NDAYEBO DAYEBO and DAYEBO AND ISAH: A TRIBUTE.

By Mohammed Adamu

“Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the height”
-Robert Green Ingersoll

The late Danladi Ndayebo was NOT just a professional colleague, he was also a fellow Nigerlite. And not only that, we partly grew up together in the same Airport Road Limawa, Minna, around the mid or late 80s, with his family’s abode right behind ours, separated only by a narrow pedestrian thoroughfare.

Yet the irony of it was that even I did not initially know these neighbourly realities untill Ndayebo and I first met as colleagues in Abuja while he was with The Leadership and I was probably just leaving active journalism to settle down as a Guest Columnist.

Meaning that although age-wise and professionally too, Ndayebo was the younger of the two of us, nonetheless he was also the more cognitively percipient, because he it was -not I the elder- who knew me and had to tell me about ‘myself’ and about how our territorial kinship had predated our colleagueship.

Chinua Achebe said “when a child washes his hands, he can eat with the kings”. It was the case with Ndayebo. He was virtually a mid-day revert into Journalism from Geology; and although figuratively speaking he came in via the ‘Short Service Course’, he had in no time worn the same epaulet with us and we were all chewing the same tobacco.

And since then there was nothing but profound mutual respect between the two of us; even though I especially had to be the one to adjust to the new reality that he was first and foremost my brother before he was a friend or a professional colleague!

And even as I had hoped that someday I might stumble onto some opportune situation to properly attorn for my unwarranted childhood mis-cognisance of him, I would soon again come into his debt one early morning on an election day in Minna while Ndaebo was a Commissioner.

As I left my personal Tunga abode early that morning for our family house in Limawa where I was registered to vote, some overzealous Police officer had ordered the impoundment of my car and was deaf even to the entreaties of some of his boys who knew both as a journalist and a ‘migrant’ voter of necessity.

And just then, like the sudden apparition of a guardian angel, came the telephone call of Ndayebo. He was calling, as was habitual with him, to say hello. And I said to him ‘well, your call is timely Commissioner. Here I am at the Minna Central Police Station. My car has just been impounded for violating the restriction on movement”.

And no sooner had he said to me “I am on my way sir, right away”, than a couple of minutes later he had freed up my car, and we were already on a motorcade of two, (I in front and he behind), as he insisted on escorting me home lest I came onto another checkpoint again.

This is the Danladi Ndayebo that we are talking about, one of Journalism’s rarest personification of the virtuous combos of professional and personal humility, dignity and integrity all rolled one. This was the brother, the friend and colleague that I have just lost.

And with Danladi Ndayebo I would learn, only belatedly, that the then survivor-friend of his Mohammed Isah who had driven them both on that fatefully tragic day and who was initially thought to have cheated death, was also someone I had even a much deeper professional relationship with.

He was with the Peoples Daily Newspaper when I was invited to start the ‘My Take’ Column sometime between the indisposition and eventual demise of Yar’adua and the politics dogging the heels of the emergence of Jonathan as President.

In my usual fire brigade approach to writing, I had always made it a habit whenever I was in Abuja, to always drive straight to the Utako head office of Peoples Daily an hour or two to ‘press’ time, to sit around over tea or coffee, to pen down my Column and occasion even supervise the page-editing!

Mohammed Isah was one of those who were always on hand to make my writing sojourn easy. From sitting arrangements, to tea and coffee provisions and even to logistics for prayer (salat) break, Isah and quite a few other editors had made sure that I had the requisite equanimity of mind, in record time, to pen away my thoughts and leave!

I was thus no less shocked, nor am I any the less bereaved about Isah’s death than I was or I am about his bosom friend, Ndayebo. They were both great in life, but even greater in death; because these two, without a vow, had done for ‘friendship’ what even spouses do not do for marriage: ’till death’ spouses usual vow to part; but even at death these two friends would NOT part!

I have neither oratory the like of which Mark Anthony seasoned the funeral of his friend Caesar, nor tears as much as Edmond Burke shed in remembrance of the gruesome murder of Frances Queen Antoinette, nor yet the humanism of Robert Ingersoll expressed at the graveside of his beloved brother, Clark.

But I have this to say to you compatriots: that your sudden departure, as much as it grieves, is a timely reminder to us that Life is not the worldly Eden that we think it to be; but that it is rather Shakespeare’s “walking shadow; a poor player that struts and frets its hour upon the stage and is heard no more”!

You two are reminding us that life is not the lyricist’s “sweet composition” but that it is Wilson Mizners “tough proposition”; that it is not Elbert Hubbard’s “one damn thing AFTER ANOTHER”, but Edna Millay’s “one damn thing OVER AND OVER”; that life is not a breakfast table of licks and yums but that it is William Gilbert’s “pudding full of plums”.

You two are reminding us that life is not measured by how long we live, but by how well; not by what we like to do, but by trying to like that which we have to do.

You remind us that life, as Harriet King would say, is not measured “by the wine drunk, but by the wine poured forth”; and that it is not a voyage to an unknown destination but as Herman Melvilles puts it, a journey “that is homeward bound”.

So, adieu colleagues. We grieve not that death has taken you to the land-of-no-return; but we rejoice knowing that the ONE who giveth hath Himself taketh, what only HE keepeth by right.