Onklei, you just fell to the floor, ayakata, and couldn’t get up? Just like that?
It’s about 3.45 am here. The late spring weather could not decide our early misty Monday morning temp. It’s nippy in the wee hours. Yesterday was Sunday. It drizzled all day. The clouds consumed the sky. But these early hours of Monday, I twist and turn at the depth of darkness. I can’t sleep. I have been awake for the past three hours. My thoughts are scattered.
Azuka and Ndubuisi
I gaze at the ceiling in the dark, the memories of our early 1980s walk on the wild side of journalism, began to infest my morning musings. So, Ndubuisi, it’s been four days since you returned to earth, wrapped in a clean white sheet, buried six feet under Abuja ground, and covered by its soil. That was how you nearly came: naked at birth and crying as you touched and breathed earth’s air in any hospital in your homeland Nigeria.
Our religion states, that you must return to our merciful maker, just as you came. Ndubuisi, It’s been four days since you transitioned from the luxury, fancy, and exotic hotel room to a mere earth-to-earth, your eternal resident. In the morning moment, I suddenly fell back asleep as I thought about the scorching Abuja hot sun blazing and steaming your fresh grave.
The hums and chimes of the birds perched on my window tree branch woke me up. The sun streaks were slowly beaming through the windows and piercing my naked mahogany skin. It’s Monday morning here. The fresh cool breeze slapped the window curtains which signaled tolerable weather for this end of spring season.
Ndubuisi, my thoughts concentrated on our early years as indigenes of our Kingdom, Onicha Ugbo, which journalism profession brought us together. Our meeting happened, first, on the pages of the Sunday Times in the early 1980s. I was a journalism student then. Your Sunday column, TODAY’S PEOPLE, was a captivating and essential read for me on Sunday mornings.
Every Sunday, I rushed to buy the Sunday papers for our home. Sunday Times was our Sunday New Testament. My uncle didn’t care about the columnists and other interesting pages and the news. His concentration and perhaps, reasons to buy the papers were to check the “Face-2-Face, Pool results: sweepstakes of football gamblers and winning numbers. I would remove your page and study your style of writing, the prose presentations. I also dreamt of the day our paths would cross. I did not know you were my “homeboy”. Your interviews in your Sunday pages were curiously engaging. I got addicted. I wanted to write like Ndubuisi Okwechime when I grew up.
So when I finally met you, I became fond of your expressions of boldness, your rascality, and your brazen risks: your lifestyle as a young bohemian journalist unafraid to hunt and hound hard-core news, and interview music superstars and widely known criminals. You chased the wanted criminals to their forbidden dens. You solved mysterious crimes and offered police tips.
Ndubuisi, you were a one-man investigative reporter, writer, and editor. I followed you because you invited me. You took me to places where other journalists dared to take a cub reporter. You introduced me to the risks of journalism and taught me to dare by taking risks. And at the end of most adventures, on any given night, we anchored at the AFRIKA Shrine. Those were the days when Fela was incarcerated.
Ndubuisi, when the Sunday Times assignments impacted your commitment to Africa Music Magazine, one of the most respected Music Magazines published by Tony Amadi in London, you approached Tony and informed him that you had found a new West African Regional Editor for him. On our next Sunday meet, as we rode in the Community public transportation around the Lawanson axis, you informed me that I would resume at the Lagos office the next day as West Africa Regional editor for Africa Music Magazine. Just like that!
You pledged that my new appointment would not interrupt our Monday morning meeting with Femi KUTI at his Bariga residence. Femi became the frontman for his father’s band as Fela served his prison terms. You and I became Femi’s unpaid Managers. On a Monday morning, we took Femi to several record companies to introduce him to the A&R and negotiate a possible record deal for his debut album, MADNESS UNLIMITED. But most of them, that day were too afraid to sign Fela’s son to a record deal.
Ndubuisi, how do I catalog our troubadours in an age of 150 characters?
We continued with our Sunday meeting at your residence. We left your home, walked through Lawanson, and traveled the dirt roads and corners of Itire, Ibidun, Ayilara, and Ojuelegba streets and corners before we either ended at Femi Kuti’s house at Bariga or if we were late we would go to the Afrika Shrine. Throughout those free-spirited walks and rides on the wild sides of Lagos, you were financially responsible for my everything.
Ndubuisi, after I joined the Punch newspapers, our regular meet was best at the Afrika Shrine. A few years later, Tunji Lardner recruited me to join Nduka Obaigbenna’s ThisWeek magazine. You were also a part of the bohemian young writers that gathered as staff of Thisweek. Within a few months of your employment, you went to interview a female personality, along with our cameraman, Kole Ade Odutola. By the time you finished the interview with our source, both the reporter and the source became husband and wife. Just Like that!!!
Ndubuisi, we made memories, powered by the brotherhood of our shared homeland. We were closer than objects in the mirror, even when we were seven thousand miles distanced. The electrifying joy I felt when you chatted with my wife, the first time I introduced her to you on the phone, remains unforgettable, The next Sunday, you ordered that I bring her to the Afrika shrine to meet Femi after Sunday Jump. You were proud to introduce her to our lifestyles. That night, at the shrine, Femi told our stories to my wife until 1.30 am when we retired to our homes.
Ndubuisi, my emotions fail me with this long narrative, I do not know if I should continue. You left me with depths of our stories as brothers, far beneath what is superficial throughout our existence. You left me to tell this human side of Abdul Ndubuisi Okwechime. You left, just like that!!!!
Azukajebose
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