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Dr Bukar Usman: 80th Birthday Felicitations The award-winning folklorist, writer, historian and retired iconic public servant, Dr Bukar Usman, turned 80 on December 10, 2022. As usual, he celebrated his birthday quietly in his Abuja residence. But his mentees, friends, and numerous associates would not let the significance of the event pass unnoticed. Below are felicitations in celebration of the life, works and exemplary character of Dr Usman, President of the Nigerian Folklore Society and a man who has touched the lives of many through his philanthropic Dr Bukar Usman Foundation.
Ex-VC, Nuhu Yaqub, hails Bukar Usman @ 80 By Henry Akubuiro Prof. Nuhu Yaqub, OFR, FNIM, former Vice Chancellor, University of Abuja, and pioneer VC, Sokoto State University, has joined teeming fans, friends and relations worldwide to celebrate Doc. Bukar Usman, President, Nigerian Folklore Society, who turned 80 on December 10, 2022. Prof. Yaqub recalled that providence brought both of them together physically recently in Abuja, though he was conversant with his literary exploits and track record in public service. After reading a recent validation of the octogenarian by Ambassador A.Y. Shehu, Nigeria’s ambassador to Moscow, he noted: “I am so enthused by this information of your blessed life, apart from your literary exploits that made me know you before we met. Indeed, your fame precedes you, and this has aptly been captured by the encomiums heaped upon you by His Excellency, the Ambassador, who wrote the piece in reference. “Your type is rare in contemporary Nigeria’s public space that has been invaded by vampires in the Service and those out of it. I am eternally proud of you, Sir. Indeed, I should inform you that you are also my mentor, like the late Professor Abubakar A. Gwandu, one of my former Vice Chancellors at the Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto, who impacted on me so much on moral issues, such as honesty, humility, incorruptibility, courage, speaking the truth, no matter whose horse may be gored, strong faith in God, and good judgment on all matters, at all times. “These are your qualities that I am aware of ab initio, and I am very happy that they have been repeated by His Excellency, the Ambassador in his piece. Prof Yaqub, who said Dr. Usman looked younger than his age, said, “When we met days before your birthday in Abuja, I didn’t see you as someone who was up to 75 years of age, not to assume that you would soon be celebrating your octogenarian age with Grace. Certainly, the Grace is that of God’s and I particularly give Him the adulation.” He also said: “I am very happy for you and your blessed family. I, on behalf of my family, extend my happiest birthday greetings to you on this auspicious occasion. You were very healthy at our maiden meeting. I equally pray that Almighty God shall continue to keep healthy; no disease, no sickness shall come near you; you shall be happy all the time; and you shall not lack anything. Members of your family shall also, by the grace of God, be operating in the same mode as you!” Writing in the same vein, an old boy of King’s College, Lagos, Dr. Usman’s alma mater, Ashim Oyekan, described the former as an “unpretentious, humble and amiable, sportive and academically competitive student at King’s College” whom he had followed through his “glorious and impeccable career in the Civil Service to the now celebrated Literary Giant,” adding, “you remain an enigma, for your simplicity and rare integrity. Alhamdulillah! I thank God for you, and for all He has enabled you to accomplish, so far, in your life.” Source: https://www.sunnewsonline.com/ex-vc-nuhu-yaqub-hails-bukar-usman-80/
Congratulations @ 80 May I humbly take the rare privilege to congratulate you and pray for you, sir, on your 80th Birthday Anniversary? Although you have since left no one in doubt regarding your principled stance on not celebrating your birthday, I believe that 80 years is a landmark and I would crave your indulgence to exceptionally allow me a space to express my emotional feelings and respect toward you as my uncle, my mentor, my compass and my role model. I formed my impression of you since the first day I met you in your office in 1990 at the Cabinet Office when I was nominated by my former boss, AVM Idi Musa (of blessed memory) to represent the DIA on a multi-agency Task Force to combat Trade Malpractice, including Advance Fee Fraud that became an albatross for Nigeria in 1980s/90s.
With utmost respect, Yours sincerely, Abdullahi Shehu Yibaikwal
Celebrating Bukar Usman, A Man of Letters, @ 80 By Bande Matthew Odu, Jnr. Today is the 10th day of December, 2022. It is the birthday of one of the illustrious and well decorated sons of Biu, Dr Bukar Usman. Sir, on this day, eight decades ago, you were born on the Biu plateau. But today, you have grown to become a global citizen and a detribalized Nigerian. You are 80 years today. We celebrate you today both for the age and for the achievements that have accompanied the age. We are proud of you and it feels good to celebrate you while you live. Your 80th birthday will no doubt draw people from far and near to comment on your greatness. Were you to name a venue, it would have been filled with people. You have celebrated your silver, golden, platinum, diamond and oak/pearl jubilees. You are now an octogenarian. Your living to be eighty is significant as it has provided you the opportunity to fulfill your dreams and to hatch your hopes; it has also made you an instrument of blessing to humanity. Our joy is that you entered the exclusive club of octogenarians well, strong and healthy. Happy birthday, sir! We pray the good Lord will continue to sustain and keep you in good health. The academia might have missed your intellectual exploits and vibrancy but your entry after retirement paid off as if grounds were not lost while you sojourned in the civil service. Your writing career has brought us as much happiness as your excellent job in the civil service. You prove your mettle anywhere and everywhere you go. You are not a flash in the pan. You are not an accident. Your achievements are visible and tangible. They are verifiable and so well documented that no eraser can erase them. You have been dutiful, diligent and hard working. Your supervisors were at ease with your work, even when most of the times you worked with little or no supervision. They showered encomiums both officially and unofficially. In the civil service, you earned your promotions regularly and reached the pinnacle of your career without lobbying for it. You were not heard, you were not even seen most of the times, but your work was conspicuous, so it spoke for you. Today, we celebrate you, a phenomenal, quintessential former Permanent Secretary. In Hatching Hopes, your autobiography, you recall with nostalgia your days at your provincial school in Maiduguri and your student days at the prestigious Kings College, Lagos. You cherish and remember members of the inner cycle (the Golden Ingots). On the few events I have followed you to, you were active and joined the choir to sing the Kings College anthem with relish and with the enthusiasm of juvenile school boys. I was jealous, I must confess. You exude unbelievable candor and simplicity and uncanny ability to attract people and retain them. People of your status yell, shout and bark out orders. But you are surprisingly humble, courteous, punctilious and disciplined – the hallmarks of a well-trained public servant. Kudos to you, sir! You have remained a civil servant by upholding the training that was inculcated into you. You are tactful, yet very productive. You preach hard work and you lead by example. For you, serendipity is as a result of hard work. Divine providence yes, but success comes with making an effort. You stand sincere and straight-talking and not given to persiflages. You are steady, even under pressure; you are unflappable. You were unruffled before a former Head of State, the late fiery General Murtala Mohammed. You went to that meeting with unfeigned innocence and courage. As a young officer, you showed boldness. You were commended ten years later by another former Head of State that “you saved the day”. Your kindness to humanity endears you to the people. You are a non partisan and apolitical man of the people, unlike Chinua Achebe’s fictional character. Your philanthropy has been copiously eulogized. You have inadvertently written your name in gold. Again, we are happy to celebrate you, sir. You have given generously to a lot of people. What dies in us while we live is the worst death. Your kindness speaks for you. History has and will continue to remember you kindly and for a long time too, especially as you have preserved most of your thoughts in writing. Your footprints will remain indelible on the sands of time. You further renewed our hope by giving us a foundation of hope, the Dr. Bukar Usman Foundation – the vehicle that has enabled you to reach out to a wider target audience. The foundation made it possible for various donations in cash and kind to be doled out to beneficiaries. Your foundation’s reach ranges from needy individuals to school, organizations and universities. You have been wonderful, sir. Happy birthday to a philanthropist! I am happy to have met you, sir. Your lucid style of writing excites yours readers. It charms and addicts even the less voracious readers; it makes them to complete reading your work once they have started. Your clarity of thought magically entice and compel them to read through to the end. This style distinguishes you and your readers thirst for more because of the limpidity of your writing. Congratulations Sir. Songs have been sung for you. You have been serenaded and recognized with a plethora of awards by individuals, corporate organizations, and universities. You were also awarded a prestigious National Honour to cap your recognition for meritorious service to the fatherland. You have been described variously as an accomplished bureaucrat, writer, philanthropist, ideologue, a man of culture, public intellectual, and venerated son of Biu, amongst others. You are our inspirer, motivator and mentor: “One whose finger is soaked in the Calabash of Honey that everybody wants to lick”; “One whose Temper rises when Human Rights are trampled upon”. You are a preacher and believer in noblesse oblige. Here, too, you are an exemplary practitioner. Behind every successful man there is a woman, I dare add, a good woman. Your spouse Mrs. Raliat Dupe Usman has been superlative to say the least. She has been your first assistant, secretary, clothier and manager. She is a kind-hearted and generous simple woman. She supported the establishment of the Dr. Bukar Usman Foundation and has continuously encouraged you. Your spouse shares in the joy of this day. Her kitchen skills is worthy of mentioning as her delectable dishes bring nourishment and rejuvenation to you. A peaceful woman, she is more or less like a younger sister and friend. The triple Hs and Z, your children, are also peaceful, easy-going and considerate. The milk of human kindness also flows profusely in them. You have an army of other people who became your children because of your philanthropic touch. The drums are out not just to celebrate the patriarch of the Usmans, but also to celebrate you as the father of all those you have met. You deserve all the accolades and encomiums, especially on this day of your 80th birthday. You remain an epitome of humility and a model for younger people to emulate. Some others richer than you have been selfish with their money, time and everything. But you have been giving not because of abundance but because of the desire to make the world better than you met it. You give surprisingly to people who cannot requite your kindness. We appreciate your efforts, sir. Be prepared, sir. A surprise alfresco party, with a ballad to celebrate a great man, an enigma and a colossus at 80, may just be inevitable. Please accept my unfeigned and sincere birthday wishes. May God reward you abundantly.
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Bukar Usman at 80: Of Creativity, Prolificacy and Cultural Advocacy By Ben Tomoloju He enjoyed his juvenile pastimes. He did enjoy the folktales to which his mother treated him under the moonlight. He also progressed into the Qur’anic School like his peers. But, at a point in 1951, at the age of seven, ‘Drarmsheladiwa’ Bukar Usman was dragged by an overzealous palace attendant to the presence of the Emir on royal order. Recalling the experience in his autobiography, Hatching Hopes (2006), the young lass of those days, now a literary celebrity, writes: ‘The Emir was reassuring. The one sentence from his royal lips threw me on an entirely new path. He spoke as if he was addressing me but actually I was arraigned before him along with one other boy called Mamman Tukshil.’ The Emir said calmly but peremptorily, ‘Well, child, you are now ready to go to school and you should proceed.’ The order of a monarch, in this connection, was irreversible. It marked a positive turning-point in the life of someone who will grow to become one of the highly influential Nigerian literary figures in recent history: Dr. Bukar Usman. On Saturday, December 10, he turned 80. Generally acknowledged as a man of humble bearing and altruistic disposition, his forte goes beyond creative writing. He traverses the realm of public affairs, research, documentation and transmission of folklore, history as well as cultural advocacy. Having spent 35 years in the civil service from where he retired as a Permanent Secretary in 1999, he has devoted himself unceasingly to the promotion of folklore at the local and international levels. With this preoccupation, he has consistently motivated stakeholders, mobilised resources and built networks towards the resurgence of the Nigerian Folklore Society where he now occupies the exalted position of the president. Usman was born in Biu, a city state about which he has embarked on research, written and published a book, A History Of Biu. He describes his place of birth with relish as ‘the plateau among the plain lands of Borno en route to the Sahara desert.’ Spelling it further, he says, ‘From the tableland of more than 2500 feet above sea level, you could survey the abode of the Kanuri and Fulani, Biu’s northward and southward neighbours.’ Situated between these ancient imperial domains, his own Babur/Bura community is a distinct ethnic nationality in its own right, and he reminisces upon his days as a child in that environment with romantic fervour. The catch is not only about the alluring landscape, flora, fauna and wildlife of Biu. It is also about its cultural manifestations, about the spectacular traditional sports, performing arts, festivals, folk life and folktales. The folktales connect quite firmly with his latter-day reputation as a writer and he bears it unassumingly, yet as a treasure. Just as an aside before one proceeds into the crux, Dr. Bukar Usman has been a public intellectual from as far back as his days in the public service. For many years, he turned out a number of books on public administration, his major area of professional specialisation. He published Voices in A Choir: Issues in Democratisation and National Stability in Nigeria. Three other books earlier published by him, namely, Press, Policy and Responsibility, The Interface of the Muse and Government Protocol and Democracy, Human Rights and National Stability were also incorporated in the new title, Voices in A Choir… Along with Dreams and Realities: Issues In Nigeria’s Golden Jubilee Anniversary and Globalisation and the World After Mubarak and Gaddafi, these books accruing from Usman’s resourcefulness as a distinguished public administrator were already evident of his prolificacy and profundity. However, back to his creative flair, it was from the middle of the first decade of this century that he deployed his skills into the literary field to the fascination and – perhaps – amazement of his close associates and the public at large. Talking, for instance, about his ‘communicative voice’, he said that it changed ‘after Voices in A Choir…’ Throwing more light on the shift, he writes: ‘This change is evident in my newspaper articles published after 1999. The articles were different from my official speeches, not merely in terms of message, but significantly in terms of style of writing. They were simple, more personal and approached issues from the “human interest” angle. In this connection, Hatching Hopes, Bukar’s first autobiography that had been in the works since 1992, is a consolidation of the literariness in his writing, which had begun to materialise piquantly in his newspaper articles. It later blossomed into full, free-flowing and lucid prose in Hatching Hopes. The non-fictional work gives an account of his childhood, education, studentship at the Borno Provincial Secondary School, Maiduguri, King’s College, Lagos and the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, where he graduated with a B.A. (Hons.) in Public Administration in 1969. His career in the civil service, marital life right up to his retirement in 1999, are also copiously projected in the narrative. Interestingly, despite his height of attainment in formal education, his cultural orientation from his younger days remains undiminished. The folktales – so to speak – continue to nag his consciousness. Communal legends and myths of origin about his Biu ancestry are taut. All are kept alive in his mind. As such, when he passed the final copy of the manuscript of Hatching Hopes over to his publisher, Duve Nakolisa, in 2005, the latter, knowing his man very well, asked, ‘Why not turn your attention to folktales in your area?’ The question was like igniting a latent energy bidding its time to explode. After a moment of reflection, the dam was opened for an unbridled flow of recollections of the numerous tales his mother told him as a child and subsequently personal creations of inspiring tales in the fashion of the traditional antecedents. He recalls that, apart from the moonlight tales, he had also benefited as a schoolboy from the classics of the renowned Hausa author, Abubakar Imam. He embarked on researches, went on creative flight. Between 2005 and 2009, he had written and published fourteen books of folktales in Hausa, published by Gidan Dabino Publishers, Kano. A German NGO, IRENE Sahel sought his permission afterwards, and ‘freely got it’, to publish the stories in ‘Boko’ and ‘Ajami’ for the education of the girl-child in Qur’anic schools in Niger Republic, aside of schools within Nigeria like Capital Primary School, Kano, which included Books 1-5 in their curricula. As a further breakthrough, the publications attracted UNESCO particularly as resource material for its initiative of using indigenous languages in teaching. Thus Bukar delved further into creative writing with an overwhelming acclaim from the international community right up to the University of Cairo where his book of folktales, Taskar Tatsuniyoyi, is also in the curriculum at various levels. To quickly mention it, prior to all this acclaim and as far back as 2014, the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, had taken account of the productivity, intellectual accomplishment and creative verve of Bukar Usman – perhaps long before the larger public woke up to it – and awarded him a D. Litt. in Public Administration for his outstanding work and research in that field. That was even before his reputation in the area of folklore and literature flourished visibly enough. All the same, beyond tales in Hausa, Dr. Bukar Usman wrote and published fictional stories in English, which were generally inspired by the folktale motif. They include, The Bride without Scars and Other Stories, The Stick of Fortune, Girls In Search of Husbands and Other Stories and The Hyena and the Squirrel. On record, after the publishing of The Bride without Scars and Other Stories in 2005, Usman has published over 20 books, one of which is the 652-page compendium of his Hausa language folktales. Another is his literary autobiography, My Literary Journey, published in 2013. There are more, testifying to the author’s versatility and fecundity. And they have generated a lot of interest in the international media and among scholars. For instance, apart from the cerebral support given by renowned, Emeritus Professor Dandatti Abdulkadir at the beginning of Bukar Usman’s foray into folklore research, documentation and creative enterprise, one has had the cause to review Dr. Khalid Imam’s book, Justice, Fairness and the Quest for An Egalitarian Society in Africa: A Reading of Bukar Usman’s Taskar Tatsuniyoyi (Compendium of Hausa Tales, Books One to Fourteen). This is one of those books that have given well-deserved critical attention to Usman’s creative explorations. In reviewing the book, one had stated as follows: ‘In Three Chapters comprising 18 sections he (the author) anatomises Bukar Usman’s tales from various perspectives. He highlights their universal significance in correlation with profound thoughts of some of the most respected thinkers in world history. From Plato to Ghandi, to Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, Imam articulates the principles of social justice and fairness, equity and egalitarianism as they abound in the moral statements of the Tatsuniyoyi. ‘He delves into the sociology of oral literature using the example of Hausa folktales. In Usman’s collection, for instance, the virtue of altruism is resonant in Marainiya (the orphan girl-child) who “subjected herself to the dangers of passing through many valleys of death to save the precious life of a prince that was about to die.” In another tale, Munguwar Kishiya (Tale of the Wicked Step-Mother), justice is the key subject matter. And justice, as posited by the author, is the fundamental principle upon which a well-ordered society stands.’ Other works abound, lending insight into the dynamic imagination of Usman as he explores the social and aesthetic attributes of orature and literature as fodder for humanising thoughts and actions. Such books include: A Selection of Nigerian Folktales: Themes and Settings (2018), Gods and Ancestors: Mythic Tales of Nigeria (2018) and People, Animals, Spirits and Objects: 1000 Folk Stories of Nigeria (2018), all published by Klamidas. With these and other fresh titles on the shelf, it should leave no one to wonder why, in the past twenty-three years after his retirement, Dr. Bukar Usman has progressively advanced from the brand of the pen to the arena of practical assertions. This is in terms of pushing his passion for the promotion of folklore beyond the writing desk to the frontiers of cultural advocacy. The Nigerian Folklore Society, of which he is the president, is now a laboratory of some sort, not only for the experimentation of the ideas for which he stands, but for the translation of such ideas into practical achievements in a collaborative sense. And his zeal still remains boundless, even at 80. * Tomoloju, former Member of the Governing Board of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments and ex-Deputy Editor of The Guardian is a Playwright and Theatre Director. Source: https://guardian.ng/art/bukar-usman-at-80-of-creativity-prolificacy-and-cultural-advocacy/ |
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