Amina, a daughter of the late Chief of Staff to President Muhammadu Buhari, Abba Kari, has revealed how lovely he was to her mother.
According to her, he was a remarkable husband and father to her and other children.
She noted this in a tribute she composed for Kyari, as published in ‘ThisDay’:
On 17th April, 2020, my world came crashing down and my heart shattered into a billion pieces. Upon receiving the news of my father’s passing, I immediately felt the most excruciating pain – a pain I would not wish on my worst enemy. My biggest fear in the world had materialised.
Most people knew my dad as the Chief of Staff to President Muhammadu Buhari. As it is with many public servants, there was much more to him than the signature white kaftan and red cap by which he came to be recognised. He was a most remarkable husband to my mother (HauwaKulu), and father to myself and my three younger siblings (Nurudeen, Ibrahim, and Zainab). Completely irreplaceable.
Growing up, my dad doted over us. He was extremely protective and his role in raising us with my mother was as complimentary as it was distinct. His main focus was our education, and my mother’s was etiquette and religion! He was stern, and Ammui (as we call her) was playful. It was a perfect balance.
He was always working. My dad reminded us he worked hard so that he could give us all that we needed to excel at whatever we chose to do. And as far as I remember, my siblings and I lacked nothing; we had all we asked and more. That said, the asking part was hard! It often would come with a lecture and many questions as to why we would even ask for things. In the end, we would get what we wanted as long as a compelling case could be made for it.
He had a hard exterior but a heart of gold and a quirky sense of humour. He had zero tolerance for mediocrity: A no-nonsense man in every sense of the word. He expected excellence at all times and when it came to time, my father was Swiss-German – for him, arriving on time was arriving late. To this day, my friends always tease me about how and why I get to airport hours before a flight. It is what my daddy instilled in me.
Daddy’s biggest obsession was education. He truly invested in us the best education. In 1996, I recall as a nine-year-old when he told me that he and I would be leaving for London the next day. He didn’t say why we were going. For the first three days, he took me to three different schools to take entrance exams. I remember being so lost as to why anyone would have to go all the way to England just to take exams. I passed all three and he picked his favourite school of the three. The day my dad dropped me off at the school dormitory, all the other students and their parents were hugging, smiling, and getting settled in.
My case was different, in true daddy style, he said: “Well Ammi, you are here to study and not play. The rules in this country are different, if you fail a single class test or school exam, they will revoke your visa and send you back to Nigeria and as you know, I don’t have space for failures in my house.”
He then patted me on the back and left.
As a little girl in a foreign country, I panicked but also believed him. My mum called the school the next day to check up on me and I cried and told her what he said. It didn’t help matters that I hadn’t understood what they taught me in class that day because I couldn’t understand my teachers’ accents. She reassured me that what he said was not true. Thank God for mothers!
My dad never missed a single parent-teacher meeting. Even when he had daunting schedules as chief executive of a bank, he would take the first flight out of Lagos to arrive in London for those meetings. Upon arrival, he would go to the hall to meet with my teachers. Typical of kids, we would peep into the hall to see which teachers our parents were talking to at the time and whether they looked angry or not.
