A Tribute To A Loving Legend, Adamu Usman Garko -By Abubakar Shehu Mohammed

Today’s tribute is about a story of a living wonder. A story of a teenage author, who, literally, has added more than 20 years to his lifetime. Today’s is a story of self-discipline, Sacrifice, focus, determination and perseverance all embodied in one amazing soul. This is about Adamu Usman Garko and here is a needle-pointed-tip nugget of his heroic, awesome journey.

Garko is the type that while his peers of nowadays are chasing girls and getting their heart kicked and broken by one girl or the next like a plastic sphere getting kicked in a football field from one player to the next, Garko is, on the other hand, busy visiting one bookstore or the next, establishing a strong feeling of communion with one author to the next through their books; While his peers are frequent visitors to video-game houses, Garko is wholly absorbed, body and soul, in his books at the library instead; While they are playing their fingers sore from one video-game level to the next, garko is passionately flipping through the pages of books, feeling the texture of each page, his mind driving immeasurable pleasure and dancing to the beautiful rhythmic crinkling of the turning papers.

Adamu usman Garko -whom I also met on Facebook in 2019- is an amazing writer, a genius poet, a mesmerizing spoken words artist and a captivating author. He got his anthology book debut, WHEN DAY BREAKS, published in 2019 before he had even finished his secondary school education. He is a also publisher of many thought-provoking write-ups in the national dailies, quite many that cannot be easily counted with the fingers of both hands. The award-winning writer is, also, a winner of many local and international competitions, recent of which is the 2020-Nigeria Prize for Teen Authors.
Allow me sweeten it for you. Do you know that, strongly suspected, that Garko is still a teenager, still less than 20 years of age despite all those unbelievable stack of achievements and still piling up on his shelf? He is a guest and keynote speaker to many literary art and leadership events all across the country.

At this young age of his, adamu has handled a whole load of stages with expert-level performances far better than most people 20 or 30 years older than he is. Garko has achieved greatness way bigger than his age would allow if he were an ordinary. When one subjects Garko, his age and his achievements under close examinations, does the math diligently, one will definitely come to the admission that Garko is remarkably exceptional and has, indeed, literally added 20 or 30 years to his life span.

I am a true believer of the popular philosophy that every child is special but, Garko is an exceptional phenomenon, a gale force shaking the world of literary art on its foundation. He is a rare Jewel that will exhaust all your descriptive adjectives when you are just barely half-way into your endeavour to describe who he really is. So I give up on this. For he is the finest son the North region ever has.

According to Adamu Garko and many literary gurus like him, it does not matter what profession one wants to pursue, one can still be a good writer, an awesome poet or a dazzling spoken words artist if one wishes to.

Consequently, I suggest, that even when we want our daughters to become medical Doctors, or Economists, or Nurses, or Lawyers, etc and our sons to become an Engineers, or chemists, or Pharmacists, or physicist, or biologist or whoever we wish them to become, we can still, simultaneously, teach them how to fall in love with the literary scholarship, knowing fully that we are living on a continent where the ‘intelligent quotient’ of a person is, sad enough, squarely measured based on the person’s mastery level of the English language.

It is, thereupon this reason alone, if for no other, my hope that every family blessed or would-be blessed with little boys and girls will -in 10 or 15 years times- raise as many Adamu Usman Garkos as can be humanly possible, ourselves included. That in the same above carved out time frame, we and our children would ‘ve been able to attain Garko’s vastness or beyond, in order to be able to express ourselves clearly and tell our Northern stories exactly the way it happens, the way it is and not the way the western world or the estern region of our dear country wants it projected.

Remember, We are all self-made, but only who are successful, who like where they are will admit it. More precisely, geniuses are made, not borne.

Oh! Allah in your infinite mercies increase our Northern province with more and more of Adamu Usman Garkos, amin.

Abubakar Shehu Muhammed is physical and theoretical chemist, peace loving, fighter against injustice and advocator for good governance.