I have also had the privilege of seeing him through both triumph and adversity. His political journey has had its share of difficult seasons, some of them difficult enough to discourage almost anyone. But Chairman has an extraordinary capacity to return. He reflects, recalibrates and rises again. Not because the fall did not hurt, but because he has always believed that a difficult chapter does not have to be the end of the story.
There is a particular privilege in knowing someone before the world decided who they were going to be; before the titles, the cameras, the offices and the public arguments. I have had that privilege with Abdulmumin Jibrin.
I knew Abdulmumin long before most people knew him as they do today; before the National Assembly and before the many chapters of public life that have since defined his name. So, as he turns fifty, I find myself writing not about the Honourable Member for Kiru and Bebeji, but about my friend, my older brother and school father. That distinction has always mattered.
I remember someone whose mind never seemed to rest. Chairman, as we fondly call him, could take an idea everyone else had accepted, turn it around repeatedly, question it from every direction, and continue long after the rest of us had become tired of the conversation. I used to tease him about it, and sometimes I still do. But over the years, I have come to understand that this intellectual restlessness is at the very centre of who he is.
