2-2-2025.

My immense LACK of FORESIGHT (what others refer to as ‘presence of mind’) perhaps explains why many ‘big’ men use, and on realising my LOW intelligence and intellectual capacity, always keep a long distance away from me.

A very self effacing politician, who occupied and still occupies a lot of important positions in Nigeria, felt very uncomfortable with the unintelligence of yours sincerely to the extent that he had to part ways with the unintelligent subordinate, to make way for more competent hands around him.

I chose to resign from two newspaper organisations, rather than to stop turning the newspapers to my boss’s, and a part of my state’s properties. At both places, the management went to the extent of warning me verbally at different times ‘not to turn the organisation into my boss and Karadua’s newspaper’. 

To be fair to them, I indeed made it into a habitual duty to constantly write about my boss, and about the persistent neglect of Southern Katsina by successive governments at the federal and state levels. I was not coward into stopping what I truly believed in, which was why I always respectfully resigned from the two organisations (at different times, of course).

In fact, an academic in one of the universities in the North, said he used to follow all the write ups I penned on Southern Katsina, when I was working at the two organisations. He was a student at the time.

In the article I wrote on 9-7-2024, ‘Remembering Mrs. Zainab Kperogi’, a Line Editor in charge of the Opinion and Editorial Desk (OP ED), at Daily Trust newspapers, I stated that, “One day she came out of a meeting with the management of the company and asked me to see her. When I went to her seat, she informed me that a decision was reached to issue out a circular soon, announcing a blanket ban prohibiting all staff from writing articles in any of the titles in the house. 

“The  clincher was that, the circular was targeted at me only. There were many of us in the organisation who wrote opinions frequently. Why only me? I naturally asked. 

“She told me that the management had told her that my ‘sins’ were that, I wanted to pitch the Villa against the organisation, and that I was trying to turn the newspaper titles into my ‘boss’s property’, since the subject of my write ups was, according to most members of the management, almost always about him. I was either fighting for, or defending, him. 

Then there was a one time presidential aspirant, and now head of a very visible and influential agency (he fits the assignment perfectly) who at one time found me very useful, but abandoned me completely to the point that he would barely respond to my phone calls. In the past, I was so useful to him, he even appointed me the Deputy Chairman of his presidential campaign committee. He aspired for the highest office in the country in 2007, at which time he made me to connect him with some influential members of his party to seek for their support.

There was also a very rich insider, and influential member of the present administration, who felt  offended by my lack of foresight, resulting in his complete loss of confidence and total abandonment of yours sincerely, because of an article I wrote which he took a particular exception to.

And there were the two media houses I had worked with. When the association got unbelievably unhappy for both parties, we parted ways, though amicably.

When such people loose someone close and dear to them, ordinary people like us cry more than them. We attend all the rights, including prayer, burial and the traditional (not religious) three-to-seven day sittings at the address of the deceased or that of the influential person’s choice. 

But we do not do all those things because we expect the ‘influential person’ to reciprocate being present to ours, if a similar event happens to us. One would be so lucky if they so much as recognise your presence at their period of  ‘extreme’ challenge, as for their presence, you would never see them. Well, like there are ‘fair weather friends’, so are there fair weather acquaintances, and bosses.

A senior of mine at secondary school, once responded to an article I shared on the social media, by saying that he looked forward to reading my memoir. I wrote back, telling him that I was NEVER going to write a memoir, or autobiography.  To do that, it would mean burnishing some lies to look like the truth, I so explained to him.

But that was not entirely my only reason. A more challenging reason was my ability to remember all the past happenings that involved me, and which must be part of the narrative of whatever if the two I may pen. I have this immense lack of capacity to remember many things as they occurred, a very important prerequisite for writing well.

I am also a very lazy person, and writing, as once noted the late famous American writer, Ernest Hemingway, is “90% perspiration, and 10% inspiration”. Inspiration is for the bright minds, while the likes of us, have all the perspiration to show for our efforts. Some time about 25 years ago I went to the river bank from the Malali (Kaduna) side, to ‘start a book (novel), because I read somewhere that one got inspiration from the natural elements. 

So I said to myself, there could not be a more serene natural element than the bank of a flowing river. But after going to the river bank for almost one month, without writing a full page on the writing paper that I used to take with me, I decided to look for another area with which to make ends meet. Some writer I was. I wisely decided that writing is not meant for dull, and lazy souls like yours sincerely.

May God, who makes two oceans meet, without their separate waters mixing, prevent us from holding as adversary, anyone we believe has not done to us what, and as, we wanted or expected them to do to us.

Malumfashi wrote from Katsina.