Chemistry and weakness in learning languages. Suffice it to say, my experience at Barewa was a
period of great personal discovery and it shaped my life in very positive ways.
From our tutors, many of whom were British, Indian and Pakistani, we not only learnt academically
but from our two British principals, S V Baker and E P T Crampton, we picked early lessons of
leadership. Mr Crampton was a hands-on leader who never ceased to remind us that being students of
Barewa College was both a privilege and a burden - of future public leadership. I still recall vividly
the early morning assembly of July 30, 1975 when he announced that General Yakubu Gowon, a
Barewa old boy, had been overthrown in a bloodless military coup. He thanked God that Gowon was
alive and well in Kampala, and then went on to say that his replacement Murtala Mohammed is yet
another Barewa old boy, mentioning his admission number and year of graduation. Both Murtala and
Gowon were school prefects and were active in the College Cadet corps in their days. Gowon was
college Head Boy in his final year. The assembly cheered.
Crampton reminded us that anyone of us could in the future be Nigeria's leader and we must therefore
be of academic excellence and the best moral behaviour. It was both an exciting and sobering moment
for many of us. Crampton retired to his hometown of Cambridge, England, with his Nigerian wife and
four children. He died on Easter Monday in April 2011. I took time off to attend his funeral, along
with another Barewa old boy, Rajneesh Narula who is a professor of industrial management, author
of many books and UN consultant based in the UK. The family was touched by our attendance, and I
was particularly humbled by what his son, George Audu Crampton wrote to me afterwards about their
affections for Barewa College, experience living in Zaria, and his father's impressions of his students,
which I excerpt below:
"Zaria: what a wonderful, wonderful city, which is still indelibly part of The Cramptons' DNA. It
was most definitely where my father had the most memorable time of his life. He was so proud of his
students' achievements, none more so than hearing of your accomplishments, as well as others from
Barewa College. I once probed him several years ago on whom he felt were his best students when
he taught in Northern Nigeria and he said of you that you were, and I paraphrase, "someone he knew
would turn out to be a pillar of his community due to his formidable academic prowess". I hope I am
not being impertinent when I write that you and so many others he knew as students first, and then
friends later on, breathed so much life into him: he was at his element when he was with alumni or
talking about them. He will be sorely missed."
My first real friend and mentor in Barewa College was Sani Maikudi, then in the fourth form. Sani is
calm, very intelligent and austere in his lifestyle. He taught me to love reggae music of Bob Marley
and U-Roy, introduced me to Dolly Parton's country music, to read the works of Walter Rodney, Karl
Marx, William Shirer, Lobsang Rampa and James Hadley Chase - and first introduced me to his
cousin, Umaru Musa Yar'Adua. Sani became a surrogate brother and role model. Indeed, his influence
on my life was so large at the time that I decided to be a Quantity Surveyor mainly because Sani was
studying to become one! I was so close to Sani and his family that I spent some of my holidays in his
family home in Katsina. Through Sani I met and became friends with many people that would be
prominent in my professional career, education and life: Mallam Mukhtar Bello, Walin Katsina, who
as managing director of Allied Bank commissioned our young quantity surveying firm to handle its
first high rise building project in Lagos, and other projects followed, Aminu Iro, Sani's cousin, who I
persuaded to transfer from Katsina State public service and accept appointment as the head of the
Abuja Road Traffic Service during my tenure in FCT, and others too numerous to mention. Sani
remains till today, one of the most influential and respected people in my life and I will forever be
grateful to him for his care, concern and guidance at critical phases of my life.
It was also in Barewa that I met Abba Bello Ingawa and Husaini Dikko who became not only close
friends and brothers but business partners in the professional firm we established in 1982, with Sani
Maikudi of course, as an equal, but part-time, outside partner. Abba is very intelligent, of a kind
disposition always, conscientious, honest and focused. We were so close that we had a common
wardrobe from University until the end of our bachelor days - we were physically almost the same
height and size, eerily wear the same sizes of shirt, trousers and even underwear! We were
roommates in University for two out of the three years we spent in the degree programme, and went
on to share apartments until we both married in 1985! We planned our lives jointly and did everything
together almost as twins, until our falling out as business partners in 1989.
Throughout my years in Barewa, I developed close friendships with several kind and wonderful
people - Usman Muazu who became an accomplished pilot, but died very young of leukemia, Hassan
Dikko, Husain's twin brother who became a university professor, Aminu Mahmood who became a
senior immigration officer, Salahu Naibi Wali who is a successful public servant and politician
based in Kano, Augustine Eno, an engineer with NEPA, Oka Kama Ama, an engineer who now lives
in the UK with his Russian wife, Ibrahim Adamu Yakasai who is a gynaecologist, became an Abacha
aide and is now active in Kano politics and Nnamdi Nwuba - a medical doctor who lives in the UK
with his wife, Chiedu, a dentist. My keenest academic rival was an Indian boy - Matthew Stephen,
who now practices paediatrics in Florida, USA. Many other classmates and friends too numerous to
mention, went on to achieve greatness in their professional careers as doctors, lawyers, officers in the
military and politics. Barewa was an establishment training ground so we did not have many activists
and social critics, though one of our one-time Barewa teachers - Dr. Yusuf Bala Usman became the
beacon of socialist ideology and progressive politics in Northern Nigeria. Years later, his brilliant
and outspoken daughter, Hadiza, served her NYSC year in BPE, and subsequently got permanently
employed. She was found to be such a competent and loyal staff that I ended up appointing her as one
of my special assistants and close confidants when I moved to administer the FCT in 2003.
Early Career Thoughts
Many parents seem to think that if a child does well in the sciences, it necessarily means the child
should become either a doctor or an engineer. So my educationist cousin, Mallam Yahaya Hamza,
naturally believed that because I was already a good science student, I should study medicine at
university and become a doctor or take a single honours’ degree in chemistry or physics in the
alternative. Personally, the moment I got to my teenage years, I never considered studying medicine
because spending my working life in a hospital was not that appealing to me. Largely as a result of the
influence of Sani Maikudi and Bashir El-Rufai, I toyed with the idea of studying either computer
science or electrical engineering - largely due to the mathematics content. Abba thought we should
study industrial chemistry or chemical engineeri
ng since we both loved and competed to be the best
students in chemistry! I was under several influences, and as one can imagine, at that age, things can
be pretty confusing.
My cousin studied physics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and he felt I should pursue a
single honours degree in physics or chemistry, go on to study for a doctorate and discover great
things, or study medicine. I was not interested in doing any of that, and I told him so, which he was
initially unhappy with. By the time Sani Maikudi decided to be a quantity surveyor and persuaded me
that that was the way to go - high math content, large dose of humanities subjects, and early financial
independence - I made up my mind. I informed my family that I wanted to be a quantity surveyor and
my cousin was very disappointed I chose to do so.
Once I decided to study quantity surveying, my choice of university could not have been easier.
Ahmadu Bello University, apart from being among the first generation of Nigerian universities, was
also in Zaria, close to my family, and home to my brothers, Bashir and Sani Maikudi, was also the
only university in the world at that time that offered a full honours degree in quantity surveying. So
while my choice of school made my family happy, my choice of course of study did not. At some
point, my cousin cut me off - withholding the pocket money he usually gave to all of us – to express
his dissatisfaction about my career choice. Since I had received a full scholarship from the Kaduna
state government anyway, I did not really need the money that badly, so I could understand his
decision. Though we eventually made up and remained quite close, this disagreement was the source
of some friction for a short while. He was simply upset with me because he thought I was wasting my
talent. Quantity surveying has a lot of overlap with civil engineering but he did not think it was
challenging enough for me. I was even offered a scholarship by the Kaduna Polytechnic to study
mining engineering at the Camborne School of Mines in the UK and I declined.
The main point of this episode though is that while I listen to every piece of advice, once I made up
my own mind, I was always ready to suffer a little bit to do what I believed in. I was not getting any
extra money from my cousin for a period while in university and he was unhappy. Even after
graduation he would have nothing to do with assisting me get a job, but that was not a huge issue then.
I had three job offers to choose from just based on my resume and zero connections. Sometimes these
tensions with relations happen, but they pass.
There is of course the argument that real education only happens outside the classroom, but I believe
the foundation for anyone to take advantage of life outside the classroom is learned in school. Without
that education from school, a person will not get the value added. Exposure and experience probably
together account more for one’s success in life than education does, but without education, the
exposure and the experience would not only be quite limited but also be of limited utility. It would
amount to little or nothing. One cannot have one without the other.
Lagos, once upon a time
My decision to study quantity surveying led to many experiences that I would not have otherwise had.
The first significant one was that it led to my first ever trip to Lagos in December 1979, when I was
about 20 years old. I had been elected the general secretary of the quantity surveying students’
association and the university sponsored me to attend the national conference of the professional body
of Nigerian quantity surveyors - the Nigerian Institute of Quantity Surveyors, (NIQS). Aside from
being my first trip to Lagos, that trip represented a number of other firsts for me: it was the first time I
travelled anywhere by air; it was the first time I saw a concrete cloverleaf interchange and ‘flyover’
bridge, because nothing like that existed in Kaduna; it was the first time I saw a really tall building –
‘tall’ being defined as above 12 storeys. The tallest building in Kaduna at the time was the NNDC
Building - about ten storeys. It was the first time I saw curtain walling - glass totally covering the
exterior of a building.
I spent two days in Lagos, just long enough to attend the conference and come back. That trip was also
the first time I ever stayed in a hotel. Prior to this, all I ever did was to stay in a friend’s home, my
family’s house or a dormitory. So when some of my wards studying abroad complain to me, “Oh
Baba, when we return home from school, we travel economy, why aren’t we travelling economy plus
or business class on British Airways, like some of our friends?” – I just smile. I know they are tired
of hearing me tell them that I did not own a new pair of shoes until I was eight years old and I did not
get on an aeroplane until I was over 19 years of age, so they had better appreciate what they have.
One time, one of them, one of my sons, said, “Baba, our father is richer than your father. Do not
compare us with you. We wore our first shoes when we were eight days old. You wore your first
shoes when you were eight years old.”
In any event, my first impressions of Lagos remain quite vivid. Based on the stories I had heard, I was
expecting Lagos to be hugely populated by lots of unfriendly and loud people, juxtaposed by a
metropolis of skyscrapers like a Manhattan skyline or something like that. Honestly, given the lurid
tales which circulated so ravenously in Zaria and Kaduna, I was led to believe that the city would be
packed with young women wearing miniskirts and no bras, because that was how the villagers see
Lagos, as if it were some huge nudist colony. Instead, the first thing I noticed about Lagos was that the
airport where we landed – the domestic airport – was not like the airports I was used to seeing on
television. There were no automated luggage claim conveyor belts, and instead the suitcases and bags
were brought manually and placed on the floor. I had also heard about how horrible Lagos traffic
was, how people spent so many hours of the day in traffic, even in 1979. But the traffic I encountered
was not nearly as bad as I was expecting.
On my first night in the city, I asked my friend whom I had travelled with to take me to the Shrine
where the legendary Fela Kuti performed every night. We made our way out to the venue, despite our
difficulties navigating the unfamiliar territory, and it turned out to be a most wonderful experience.
We spent the first part of the evening watching the go-go dancers and revellers, and then Fela came
out to perform at about 2 a.m., smoking marijuana on stage and doing his thing, criticizing everything
and insulting everyone – Fela was not happy with the government, he was not happy with anything,
really. We finally got home at about five in the morning and I was floating from the experience at the
Shrine. Realize, I had never smoked in my life, not even a cigarette, but I inhaled so much second-
hand marijuana that night from the ambience that by the time I came back home I was really floating.
That was my only experience with this kind of stuff.
However by the next morning, our first time seeing Lagos in the daylight, my attention returned to the
main focus of my visit: studying the buildings and engineering structures – I was, after all, in the final
year of my undergraduate p
rogramme in quantity surveying. So apart from the traffic situation, which I
thought was not that bad, and the fact that people in Lagos were as normal as people in Kaduna – they
dressed the same way, and contrary to the legend (and the near disappointment of my teenage mind)
the women were not half-naked – what I was mostly thinking about was how much money the
government spent in Lagos. By then, I could look at a building and put an approximate construction
price on it, so looking at all those bridges and roads and buildings and pricing them in my mind
absolutely fascinated me.
I was disappointed by what I saw in Lagos, quite frankly. I did not get to see the Bar Beach and other
nice attractions; I did not visit Victoria Island and Ikoyi, which were the highbrow residential
neighbourhoods at the time. I saw the not-so-good parts and I thought, if this is Lagos then it is nothing
impressive. The one thing I came away with, and this has remained in my mind since then, was that
Nigeria was pretty much the same everywhere. The upper class areas were all similar. Kaduna and
Lagos were very similar; it was just a matter of scale. The people are the same. The buildings were
the same. Lagos had overhead expressways and bridges, Kaduna did not then, though it does now. It
was the same people. Any differences in social and economic levels were minimal if not artificial in
my view. I also thought that Lagos was a bit of a basket case. It was just too disorganized to be
capable of significant improvement.
Today, of course, Lagos is much bigger. At the time I visited it had about five million people, but now
it has some 15 million, and it is expected to expand rapidly to the point of being a sprawling mega-
city in a decade or less. The human problems have multiplied accordingly. Although the pressure on
Lagos as the capital of Nigeria has been partly gone since 1991, the influx of people into Lagos
continues because it is still the centre of commercial opportunities in Nigeria. Other than that, it has
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