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.
It explains the businessman, the teacher, the politician and the scholar who earned a PhD in International Relations and, years later, returned to Bayero University Kano for another in Economics. Chairman has never believed that learning has an end point. He is always searching for the next question and, inevitably, the better answer.
