There are three reasons why he should manifest himself or take manifesting himself seriously. One, as the son of a former president of the defunct National Association of Nigerian Students, (NANS), Mouktar Abashi has a readymade audience: his father’s constituency of activists of radical nationalism can be said to be waiting for him. This audience is a national audience. A readymade national audience is not an advantage many enjoy. Million’s of young people today have to create an audience for themselves, in social media self-marketing or in politics, academic brilliance or cultism and nudism, (in the case of the young women, unfortunately) and so on.
A portrait of the late Chris Abashi by Mouktar Abashi
Two, his mother, Cecelia Abashi, has impressed everyone in terms of the moral high ground and resilience. So, in her mother, he has had a formidable fall back and still does and owes her a becoming that offers a symbolic compensation to her. Third, Mouktar Abashi has demonstrated that he is a big promise in artistic creativity. He is not just a graduate in Fine Arts, he is very good at it. He writes poetry. He is good in drawing, painting. He is a bundle of potentials in that domain from what he has done as an undergraduate. It is for this uncommon track record that he qualifies for this spotlight in spite of his annoying tendency to relapse to adolescent confusion now and then.
Without the father who is late, it has not been easy for me family just as has been the case for all other activists who died but he is not one of those who must work to survive. Rather, he is one of those who should seek graduate education. Young people with solid academic grooming, especially in artistic imagination remains an investment that cannot go wrong as far as the future of this society is concerned.
To that extent, his absence in the right spaces where he should be unfolding is no longer a private matter or a subject of his free will but a matter of public concern. There are certainly many brilliant and many promising young Nigerians all over the country. There’s no debate about that but it is not all of them that we know of. Mouktar is thus a way of signaling all such young people that this society still has a way of picking out those showing exceptional records.
So, we want to see Mouktar Abashi advance to be recognised, to resume his artistic creativity, to tell whoever cares to listen that he has a plan. Great if the plan is something like ‘I would like to undertake a Masters Degree program under Prof Sola Olorunyemi at the Institute of African Studies at University of Ibadan or Prof Tanimu Abubakar in ABU, Zaria or Ibrahim Bello Kano in BUK or under Dr. Chijioke Uwasomba at OAU, Ile-Ife. Yes, our university system is in crisis but applicants to graduate studies can still get basically adequate grooming if they are discerning enough to pick out those they want to work under.
He used to go about fishing bright lads in the old North. No one seems to be doing that anymore in a deeply divided North
Alternatively, Mouktar Abashi should be one of those persistently knocking at the gate of a place such as TY Danjuma Foundation, asserting a plea for assistance to go for graduate studies outside Nigeria. If TY Danjuma Foundation doesn’t have such a facility, it is the Mouktar Abashis of this world who will make them to insert it. That’s how some of us got employed in Radio Kaduna in the early 1980, without knowing anybody there, without a big family name and without bribing anybody. Of course, Nigeria of today is not the Nigeria of the early eighties anymore when an unsure secondary school leaver could go before a James Audu and later Mohammed Suleiman, declare that he wants to be a journalist, answer a few questions and, literarily, walk away with an offer of employment. But it can still be done and we are now waiting for Mouktar Abashi to lead that process. That’s as soon as he reads this.
And Now This:
It is great to learn that one of the late Thompson Adanbara’s two children is doing fine in school. Their father remains one of the best philosophers Nigeria never had. Now, his two children offer the possibility of that realisation even as one of them is understood to be confronting financial crisis. Typically!
Meanwhile:
It is a story that will gratify many minds that one of late Chima Ubani’s daughters is now an undergraduate in one of the first generation universities! It is not yet the Chima Ubani moment but it is a huge part of it!
