I am undertaking a mentoring programme facilitated by the Afrigrowth Foundation.For a while,i am going to be under Dr Reuben Abati's wings.This is the account of my first meeting with RA.Enjoy!
Still basking in the euphoria of being assigned to Dr Reuben Abati, Chairman editorial board of the Guardian newspaper, a polymath whose columns and other writings are subjects of keen interest for me-I left my house on Thursday morning and headed for Rutam house, Dr Abati’s workplace. The gusto with which I departed my house was unparalled, even the prospect of seeing examination results could not have dwarfed the joy of meeting the legendary columnist.
The preparation for the first meeting had started from Umuahia, my base for now. The choice of what to wear, the day of meeting and what time of the day to drop by, were the thoughts that agitated my elated mind while I journeyed the 8-hour drive from God’s own state down to Lagos.
I finally settled for Thursday, being my favourite day of the week and arguably the most convenient in view of the brevity of time. The next challenge was settling for the best outfit to don as the words of Mrs Dayo Keshi,President Afrigrowth Foundation, kept ringing in my ears-‘don’t dress to show your mentor how enormous your problems are’ or something along those lines. Selecting what to wear on momentous occasions is a task that thankfully confronts not only individuals like the legendary James brown,the late king of Soul who was reputed to have had about a thousand suits in his lifetime but also folks whose wardrobe holds a meager collection. The category to which I fall had better be left to conjecture.
Despite the protestations of my mum and my kid sister, I opted for a souvenir from my last trip to Abuja -a well-starched buba and sokoto that was making its first public appearance. It couldn’t have been launched at a more auspicious time.Despite my mum protestation that a corporate dress would be more like it but I reasoned that the “tinwa tinwa” attire fitted my mood.
I left my residence some minutes before 9am and set out for the Isolo expressway, along which The Guardian's office is situated. Before leaving I made it a point of duty to ask my dad for the precise bustop as I didn’t want to the object of derision of uncouth Lagos bus conductors. Toyota bustop was my destination! There was no getting it wrong.
My mind was fixated on what the first meeting would be like. Needless to say I had gone through the toolkit provided by Afrigrowth to prepare myself for the first contact with our mentors. The last thing on my mind was being caught napping. Even while in the bus, the annoying antics of both passengers and daredevil conductors didn’t faze me. If only they knew whom I was billed to see that afternoon, I thought to myself.
By 12.45 I was already at the unprepossessing gate of The Guardian, the flagship of the Nigerian press. Armed with a letter of introduction from Afrigrowth foundation and an identification tag as a mentee, I strode confidently into the reception “I am here to see Dr Reuben Abati,” I told the receptionist who immediately sized me up and plucked the phone to speak into it. Seconds later she handed it over to me. “Yeah, my name is Eyinade… I am from the Afrigrowth Foundation. I have a letter for Dr Reuben Abati…’’ as if the voice knew that nothing would stop me in my quest to see my mentor, she asked me to proceed upstairs.
“I am seconds shy away from meeting this great man,” I said to myself as I doubled my strides. I was directed to his office by a receptionist who didn’t forget to add that I took the wrong way in. I knocked on the door and was ushered into the secretary’s office. I greeted her and told her my mission. As soon as she heard that I brought a letter she immediately retorted that I drop it since her principal was away. Was that a good omen? Not even my explanation that I had been instructed to deliver the letter personally to her boss could deter her. To seek a middle ground, I asked when he would be back. “around 2 or 3pm ,” she replied. I opted to wait for him but she declined. “Drop the letter and come around later,” the face behind the spectacles dissolved into a smile.
I dropped the letter and elected to return at the time she suggested I return. Walking out of the office I kept asking myself if not meeting him on seat was a good portent. I was preoccupied with that thought that I took the wrong turn again on my way out, which earned me the harsh rebuke of the receptionist who had earlier tutored me. I apologized profusely and walked out of the building.
The next thing on my mind was looking for a place where I could kill time. My first instinct was to head for a cyber café where I could hook up with some idle friends already bored with the day’s job. I rebuffed the thought and walked for some minutes to the next bustop where I boarded a bus to Ilasamaja, where my cousin resides. Yeah, I had the presentiment that I was not going to meet Dr Abati on seat so I had asked my mum if my cousin was going to be at home. She answered in the affirmative as she reasoned that schools were vacation.
I found temporary solace in the company of my cousin’s kid and her househelp as I was told she had left for the University of Lagos . I settled down to read Helon Habila’s Measuring Time as I still had a lot of pages to devour. My eyes would rest on the pages of the compelling book one minute and drift to my wristwatch the next. God forbid that I should dose off. The anxiety was mitigated by some timely musicals that the TV churned out.
I hurried into my buba which I had pulled off to take some fresh air after I came in, at about a quarter to three . I said my farewell to the kids and hurried off to catch a bus, praying under my breath to meet Dr Abati this time around. I got to the Guardian office at about five minutes past three. After I dispensed with the registration details I sauntered into the building housing my mentor’s office. This time around the receptionist was busy working the phone to notice me. I walked into the secretary office to observe that the secretary on hand was the lady that attended to me. I introduced myself appropriately and told her I was around earlier.
I sank into a sofa and took in the office in a quick glance. I didn’t miss her entry into the adjoining office which I presumed was Dr Abati’s. I needed no clairvoyance to tell me he was on seat this time around. Seconds later I was ushered into the small but packed office where apparently those incisive and widely read commentaries are written.
He was seated behind a small desk, which took a significant portion of the office space. It was sporting books, sheaves of sheets, here and there and other paraphernalia of the editorial trade. Adorning the edge was a flat-screen monitor, I didn’t miss a book rack brimming with books staring down at me. I greeted him and he mumbled something about my coming the previous week. It wasn’t me, I told him as he evidently had me mistaken for another person.
My attempt to take in the titled of the books on the rack was cut short when he told me the day’s itinerary. “You are looking at a man who hasn’t slept for hours. I left the office for Akute earlier in the day, then proceeded to the Yoruba tennis club to review a book and then Alausa for a meeting” The mentoring session had commenced unannounced! The only snag, according to him, was that he had his column to write. His column I thought that would have been written sometime in the dead of the previous night.
While he spoke, he was shuffling a dozen dailies that formed a pile on his table. He unwittingly vouchsafed the process that produces the beautiful column. “Well I am casting for a topic in the dailies.if I don’t get what I want I might have to write what I have in my head” He said smiling that trademark Abati smile which usually followed the delivery of a punchy comment on the widely-watched Patito’s gang.
‘I will need two hours to write and another one hour to polish it’
I was enjoying the rare, behind the scene disclosure.On the verge of asking him if I could watch him fly on the wall as he wrote, he asked what my background was. I told him I studied Microbiology at the Obafemi Awolowo University though I had a keen interest in the media.
“Well anybody can work as a journalist all you need is a love for writing. By the way do you write?”
I was a little puzzled by the question as I had thought he would have read the essay I had written about myself; well, he probably had better things to do than to skim through a write-up of a starry-eyed aspiring writer.
“Yes, sir. I edited a campus weekly while in school and also freelanced for the Tribune and also contributed for the Nation.”
His face lit up and asked if The Tribune used my write-ups. I nodded and added that the five stories I sent them were all used. Did he sound impressed? I couldn’t say, as five stories didn’t come near the hundreds of his articles he got published while a student at the University of Calabar . His prodigious writing career, I had read, started way back from his undergraduate days, where he wrote for both soft sells and national dailies.
He gave me a hint of how packed his schedule was when he told me that the editor of a campus pullout to which I contributed while an undergraduate was in his office only the previous day to invite him to speak at her a forthcoming event in May. According to him, he needed to be continuously reminded, as his schedule was always tight.
For a moment I was awe-struck. I had wanted to tell him that I followed his column religiously while in school, that I would go online to read his Sunday column when I couldn’t lay my hands on The Guardian on Sunday because it seemed priced out of my reach, that I had clippings of his columns on subjects that resonated with me, that I had read of his perfectionist father who never saw anything special in a kid coming tops in class, that I had read of how female colleagues described him as always “sounding like a textbook” because of his ravenous appetite for books, that… ad nauseum. But I stopped dead in my mental track and saved the litany for another day. Rather than talk, I could only stare in awe before this human institution called Dr Reuben Abati.
