seated with Durbi in front of his house on the occasion of the big sallah during which the Emir of Gombe stopped and prayers were offered. Someone who never met me with him before asked who I was. Durbi answered: “Tunji served here when I was the LGA Chairman; since then, ba ya rabu da Gombe ba, baya rabu da mu ba.” (It roughly means, he hasn’t separated himself from Gombe, and he hasn’t separated himself from us).
In the course of many years of sitting to listen to Durbi, I’ve come to recognize many virtues in him, and through him many of the virtues in a northerner from the core north. These are virtues someone not so close, especially a southerner, cannot notice. In fact, most people don’t know northerners from the core north beyond the dignified appearance that many in leadership positions always have. I have the privilege of seeing and hearing the mind of Durbi both in his high and low moments. Every human being has theirs. He had his when he lost a wife, a son, a sister, or a significant moment that he hoped would have led in a different trajectory for him personally and the nation in general. But he bore them all with incredible fortitude, dignity, and maturity that were great lessons for me. Durbi was ever full of laughter, his voice so full of strength when I was with him in 2018/2019. Even when he called and spoke to me on phone while he was ill late last November, I told him that his voice was so strong that one would hardly believe that he had been in and out of hospital around that time. I told him I was happy to hear his voice; I was happy he was alive. I promised to come and see him with my family. But before I could do this, he left us.
I was stunned when I was informed that Durbi passed on. Days passed during which I couldn’t summon the courage to call Durbi’s son, my friend and brother, and former Commissioner of Land and Survey, Gombe State, Hon. Shehu Abubakar Durbi. I didn’t know how to talk about Durbi in past tense, or to even mention that he was dead. Shehu Durbi felt the same way. He knew how much his father meant to me too, and when I finally called him, he said: “You know, Tunji; I didn’t know how to inform you. I picked my phone on two different occasions, but I dropped it each time.”
The passing of Durbi was very painful for me. For, among other things, I lost a father and there was that unfulfilled dream of mine in regard to him. From many of the discussion we had about Gombe over the years, I decided we should work together on a book. The book was completed, and we were still waiting for the publication when he departed. There was his personal memoir as well, the last few chapters of which I had promised to still come to Gombe to interview him for.
How best can I remember Durbi? I don’t know. For he was such a remarkable personality, one that impressed me on several fronts such that I asked him to be my godfather barely a year after I met him. He agreed. For the many years that followed, Durbi gave me the treatment of a son. What I needed that I didn’t get was what I didn’t ask Durbi. Ever a writer, I would ask for information. If he didn’t know, he would take me in his car to any important person in town who did. There was a time I applied to do a programme at the University of Maiduguri and I told Durbi that I needed his intervention. He made an important person travel to the university for the purpose. Below a picture that I took with him in my NYSC white T-shirt in his office when he was still the Gombe LGA Chairman, I had scribbled, “Not even a father indulges his son more.” I saw this picture of almost thirty years when I was with him in his living room in 2019. What I state below this picture speaks to the kind of person Durbi was – detrabilised, good-hearted, hospitable, a most pleasant person one would like to be with. Above all, he cemented my view that humans are humans and they should be seen and treated as such irrespective of their tribe or religion.
There was that domestic, fatherly, and grandfatherly aspect to him too. His children felt very comfortable with him. He discussed with them intimately and offered them sound counsel. All of Durbi’s children, male and female, are people of impeccable character. People across town speak highly of them. In my presence, many of Durbi’s grandchildren played at his feet.
Yet this was a man who had operated at very high level in regard to statesmanship. As the Chairman of Gombe LGA, he was at the centre of the topmost negotiations for the creation of Gombe State. I was there in Gombe when he would lead delegations to meetings within Gombe and to Abuja in regard to the struggle for the proposed Gombe State. On one occasion, his Vice-Chairman died in road accident as they were returning from southern Gombe where they had had one of such meetings. As a member of the Emirate Council, he accompanied the late Emir Shehu Abubakar to several meetings on the same issue. A close confidant of the late Emir, they travelled together within and outside the country, including the US. In traditional settings, Durbi was regarded as an institutional memory within the Emirate Council, having worked with three different Emirs. He will be greatly missed.
