Two Years Without Baba: Parents Are Always Right

The Year was 2005. At Therbow Secondary School, Zaria, a tense quiet hung over the classrooms. We had just completed our junior class examinations, the critical hurdle before entering Senior Secondary School. In those days, the school operated a rigid, almost mathematical system of destiny-sorting: internal examination scores determined your future. High marks punched your ticket to the Science class; average or medium scores routed you to the Arts. Of course, this didn’t mean the Art students lacked brains, in fact, some of the most brilliant minds I knew sat firmly in the Arts. But the system had a mind of its own.

When the final lists were pinned to the board, there it was: my name was firmly stamped under the Science class.

While others celebrated, my heart sank. All through the grueling exam week, I had prayed fervently for the Arts. My lifetime ambition was to become a lawyer, a dream that required words, logic, and rhetoric not equations. To make matters worse, I detested mathematics with a passion that bordered on the spiritual.

Yes, I wanted to be a lawyer, but I also wanted to be in the Art class so badly because most of my closest friends were there. I guess peer pressure and the desire to stay with my circle also heavily influenced my insistence. Naturally, growing up, whatever Baba decided was always the marching order for me, his word was law. But this was the one time I chose to stand my ground.

Then came the hard part: breaking the news to Baba, my father. Baba had always been a man with a vision, and in his blueprint for my life, I was to be an engineer. To him, mathematics wasn’t just a subject; it was a foundational virtue. The moment Senior Secondary School resumed, Baba instituted a strict regime of academic drills. While my friends were outside gisting, laughing, and enjoying their morning and afternoon breaks, I was chained to a desk for extra math and English lessons.

Naturally, I rebelled. I became a master at dodging the lesson teachers. My avoidance tactics grew so desperate that my frustrated tutors (Mrs. Uwaloka & Ms. Thersy) eventually offered free lessons to my friend, Mohammed Zubairu (Utaka), just so Utaka’s presence would lure me out of hiding.

Finally, I gathered the courage to confront Baba’s engineering blueprint. “I want to be a lawyer, not an engineer,” I told him flatly.

Baba didn’t flinch. With the calm authority of a man who had surveyed the horizon, he looked at me and insisted that the world was changing rapidly; engineering and technology were the undeniable future. But I was young, stubborn, and utterly adamant.

Seeing that my heels were dug deep into the earth, Baba did something unexpected. Rather than forcing me, he decided to let the system speak for itself. He sent my stepmother to the school to formally request my transfer from the elite Science stream to the Arts.

When she arrived at the administration office, the principal looked at her as though she had asked for the moon. The request was entirely strange. The waiting room was packed with frantic parents doing everything in their power to beg school authorities to move their children from the Arts into the Sciences. And here we were, marching in the exact opposite direction.

And so, the impossible bureaucracy bowed to my youthful stubbornness. I was officially moved from the Science stream to the Art class. At the time, I walked into that classroom with my head held high, convinced I had won a monumental battle for my destiny. The rest, as the old saying goes, was history.

But destiny has a mischievous sense of humor.

When the university admission list finally came out, the ultimate irony unfolded. I did not get to study Law. The lifetime ambition that I had fought so fiercely for, the very reason I fled from mathematics, eluded me. Instead, the university offered me a completely different course, and four years later, I walked across the graduation stage with a Bachelor of Arts. I had run away from Baba’s engineering blueprint, only to end up missing my own legal target as well.

Today, decades after that showdown in Zaria, I find myself in a workplace that is 60% to 70% purely technical. It is an environment where algorithms, infrastructure, and engineering metrics form the daily vocabulary. And every so often, sitting in high-level meetings, a sudden wave of memory hits me, accompanied by a quiet, nagging question: What if?

I look around the table, sitting amid brilliant engineers, and find myself largely quiet when the technical mechanics are being stripped bare. Because I lack the technical know-how Baba so desperately wanted me to acquire, I cannot build or engineer the solutions. I can only contribute based on what I have read and painstakingly tried to understand. Granted, when the conversation shifts to the policy and administrative side, an area I know inside out, I excel and find my footing. But deep down, a part of me always wishes I possessed that technical edge too. I realize now that Baba wasn’t trying to stifle my creativity; he was trying to shield me from the quiet helplessness of a non-technical man in a digital age.

Baba did his absolute best for us. He saw a future that my teenage eyes could not possibly comprehend from behind a desk at Therbow school.. He was right all along.

Looking back now, years later, I finally see what Baba saw from his mountain of experience. The world did indeed change, just as he predicted. Technology and engineering became the language of the modern world. In my stubborn youth, I thought I was fighting for my dream, but Baba was trying to arm me for the future. I learned the hard way that when the dust of youth settles, you realize one universal truth: parents are always right.

However, I still personally went ahead and encouraged my three younger siblings to pursue Law. I wanted them to achieve the dream that slipped through my fingers. Today, Iliya is a practicing lawyer. We tragically lost Aisha (Maama) when she was on the very verge of becoming a lawyer, a loss that still breaks our hearts. And today, Husnah is on her path and will soon become a lawyer too, Insha Allah. Ironically, our last born chose a different route altogether and went on to study the exact field of Engineering that Baba had so desperately wanted for me. In the end, his dreams for us found their way. I hope Baba is looking down and feeling incredibly proud.

Baba did his absolute best for us. He was everything to us, our rock, our guide, our guardian angel. I miss him every single day. Truly, there is no day, no time, and no moment that passes without him in my thoughts. Just as Baba never missed a single prayer without invoking blessings for his own parents, it is the same for him in my heart, Insha Allah. I pray that he is as proud of us today as we have always been profoundly proud of him.

May Allah (SWT) forgive his shortcomings, accept his good deeds, and continue to grant him eternal rest in Aljannah Firdaus. Till we meet to part no more, Insha Allah. Ameen.

Umar YD. Musa wrote from Zaria