According to Cde Manasseh Turaki, the husband, in a brief telephone chat with Intervention earlier today, the family woke up to it on Sunday, December 31st, 2023. The wife, Rifkatu Manasseh Turaki, had gone to sleep normally the previous night. When she did not come out to head for the Church the following morning as would have been the case, then the children went to knock. They charged into the room when the knocking elicited no response but only to find their mother stone dead. They called their dad who was away back in their community to break the sad and saddening news.
Bereaved Cde Manasseh
A 2017 picture of mother and child (2nd child of the family when he finished secondary school)
There might have been signals of death stalking her just as she might have struggled with death that night or early morning of December 31st but whether that is true or not now rests in speculation. Her husband who would have been the testimony bearer was not there that night when she slept alone.
It will take time for many to come to terms her departure, especially the children, husband, immediate friends and colleagues at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences of the Kaduna State University where she was a lecturer since 2015.
Intervention has been told that nobody who ever lived with her, no matter how briefly, will fail to testify to her genuiness: no – over reaching herself; no querulousness; no bitchy life styles. Just basically trouble free. Above all, she appeared to know what she wanted: she wanted Pharmacy and it was Pharmacy she studied at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. Of course, she is a product of one of those high quality secondary schools around Jos in those days.
For several years, she was in the services of the Kaduna Health Services Management Board until her husband took up a political appointment with a Jigawa State legislator in Abuja, making her to relocate to Abuja along. In 2015 when they returned to Kaduna, it was to the Kaduna State University (KASU) she went to become a lecturer in Pharmacy.
Rifkatu Manasseh Turaki had no medical history which can provide a commonsensical explanation for her manner of death. With three grown up children, two of them already graduates, she must have been looking towards a restful evening. As a believer told Intervention about her death, God has decided she spends those evenings in Heaven. There may be nothing more to add to that!
