By Rotimi Fasan
I HAD quite a tough time settling on the subject of today’s discourse. The issues involved are quite personal and as any regular reader of this column would know, exploring the personal wouldn’t count as one of the strengths, if any, of this columnist. Yet, as anyone who has taken time to look at such matters would know even the most rigorously written, distant and impersonal history ultimately has its subjective side.

As we hold forth on the larger issues of politics and nationhood, there is a sense in which the personal may aid, even sharpen, our appreciation of those matters that are generally seen as of public relevance. History is not only about kings and queens, presidents, politicians and generals and their often perfumed accounts of life.

It is also about subalterns, the seemingly ordinary and diligent foot soldiers who cleared the path trodden by emperors. Which is to say that every history is local, every collective history is individual; every national history is a summary of the apparently local.

That settled, there was yet pending the question of what aspect of my subject to talk about for this is about my father and as I thought about it all many things ran through my mind as in a dream. In the end I chose to take things by the ear, just follow as I’m led, hoping that what I touch upon would not be too far off the mark.

Twenty five years may not amount to much in the total order of things. But in terms of human life, 25 years, that is a quarter of a century, is indeed not the shortest of time. And that’s for how long my father has been gone. Exactly 25 years ago yesterday, that is on July 5, 1986, he took that one last stride across the gulf of mortality.

I got my last view of him as he walked, supported on both sides, into the vehicle that took him from the private medical facility he had been in Ankpa now in Kogi State where he worked at the time, to the bigger State Hospital in Makurdi the Benue State capital. It was a late

Thursday evening as they set out on the three hours journey to Makurdi, and the medical vehicle that took him was sandwiched between four or five other vehicles with police escort. There was a flash in his eyes and he didn’t look like someone with just two days more to live. The only family member with him was my mother; the rest of us children had been restricted home.

My eldest brother who could have accompanied him was away in Lagos. By the time I arrived in Makurdi late Saturday morning hoping against hope that he was well and alive, he had been some hours in the morgue of the hospital by which I had walked desultorily and taken a close look on a failed mission to locate him.

Since Thursday after he departed I and my siblings, all except two older, had reached a consensus that I should go and join our father, taking along his diary which he had requested and maybe one or two other things I can’t remember now. I knew where he kept important things which I accessed as and when he requested, kept the key of his wardrobe after he took ill and was in all something of his personal assistant.

But as I said he had been some hours gone by the time I surfaced in Makurdi. But what I remember or would like to remember were those things that made him who he was, not the trauma of his passing at the time he did.

For one, he was a most meticulous individual who never lost sight of events around him as the point about his diary would indicate. Diligence and dedication to duty was high on his list of priorities. An early riser, he was up before anyone at home and his background as someone who must have harboured priestly ambitions and was close to his local church in Ondo, hummed and sang hymns as he washed and got ready for work in the morning.

Tall, athletic and of dignified bearing, he was a member of the Boys Scout and there is at least a picture of him from those days. There are pictures of him with his students during the time he worked as a school teacher. At least two of his students I know: A retired bank manager, a Mr. Darupale and a provost of the St. Stephen Anglican Church, Venerable Olaosebikan Modupe(?) in Ondo. He, it was, told me of what errant students dreaded most about my father: his slaps that were unique for their severity.

I testify to this. For someone who had to pull himself up by his bootstrap, he couldn’t follow his intellectual pursuits for long. He ended up in the Police Force which became the beneficiary of his high intellect.

He was no mean bibliophile and his habit of reading and collecting books would be passed on to my eldest brother, Dele, and maybe one or two of his children. His initials ROF (Rufus Olayele Fasan) were often boldly printed on the books many of which are still today in our family home library kept by my eldest brother.

He was proud of his job and did it with a high sense of responsibility. When I look at our present crop of police officers I wonder if it was the same organisation father worked so diligently and uprightly for. Of  course there was a vast world of qualitative difference between the constabulary of my father’s time and what there is today. Poorly trained, kitted and educated, the quality of our Police Force deteriorates by the day.

Even though the time I talk about is not such a long time ago, there is yet a marked deterioration between the quality of today’s Police and even those of, say, ten years ago, to say nothing of several decades back. You don’t need to embark on any special survey or research to know this. The Police have behaved poorly and people, Nigerians, have a generally poor impression of them, especially those that are to be encountered on a daily basis on our roads as other public places and in police stations in their threadbare uniforms and torn shoes.

To be concluded next week