Like Dr. Stanley wrote in the case of the late Dele Giwa, so would I say that it is abnormal to write a tribute on Cosmas Elaigu. This is because an obituary here would amount to acceptance and accommodation of a death that was completely avoidable and which, to the extent that it was not avoided, makes the death of Cosmas unacceptable. We may not be able to punish anybody, including the deceased himself as well all those who saw him everyday in the last one year and, in fact, so many others, particularly Malam Auwal Rafsanjani, Mallam Y. Z Y’au and myself but we must not fail to document the story.


I put the blame on the silly individualism and its limitation on how far a friend could interfere or intervene in his or her friend’s private matter without injuring friendship. But it is a culture that one of the three of us should have ignored and shouted to high heavens that Cosmas was dying, whatever Cosmas himself thought about it. The tragedy is that we didn’t do that, the penalty for which would be loss of our own happiness for quite sometime to come.

I must wonder though if we could have achieved much or gone beyond healing him physically and if the physical healing would have cured him and prevented his death from the psychological burden that we all thought he was battling with but which we could do very little to unravel since he himself was least forthcoming. He was alien to unburdening his minds to anybody, including some of us who thought that because of the basis of our relationship, he could trust with the details of what he might have regarded as strictly his own business.

I cannot recall how we met. It could not have been earlier than the early 1990s when he came to replace Comrade Labaran Maku as the Kano State Correspondent of Daily Champion. Labaran’s office was our regular point of call whenever we came out of Bayero University where I was a student and Malam Yau was an academic. Naturally, we were bound to be interested in Labaran’s successor because, as student activists, we needed the press to push our own position on local, national and international issues. As a product of ABU, Zaria when ABU was ABU, Cosmas fitted neatly into our intellectual, ideological and political traditions even though he was more of the kind of person you employ as a researcher at the party headquarter than as a publicist.

Throughout the period that we were all in Kano, we were a knit group and our interactions extended from the social to intellectual and the political. The most manifest of our group project was the book, “The Populist Factor in Nigerian Politics” we published in 1995, the empirical side of which was an extended interview with Alhaji Sule Lamido and which was how all three of us became more acquainted with the Jigawa governor today.

Cosmas was the first to leave Kano following the death of his senior brother, John Elaigu who was a journalist in the News Agency of Nigeria, (NAN). It was after the death of John that the thoughtful and systematic Wada Maida invited Cosmas to join NAN on compassionate grounds. That was how he left Kano before I could graduate in 1995. His departure was a blow to me in particular because, aside from the robust group interaction, there was the regular remittance from him to an indigent student like me.

In NAN, he obviously made good progress, culminating in his posting as New York correspondent of the organization around mid 2000. That appears to be where and when his crisis started. I do not have a good recollection of everything that he told me regarding the crisis after we reconnected in 2005 or so in Abuja and I would say I stand to be corrected, especially by people like Waida Maida.


About the time that he was in New York was also the time that the Nigerian government planned to sell the New York office of NAN inside the UN Headquarters. Cosmas contemplated the absurdity of such an exercise since other third world countries would only be too glad to replace Nigeria there in the well located space, I think, one floor below CNN base inside the UN Building. Cosmas, therefore, decided to see his former teacher, Ibrahim Gambari, the man who actually introduced International Relations as a distinct degree programme at ABU and which Cosmas graduated in, either in the first or second set. It was then that Gambari took up the case with the then President Obasanjo who eventually ordered the suspension of the sale or something like that. What Cosmas told me then in Abuja is that his problems started from there. He suspected that some people who had readied themselves to benefit from the sale responded to the suspension by developing a hatred for him and putting spanners into works against all his interests. His problems were compounded by what looked like irregularity of salary or remittance to the out posts of NAN.


The no-free lunch praxis in an advanced capitalism like the United States so aggravated his crisis that he had to seek employment which contradicted his status in the US. Before long, he was deported by the Americans. What I do not know and never asked him is whether or not the deporting authority gave him the option of being deported along with his family or such an option is not part of the question, irrespective of the circumstances. Anyway, that was how he came back to live without a family since about 2005. Suffice it to say that since then, he has not seen his wife or any of his four children

Initially, we were so worried about this. I asked him as frequently as we met. In fact, one day, he called his wife and we spoke and I calmed down. Subsequently, each time I asked about the children, he gave a heart warming progress report, especially in respect of their educational progress. When it seemed that it was their consensus for things to remain like that, I stopped asking.

For much of 2006, we were together in Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre, CISLAC) where he came regularly as a discussant or some facilitator. Things were going fine. He had bought a fine Honda car and seemed to have put behind him the crisis of the first half of the decade. That was the situation in which I left Abuja for Jigawa in May 2007.

From mid 2008, however, things started to change for the bad. Number one, his car was damaged beyond repairs in an accident. Number two, he began to depreciate rapidly. At this time, I only saw him once a while. Each time I ran into him, I felt like asking him frontally but I managed to contain myself because I was really becoming conscious of the criticism that I lack protocol in these matters. But it was not the accusation of lack of protocol that stopped me. I did not ask him because I was afraid he might have been struck with HIV, even though he was not known to be reckless. If I confronted him and he said he had contracted HIV, what would I do?

But As long as he was not recovering, the worry was there. And I used to call Y. Z and we used to wonder why Cosmas would not sit us down and tell us what the problems were. Alas, it was nothing like HIV but something worse, diabetes, high blood pressure and hypertension. This was what he told me on the evening of February 13th, 2010 in front of Jigawa Hotel, Dutse.

The Sun newspaper had come to answer the question as to whether something developmentally serious is happening in Jigawa under Sule Lamido’s governorship but which the Nigerian press might not have been focusing on the way it should. As if he only knew then that I hail from Benue State, Daily Sun editor, Steve Nwosu, insisted that an interview with me should be part of the story. The package was published in Daily Sun of February 9th, (pp 25-33). It was while reading my interview that Governor Sule Lamido came across the book project we did with Cosmas and then called to ask me wherever Cosmas could be in this world. I said he was still in NAN. He said I should add his name as part of the journalists coming to re-enforce their resident colleagues to cover the Jigawa local council elections scheduled for February 13th. And that when they had finished, I should come along with Cosmas and Y. Z to Bamaina, his village on Sunday, February 14th.



I quickly linked up with the authorities in NAN and approval was given for Cosmas to come to Jigawa. I also linked up with Y. Z to say that three of us should hold a meeting in Kano on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 in Kano. At that meeting, all three of us who authored “The Populist Factor in Nigerian Politics” should consider the advise of a publisher that it is time we revised the book and come out with a new edition of it in view of the fact that populism has staged a come back in global politics, what with the victory of Obama in the 2008 American Presidential contest and of Jacob Zuma in South Africa as well as what is going on in Jigawa. Such a meeting would be good since we had no idea what Lamido may want to say at the meeting he had requested with us. If it turned out that he wanted more than just see our faces, (Cosmas’s face really since he must be tired of my own face now and even that of Y. Z who went to challenge his ideological purism or lack of it recently in Birniwa LGC of Jigawa State), then we would not be caught off guard.



The idea of this meeting was acceptable to both Cosmas and Y. Z hence Cosmas’s arrival a day earlier than stipulated for the other journalists. Well, we had the meeting but with difficulty. The mood created in the two of us by the physical status of the Cosmas we knew and the Cosmas we were seeing that night made this not to be one of our typical meetings. For, for the first time since we became a group, we met and dispersed without a social evening where we usually engaged in prolonged debate and theorizing of all sorts. It was clear we had not been fair to Cosmas as much as he had not been fair to us. Throughout the night, I was thinking. Why did he not use this opportunity of all three of us being in one place again to talk about himself? Could he be down with HIV? Should I just take him to Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital with or without his consent? After the meeting, Y. Z and I talked again on the phone. He said I should handle human affairs with care.



The following day, I sent an early morning text to His Excellency to say that even though Cosmas himself gave no one any evidence to suggest he was sick, he is too physically challenged to cover the election, not to talk of seeing him on Sunday. And that but for human complexity, I would have just proceeded with him to Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital. The governor asked what I thought could be the problem. I said I had no idea. Because he was dried up, my mind was going to HIV but that I had no evidence. He wondered how I would be able to proceed with him to hospital if he did not agree. He suggested I should first try to make him very welcome by giving him no sign that I was worrying. I should also create time for him to rest sufficiently. It was on the basis of this that we left Kano on Friday afternoon, February 12th for the pristine but healing atmosphere of Jigawa 3 Star Hotel in Dutse. That was where Cosmas rested throughout February 13th, 2010 while the local election was going on throughout the state.



By about 5. 00 pm that day, I set out with him on a tour of Dutse. I was relieved when everywhere we went, he had one sharp statement or another to make. He was ecstatic with the road network, saying he did not know that Lamido had reached that level of development.

The comments showed someone who was in total control of his mental capacity. So, what could be wrong with him? I seized his happier mood at the end of the tour to ask him. To my surprise, he showed no anger or reluctance. He said it was high blood pressure, hypertension and diabetes that were his medical problems. But why have you not gone to the hospital? The problem, he said, was money. He told the story of how he got well at some point when he paid and he collected all the drugs. The problems came back when he didn’t have the money to afford the treatment on a consistent.

Taking note of Y. Z’s caution to go slow on him, I did not ask him why he did not ask for some help from anyone. Instead, I asked if he would proceed to National Hospital, Abuja straight from Dutse if he had the money. He said he would but not to the National Hospital. He mentioned a missionary hospital. I asked if it is the one run by some French nuns near a housing estate in Karu. He said no. The one he had in mind is in Kubwa. Was he sure they are that qualitative? He said they were.

I said to him: Lamido has approved some money for you but he has also instructed I give you the first half of that sum and the second half will be released to settle whatever bill you accumulate in the hospital. First thing on Sunday morning, February 14th, the driver will take you to Kano and you will return to Abuja in the green taxis. We want to hear from you from your hospital bed. You have to be admitted in the hospital and they have to run all the tests. It is only after the tests that we would know whether it is something that can be handled within Nigeria or whether we have to launch an appeal fund for you to seek medical attention outside the country. I said it was time to do such a thing because journalists publicize the medical problems of other professionals but die because of lack of money to treat themselves and I cited three recent cases of this.

All these ‘terms’ were acceptable to him and he was very thankful and relieved. And I relayed all these to Mallam Y. Z. The following morning, he was taken to Kano and he boarded a green taxi to Abuja. When they arrived Kaduna, he sent a text of how very well they were cruising, his own words. In the night, he sent another text to which I replied before calling him. Disappointingly, he was speaking from his house instead of from the hospital as we agreed. But he assured he was going to the hospital for a most comprehensive check –up first thing on Monday.

The next time we spoke was early Monday night, February 15th, 2010. He was still in the house instead of being on admission in the hospital. But he said he was collecting the results of about six texts the following morning and that he would inform me as soon as he did that. But that was the last time we would ever speak to each other as mortals. The following day, Y.Z Yau who had gone to Abuja for some engagement called to say that he had been informed that Cosmas had died. Most surprisingly, I started getting texts and calls from many people informing me or asking me to inform my boss that his friend, Cosmas, had died. Some of these people were seeing him withering away daily but did nothing as simple as alerting the governor that there must be some problems with his ‘friend’ until he was done with the world. Well, this tribute is only because one’s sense of bonding will be injured if the experience of Cosmas’s friendship is not accounted for in a documented way. Adieu, Cosmas Elaigu!

Onoja is Special Adviser on Media Affairs to Gov Lamido of Jigawa State and can be reached on adagboonoja@gmail.com