By Usman Abdullahi Koli
The elders say a man who teaches you to see is greater than the one who gives you eyes, and Malam Rauf Oyewole taught me to see long before I understood what I was looking at. Some people pass through your life and leave footprints, but others walk in and quietly rearrange the furniture of your future, and his emergence as Chairman of the Bauchi Correspondents’ Chapel is not just news I am celebrating, it is a debt I am acknowledging in public.
I met him when I was in my second year studying Mass Communication and he arrived on our campus as a corps member, which meant that many of us, young and still learning the ways of the world, filed him mentally under “temporary” and moved on with our lives. I was not even one of his regular students, and I say this without pride, because I dodged his Photography and Photojournalism class more times than I care to count, a three-credit-unit course I treated like an inconvenience until the day an assignment refused to let me hide.
Our news gathering class sent us to cover an event in a nearby community, and when we returned I wrote my report the only way I knew how, which was the way my father had trained me to write since secondary school, sitting with my drafts for hours, editing, correcting and reshaping them until the work belonged to him as much as to me. I did not know it then, but those evenings were preparation, and the headline I produced for that assignment turned out to be the door through which Rauf walked into my life and refused to leave.
He called me “Biggie” and said it in front of another mentor whose own story I will tell someday, telling me that since I did not see him in class often enough, from that day onward, every day he came to the department, he must see me twice, morning and before closing, and that was how a lecturer I was avoiding became the man who would not let me go.
Rauf did not simply tell me I could write; he made me write, and there is a universe of difference between those two things, because every week I owed him three pieces, topics chosen by him at first, with a friend sometimes helping me until Rauf caught on and insisted I do the work myself, after which he would read everything I submitted, including the ones barely worthy of being called writing, correcting them, editing them and explaining what was wrong without ever once making me feel small for getting it wrong. That was his greatest gift, the understanding that a young person learning to write does not only need correction, he needs the confidence to keep trying after being corrected, and Rauf built that confidence in me the way a builder lays blocks, patiently and without applause.
He taught me journalism inside the classroom and continued teaching me outside it, drilling into me that writing was never about assembling beautiful words, but about observation, discipline, accuracy, clarity, relevance and responsibility, and that a good writer must keep reading, keep writing and, above all, keep accepting corrections. Even after I graduated, the relationship refused to graduate with me, because when I returned to further my studies and Rauf was no longer taking our class, Malam Burra, a teacher I will properly honour another day, saw what Rauf had started, picked it up and ran with it, and between the two of them I gained not just writing mentors but a standard I have carried into everything I have ever attempted.
Many people who know me today assume I was ready-made, that I simply had writing in me and found my way, but Rauf saw something different, a young man with potential whose talent had not yet been properly discovered, developed or disciplined, and instead of merely admiring that potential, he took responsibility for helping me explore it, without ever asking where I came from or seeing my tribe or region as a barrier, because what he saw was a Nigerian student with talent and he treated that talent as something worth investing in.
Today I have become a writer, columnist, journalist and lecturer, and I have served in positions I once could only imagine, but none of it would mean anything if I could not also say that I now do for younger people what Rauf and Burra did for me, which is to see them early, push them hard and refuse to let them settle for less than what they carry. Rauf Oyewole occupies a special place on that list, a relationship that has outgrown student and lecturer to become senior colleague, elder brother and, in many respects, father, because he still reads my pieces, still blesses some of them, still calls me to order when he thinks I have gone wrong, and I still listen.
If there is one lesson I have carried from him, it is that the people who change our lives are not always the ones who make the loudest declarations about us, but the ones who quietly see something in us, patiently nurture it and refuse to give up until we begin to see it ourselves, and for me, Rauf was that person, the one who saw the writer in me before I fully understood the writer I could become and then handed me over to another good man when his own season in my classroom ended.
So as he emerges as Chairman of the Bauchi Correspondents’ Chapel, I am not only congratulating a journalist and a professional colleague, I am congratulating my teacher, my mentor, my senior colleague and the man who started everything. Thank you for seeing me, for teaching me, for correcting me, for making me write and, most importantly, for never making me feel that my early attempts were too poor to deserve your attention, because I remain one of the many people whose journey carries a part of your influence, and I pray that as you lead the Chapel, you bring to it the same eye for hidden potential that you brought to a student who was dodging your class.
May Allah grant you wisdom, strength and the grace to lead with the same commitment, fairness and professionalism that have characterised your own journey. Congratulations, Malam Rauf Oyewole. My teacher. My mentor. My senior colleague. My elder brother. The man who saw the writer in me.
Usman Abdullahi Koli,
mernoukoli@gmail.com.
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