I cannot forget in a hurry the day we were involved in an accident with that same Beetle car. That was back in Makurdi. James was at the wheel. We were five in that small car. I was in the back seat between Omale and Cephas. Alex, I think, was in the front passenger seat. We were driving from the General Hospital end of the road down Kwararafa Quarters towards Government House when a lorry carrying a load of sand suddenly turned into the main road, just ahead of us. Instinctively, James swerved out of the way to avoid colliding with the tipper.
Our vehicle tumbled once, twice, and a third time before coming to a stop on all four tyres. People rushed toward the scene of the accident in great alarm, and were surprised to see all five of us step out of the car unhurt. I was so shaken by the miracle of that escape that I published a full page article in the Benue State newspaper the following week entitled, “The Driver Next Lane is Crazy”.
But I was telling you about Lagos. James and I left Newswatch virtually at the same time when the fortunes of the company began to dip and staff were laid off. We both joined Eben Dokubo at PWD, Sogunle, where Eben was trying to re-launch a news magazine called Banner. There were a lot of machines in that press, but we didn’t get to hear their sound for one day until we left. We wrote many stories that never got into print, but I was grateful for meeting two brilliant journalists there, Niji Akanni and Amos Esele.
Many years later, when I was appointed Speech Writer to the Governor of Bayelsa State, James came over to stay with me in Yenagoa for a few days. I was set to buy my wife her first car, and James offered to go on the errand across the Seme border in his capacity as an authentic car dealer. The car, a diminutive white Corolla hatch-back, was one in town when it arrived Yenagoa. One of my fondest memories of it was the day I drove like Michael Schumacher in the Governor’s speedy convoy for the first time, all the way from Port Harcourt Airport to Creek Haven, Yenagoa. I felt the exhilaration of winning a motor race that day, and all the while, I told myself that James had bought a very good car.
James visited Bayelsa a few more times, and stayed for longer stretches. I was touched the day James and our mutual friend, Omale Orokpo, offered to know my hometown. They had heard so much about Nembe, and since they had come so far down the coast, they might as well set foot on Nembe soil. There was no motorable road to speak of then. We did the trip by boat from Yenagoa waterside, meandering through the creeks in the descending dark, to Nembe. As far as I know, they could not swim, but if people were boarding a boat, they resolved to do the same. They wore no life jackets, and the two Idoma boys confessed that it was their very first trip in the winding creeks of the Niger Delta to the ancient city-state of their bosom friend.
I was touched by the gesture, and I counted them as being amongst my best friends from that day. Needless to say, they both had a lot to recount about that historic trip. It opened their eyes, for the first time, to the hard realities of life in the beleaguered swamp of the Niger Delta region. They saw fishing ports with a few thatch houses, and canoes bobbing at the waterfront, tethered to idle sticks stuck in the mud. They saw naked children diving in and swimming out in the polluted water, and generally feeling funky about it all. In Nembe itself, I did my best to make my friends feel at home.
After that, I did not get to see James again for a long time, till I left for England. One of my most memorable days in the United Kingdom was the day I received a call out of the blue to the effect that James had just arrived London. The call came at a time when I was at the lowest ebb of my stay in Her Majesty’s domain. I was alone and lonely, depressed over the circumstances that led to my flight from Nigeria. I was on self-exile over the troubles caused by a book from my pen. In the silence of my bedsitter in West Hampstead, I felt as if I was in a tomb. I was beginning to wonder if at all I was still alive, if I still had family and friends in the real world, and if God still had my back in my rebellious confrontation with the excesses of society.
It was as if God felt my melancholy at close range and wanted to prove a point to me. He wanted to get me to laugh again. And guess the fellow God sent to make me laugh with all those fresh ideas? James Abel Uloko, no less, the selfsame guy I first met at Grassroot Communications, Makurdi, Benue State. He met me there as the principal staff writer at Strategy magazine. His story on the 14th delegates conference of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) had occupied two pages in our one and only edition. I remember him talking with apparent excitement about his meeting with Sani Zorro, President of the NUJ at the time.
As I was saying, James was the first friend who gave me sleeping space in Lagos when I returned to the city of my youth many years later. We lived in two rooms at the ground floor of a big storey building in the far-out surburb of Abule-Egba. He had been employed a few months before me at Newswatch. I was with James for the better part of six months, long before his young family arrived. I left soon afterwards, taking a room not far from my friend’s abode. I remain grateful to Ladi for being such a tolerant wife, and to their children Jennifer and Maxwell for all the laughter they provided me.
Jennifer was a loveable and adorable baby girl, and all the neighbourhood knew her to be so. But I got greater entertainment from watching Maxwell, the first son of my friend, do what I came to call the belly dance. Max was still a baby boy with an ambition to walk one day. At the time in question, he could only sit on his baby bum. But whenever music sounded in the vicinity, whenever there was a danceable vibration in the air, Max could depend on his naked tummy to do the dancing, so that as he sat on that floor, he looked as though a big football was pumping up and down right there in his belly. Maxi Bum was the only one with a straight face in all this performance. Everyone else would go into tittering stitches.
I was glad to know many years later that James had a younger brother by that selfsame name, Maxwell. Out of fond admiration for his immediate younger brother, James had called his first son by that name. When I met him, Maxwell senior had the carriage of a senator. He had chubby cheeks, freckles on them, pink lips, and a dimple in the chin. Sunglasses over his eyes, Max saw the world through a photochromic vision. He had a smooth way of talking, and conversation came easy to him. To hear Max laugh out loud is to know that he had been tickled to the inner marrows of his ribs. Otherwise, he was a cool, self-possessed and calculating mind with a definite idea about what to do next.
Maxwell, the senior had a taste for cars, and he believed in the wisdom of maintaining a car well, even if it’s the only one in the garage. Not surprisingly, his car was as clean outside as it was comfortable inside, and a welcome selection of music oozed out from the speakers with every waft of cool air from the many vents of the interior.
In the days when I served as Speech Writer to the Governor of Bayelsa State, I was on the look-out for a good car to buy as a birthday present to myself. I was on official trip to Lagos, and our accommodation was just overlooking the famous 1004 complex on Victoria Island where Maxwell had an official quarters courtesy of his office, NTA, Lagos, where he worked in an administrative capacity. Maxwell and I caught up swiftly, and he picked me up in this metallic blue Mercedez Benz 190 with fluffy seats.
He had taken me on a cruise around Victoria Island and Ikoyi, with a memorable evening stop-over at Bar Beach. I remember that outing in particular because, other than the boisterous conversation by the side of the Atlantic waters over a few green bottles, liquid contents only, I was struck by the smooth ride in that car, and said something to the effect that it was just the kind of car I would like to buy. Maxwell said he was actually at the point of selling it off at a reasonable price to any ready buyer. Eyeball to eyeball, we promptly settled on that price without further haggling, and that Benz became mine. Its distinctive metallic blue colour set it apart from every other Mercedez Benz when it rode with majestic assurance along the roads of Yenagoa.
Now, here was I in London, virtually under the weather, and James was a member of a government delegation on his very first trip to London, and he would be staying for about a week. I left my lonely hovel in West Hampstead, and spent the whole day with my good old friend, laughing all over England. I laughed so hard that I passed the night in James’ hotel, munching, drinking, and simply talking the world to tatters. We had picked up a few books along the way, and couldn’t stop talking about characters from VS Naipaul and, especially, Samuel Selvon’s Lonely Londoners.
We were already familiar with the adventures of Dumboy, Sir Galahad, Moses, and Captain in my single room at Abule-Egba, Lagos. Here we were in London, and we had good reason to look out for the famous landmarks we had read so much about. Till this day, James does not know that God sent him to bring me relief in London when I came so close to a sinister point of acute dejection in my life.
As if that was not enough, I was still ensconced in London when James returned a second time a few months later, and stayed with his cousin at Essex. I simply moved over and stayed with them for the next three days, until I felt colour and assurance return to my everyday life.
I was still at Essex when another welcome bit of news came to my ears. God was really bent on cheering me up. This time, my own younger brother, Fakuma, was coming to London, and he didn’t want me to know. I whispered the fact of the matter to James, and we both boarded a train on the appointed day, and rode all the way to Heathrow Airport in the English cold.
That was Fakuma’s first trip to London, and he had no idea that I would be at the airport to receive him. Our mother had called me from Nigeria to say he was on his way. I could hear in her voice the concern for her second son, and I assured her that all would be well. He would arrive safely, and I would be the first to tell her. It was a long wait, but James and I had a lot to see. All around us was the swirl of civilised humanity, and the vast interior of Heathrow airport glowed with the light that powers it all day long, all night long. The hum of conversation was ceaseless. James had countless ideas about how to improve Nigeria, just by looking at the sheer magnificence around him. Wherever he turned, a brilliant idea was staring at him.
At last, the plane from Nigeria landed safely. We turned attention to the bright tunnel of the arrival hall, and the mass of passengers trooping out of it. Around us, many hands raised placards bearing the names of people they were expecting to receive. We had no placards to carry. I could only wonder at God’s infinite imagination, merely looking at just how different one human face was from the other, without regard to race.
And then, from among the lot of faces, I picked out my brother as he turned the corner, and joined the march into the open lobby of the waiting area, dragging his suitcase with him. James and I walked up to a vantage point where he could see us. I called out to my brother. He turned, saw me, and a big smile of surprise broke out on his face. I called my mother right away to tell her he had arrived.
Fakuma had already made his travel arrangements to the letter. We picked a cab from the airport, and rode into the easy flow of the London traffic. James dropped off at the train station closest to his next stop, and my brother and I headed towards The Marriot Hotel, Maida Vale, where he would stay for a few days before leaving for Manchester. I was glad when James was appointed as Special Adviser on Media and Orientation to Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State. It came as a cheering piece of news. I could bet that the Benue State government was set to benefit from a truly resourceful man of ideas, and I would be the first friend of Benue to testify to that.
I’m even happier to know that President Bola Tinubu recently appointed James Abel Uloko as the Executive Director (Corporate Affairs) of the North Central Development Commission, the Middle Belt equivalent of the Niger Delta Development Commission.
