Mouftahu Baba-Ahmed and my father: A tribute by Abdulhamid Al-Gazali

BY ABDULHAMID AL-GAZALI, SEPTEMBER 23, 2025 | 05:23 AM

The death few days ago of Mouftahu Baba-Ahmed, one of my father’s and boss’ closest Nigerians, was devastating to me, if somehow consoling. It made me imagine how my father would have reacted to the news of his passing, as Baba Mouftah actually did when I broke the news of his (my father’s) passing in 2014. To say Baba Mouftah was rudely devastated by it was an understatement.

However, his passing was consoling because he has returned to His Maker, to whom he had always remained submissive, and has thus also reunited with his loved ones, his dad Mal. Baba Ahmed and my father, one of the people he was extremely fond and proud of.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been in touch with him since 2017. It was the reason the news of his passing, which only reached me 24 hours later, leaves me shattered and thoroughly disappointed in myself. I am. Mouftahu did not deserve that, at least from me.

Though I believe they met much later in life, there were actually few people who were as passionate in their admiration, affection and loyalty to my father as he was. Truly few.

At a point, Mouftahu was almost my father’s only access point to the things happening in the country. He made sure he sent across every vital article, news report, policy document or even just a rumor, which I had always received and printed out for his attention. On top of this, he often called and held long conversations over the phone. A few times, Late Mouftahu would request his opinion on some issues, even to the point of persuading him to get them published.

In 2012 when Wole Soyinka propounded some pseudoscience and ‘paraded’ it as some out-of-the-world theory to explain the Boko Haram crisis—which was of course nothing but his helpless outpouring of Islamophobic outbursts—Mouftahu persuaded him to respond and he did with a 5-paragraph rejoinder. I took the dictation and sent it across to Baba Mouftahu. It was immediately widely circulated online.

A part of the rejoinder is still in my mind. It described Soyinka’s piece as a blessing in disguise as it had helped to unravel him. First of all, of his article, in one week, Mahmud Jega responded and said Soyinka thinks he knows; Late Sam said he doesn’t know; Mohammad Haruna said he was peddling rubbish and Adamu Adamu capped it all by saying he could never even know.

Prof. M. N. Alkali on his part added that the Soyinka thesis had lifted the lid on him and showed that ‘the man who likes to come across as a giant of a man, was in fact a little thin man who was also fast degenerating.’

That dangerous thesis, which seeks to say that Boko Haram was an extension of, or a problem of, or even, more plainly, a creation of the so-called northern hegemony, was thrown out to the dogs after those fierce rebuttals; and that, for the country’s good. Otherwise, the islamophobic, anti-North and truth-phobic narrative the pseudoscience sought to fuel would have badly impacted the country’s political stability. Given the outlook of the four pieces, I was always tempted to believe that Mouftahu may have been the one who persuaded all of them to respond to the Nobel Laureate.

Baba Mouftahu had one of widest networks in Nigeria; and whether he had realized it or not, he could at a point, and may be until his death, do and undo a lot of things across the country. I was part of a powerful think tank he had built out of this network. It primarily operated as an email listserv, named the Nigeria Collective. It has all of the country’s who is who; and as a think tank, it’s more elaborate in diversity and spread than the much touted or even demonised Kaduna Mafia; as sharper in intellect as the U.S Deep State or the UK based Old Boys Network.

Until I lost access to the forum due to an unceremonious loss of devices, it was the country’s most intellectually endowed platform of its kind and size I have known to date.

It was for this reason that he was the first person I had informed of my father’s death after family members. Within seconds, Baba Mouftah got the message out even though he was instantly devastated by it outright.

But he didn’t stop there. He told me he would reach out to those who had related with my father to ask if there were debts. ‘Even though he’s not one to easily incur debts, it is our duty and an act of final respects and love to him to find out,’ he told me.

He did and got back to me the next day ahead of the funeral. He asked me to inform the elders that he had done the inquiry and that there wasn’t any. For me, there can’t be a love greater than this. He truly loved him. And despite the age difference of about 16 years, my father loved him truly too as a younger brother and friend. In fact, through this friendship, Dr. Hakeem, Mal. Nafiu and Datti, all Mouftahu’s siblings, became known to him too and became his brothers.

My father was fond of their dad, Late Baba Ahmed, too. A scholar of an unquestionable verity, the Zaria-based polymath’s widely attested uprightness, honor and dignity was of his own father’s kind. As such, it was not difficult for him to see another father in him. Like the Late Baba Ahmed, his own father and my grandfather, Qadi Shettima Ali, was a true heir of the Kanem-Borno scholarship tradition, and by extension of the wider Sudanese, or even the worldwide Islamic intellectual tradition.

As we mourn what is truly a huge loss, we must remember that for him it is a reunion with loved ones, a much deserved rest after an eventful life of true service to mankind, and definitely a return home, to his real source and to Allah, who was Miftahul Khair’s only obvious preoccupation while alive. May Allah grant all of us the fortitude to bear the huge loss and him, a mellifluous entry into Allah’s highest paradise, the Jannatul Firdaus.