Death Is A Universal Language -By Musa Kalim Gambo

This day takes me back to a day like this last year. I can’t remember the last time I shed tears over anything, whatsoever. On that fateful day a student had died after a brief illness, and the President of the Muslim Students’ Society (MSS) at Ahmadu Bello University, Aminu Gadagau was called upon to pick the corpse of the student at the Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital (ABUTH), I was among the MSS officials who accompanied Gadagau to the hospital. We did not know the student while he was alive, we couldn’t possibly have known him among the thousands of our members, but it was our responsibility to ensure that he was picked up and given a befitting burial in accordance with Islamic injunctions.

We arrived at the hospital when some of his relatives have already administered the burial bath on him. Therefore what was left of us was to pick the corpse, administer prayer and take it to the cemetery. At the mortuary, the deceased’s sister and brother have already arrived from Lagos. Two Yoruba lecturers from his department were there with the siblings.

It was when the corpse was finally brought out on a stretcher that I saw death. That wasn’t the first time I have been around a dead body, I was overwhelmed by the fact that death could be real and stare us in the eyes to remind us that our turn is on the way. His sister murmured something in Yoruba and started weeping while she struggled to wipe away tears from her eyes with the edge of her wrapper. That was when I ran to the back of the MSSN bus to shed the tears I couldn’t control. The Da’awa Officer, Musa Garba called me back to give a helping hand to lift the stretcher carrying the corpse. I couldn’t. What I have seen has robbed me of any strength needed to lift up even a single broomstick.

On the way to the cemetery, my mind was deep inside a turbulent ocean of thoughts; what if I were the one being conveyed down to my final abode without my loving parents seeing my corpse? Well, isn’t it a privilege that you die and get buried? Think about those innocent and helpless souls who have been burnt to ashes or blown to pieces either by deliberate act of violent terrorists or by accidents. Isn’t it an honor that the community gathers to pray over the trunk of your dead body?

After praying for him at the residence of his Head of Department, we finally laid him to rest in his final home. But the memory of that day, the tears I kept trying to suppress and had to shed to have peace keep coming back to remind me that death, beyond being a metaphor, is itself a universal language. We are scared to our bones to speak of or to it, of what use is it if we do speak to it? After all, death is deaf, blind, dumb, and numb. When it crawls towards anyone it doesn’t give a damn who the motherf*cker is. It doesn’t care whether he is the most powerful man in Egypt or Nigeria.

Nigeria’s corridor of power has never been spared by this death. It has used its soft and brutal voice to call the people who called the shots, from those who were shot violently during the military era to the present day of civilians who had to surrender against the optimism of survival.

I was awake on the night the death of President Buhari’s Chief of Staff was announced on Facebook and Twitter by Femi Adesina. Although it has been widely reported that Kyari was battling with the Coronavirus disease, it was still a shock. I mean I was shocked! But as Muslims when such news comes to us what is expected of us is to reaffirm this divine axiom; inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un, “Indeed we belong to God and to Him we shall return.”

The live broadcast of his burial on TVC was a time to reflect upon the inevitability of man’s mortality. It demonstrates that when we live we must remember that our end will certainly come. And we cannot choose such a date.

Some critics and speculators on social media have speculated that Abba Kyari was a surrogate president to Nigeria’s Muhammadu Buhari. This was because of the power he wielded in the presidential palace while he was alive. Mr. Buhari’s wife had also publicly alluded to the existence of a certain triad of power clique that has placed her husband at the center of Nigeria’s corridor of power. Abba Kyari is said to be a part of this power triad.

But the universal language of death is oblivious of this identity. The diction of this universal language will someday speak to me, and you too. But our prayer should be that when we are eventually called upon with this language we should take a bow in peace and walk down to a more peaceful home.

Musa Kalim Gambo writes from Zaria, Kaduna State