As I looked at the last known picture of Governor Patrick Ibrahim Yakowa, taken on 15th December 2012 as he, in the company of Gen. Andrew Azazi, walked toward the helicopter that would crash and kill them minutes later in the forest of Okoroba, Bayelsa state, I marveled at the finite mortality of us all in this world. The cumulative minutes expended keenly scrutinizing that last picture, looking for unfamiliar answers add up to hours yet, the picture has held tightly to what it doesn’t know about those few minutes before the crash
That last picture of Yakowa, resplendently clad in his sky blue Baban Riga is etched forever in me. High cheekbones that gently tapered out toward the nose, bright eyes that endlessly emphasizes seeing the best in each person, and a prominent forehead that left no one in doubt about his purposefulness in life, are the physically impressionable aspect of his feature that refuses to fade away and never will.
However, the question that springs up is how can one calmly walk to his death when the hour has unknowingly come? Doesn’t one get any hint that the ticking clock is about to end? Is that how the grim reaper swings his scythe and harvest us at the fullness of time? Can’t we do something to stop ourselves from dying until we are ready to die? How can Yakowa be walking to his death that day without any inkling of what awaits him minutes later?
These are questions that keep popping out in the heat of uncertainty, depression, and sadness that always accompanies the anniversary of Yakowa’s death. It also highlights the mystery of death – something that all religions on this planet have attempted to explain. An issue that has bonded us all under the mist of mortality, haughtily insisting that we must all go to our graves at different times, under different circumstances. That of Yakowa was to go out in a blaze of hot twisted heap of metals that was once an engineering feat of miracle which soars in the air in defiance of gravity. Given the chance, would we have agreed to be born only to die such fiery dead?
Probably why Azaro, the spirit-child that keeps being reborn in Ben Okri’s book, the ‘Famished Road’ while explaining his apprehension at immersing himself into the process of birth said: “There was not one amongst us who looked forward to being born. We disliked the rigours of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustice of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of dying, the amazing indifference of the living in the midst of the simple beauties of the universe. We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of who were born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.”
But Because of the inevitability of death different religious thoughts accepted it with its offer of a rosy picture of a compensatory glow in the hereafter. This has given hope to us that we would also die but get reunited with those that had gone ahead of us. The Bible itself assured us of that. Meaning that death is a temporary discomfort while the sweet glow of the hereafter is permanent! This has cushioned our fear of death and strengthened the hope of the blessed reunion with loved ones that await us. This is the comfort that sustains some of us four years after the death of Yakowa.
It’s however, painful when one looks back and sees both the tangible and intangible legacies he left behind knowing he could have rivaled and surpassed such legacies if time had been kinder. But four years later, some posthumous slur is deliberately being smeared on those legacies, but the posthypnotic suggestion to them after the giddy feeling of condescending arrogance had ebbed away, is that Yakowa’s integrity will still stand aloof, glowing with spectacular self-assuredness that he did the best under the uncertain situation he found himself in.
I am filled with gratitude for his accomplishment. More so that he was not one given to unbridled assertion of sectional supremacy but viewed each in Kaduna as an equal. I am thankful for the values he taught us and delighted in the fact that he will always have a place in my heart despite the fact that some have already forgotten. Even though his death was a bittersweet experience, but the sweet part is that he is now free to soar into our memory, unseen and unheard but always there.
He was one person who was able to victoriously inspire people’s outstanding ideals and finest values for the good of the society and he has even become more victorious in death because for him death now holds neither mystery nor fear.
And because he was a good citizen of Kaduna state, he was also a good family man who cherishes family values. That probably was why Theodore Roosevelt, while speaking on January 26, 1883 about the duties of American citizenship also had him in mind when he said: “No man can be a good citizen who is not a good husband and a good father, who is not honest in his dealings with other men and women, faithful to his friends and fearless in the presence of his foes, who has not got a sound heart, a sound mind, and a sound body; exactly as no amount of attention to civil duties will save a nation if the domestic life is undermined”.
Four years after his death, we can only say rest in peace Langba, the angels wouldn’t dare release one of theirs now, no matter how long we miss you.
Buhari wrote this piece from Kaduna
Read more at http://www.dailytrust.com.ng/news/opinion/patrick-yakowa-unanswered-questions-four-years-after/176253.html#XpSUoBurBTzYaEUu.99
