This is an inspection day at Abdulkadir Barau House, of Abdulkadir Barau Primary School Bakori, Katsina State.
The House Mistress is my 1st Lady (No. 2). And the school was renamed after my late Father. It was so named because my late dad was one of the community leaders in the locality. He was the Chairman, Police Community Relations Committee (PCRC); Chairman, Izalatul Bidi'a Wa Iƙamatus Sunnah (JIBWIS), Bakori Local Government Chapters, respectively.
He was a classmate (at elementary level) of the late District Head, Bakori, Makama Tukur Idris and other community leaders like late Tukur Yusuf Ajiya, and late Ahmadu Bakori, a one time Commissioner in the old Kaduna State, as well as Alhaji Abdullahi Abasaya, father to my friend, Kabir Abasaya, Director Programs, Katsina State Radio.
Because my father was the oldest in the class and the brightest, he was made the class monitor and the head boy. I remember late Makama Tukur, at a condolence visit when my father died, told us a story of how they used to refer to my dad as their teacher because whenever there was no teacher available, he was often assigned to teach his classmates.
My dad's brilliance was obvious even to us his children. Whenever we were travelling and I told him the distance to our destination in kilometers, he would convert the distance to miles off head, without using a calculator!
As a teenager, he was often loaned to an Ibo merchant who lived opposite his father's house to act as his manager. The Ibo merchant and my grandfather were both Licensed Buying Agents (LBA) who purchased food and cash crops as well as hides and skin for French and Italian companies such as CFAO and L. Ambrosini etc. The commodities were weighed on scale before packaging and my father, as what they called "scale-boy", took down the measurements from the scale, converted the pounds & ounces into money by using a reckoner (Raskwana in Hausa) - there was no calculator then. A reckoner is a book of tables, more like the four figure table, used to calculate the cost of each ounce. At that tender age, my father had memorized the whole reckoner! Whenever the weight was announced, my dad would instantly name the equivalent amount in Pounds and Shillings without looking at the reckoner! The Ibo merchant would shake his head and say, "There must be something in your head"! 😃
Sorry if I'm boring you, but I get carried away whenever I write about my dad...