Gbenga Agbana: It is hard to say goodbye
How do you say goodbye to a jolly friend who suddenly departs without even a word? Shock! Disbelief! Anger! That was the trauma we didn’t bargain for when the news hit town early Wednesday, March 7, 2011 of the sudden death of Mr Gbenga Agbana, the president of the Capital Market Correspondents Association of Nigeria (CAMCAN) and one of the finest financial journalists the nation has ever produced.Grief tore through my heart as I engaged the harbinger of the sad news thus:“Was he sick? Or was it an accident?” “No! I learnt he died in his sleep in the wee hours of Wednesday after complaining of a chest pain. Even he went to work on Tuesday.” "G-O-D!” I yelled. A deathly hush fell on the conversation. God! another green tree has fallen where deadwood is standing aloft!Throughout that day,I was benumbed by an eerie void that won’t cease flashing images of colleagues recently felled by death. Their apparitions kept tossing up and down in my brain: Ben Ukwuoma, 50, the acting News Editor of The Guardian.He died in February. He used to be my senior Colleague while on the Health beat. Lanre Oloyi, 51, a former colleague of Agbana at The Guardian who later moved over to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as the Head of Media.He was also a victim of sudden death on September 3, 2011. Bukola Ore, a Capital Market correspondent of TV Continental who succumbed to the cold hands of death in June 2011. Emma Okenyi, the Capital Market correspondent of The Observer Newspapers and a member of CAMCAN executive. He was killed in an accident on December 2, 2010,incidentally, the day he clocked 40. His death was particularly painful because he was burnt beyond recognition with his younger brother in the ensuing inferno after a petrol tanker rammed onto their bus and exploded into a huge ball of flame at Fin Niger Bus Stop, in between Iyana Iba and Mile 2 area of Lagos. And now Agbana, 45. O death! How many more people wilt thou kill before thy end? A cold shiver ran down my spine as I bowed in grief.
Wake-keep
Later that day, I went to sign a condolence register on his Facebook.I had penned: “ Gbenga, my Chairman, your death is a nightmare to me.” Little did I know that that nightmare would haunt me the third night, that was Friday, after his wake-keep held during the day.The ceremony had started shortly before I got to the Butterfly Estate, the Ikorodu residence of the deceased, venue of the event. Exhortation was going on. After that, Bible reading. Then came the critical moment: Hymn 963:Jerusalemu t’orun(Jerusalem on High).The doleful rendition of this dirge was so heart-rending that everybody was moved to tears. And for the first time in my adult life, I wept and wept until tears almost flushed my eyes out of their sockets. I afterwards fell into sober reflection on the whole essence of life.The ceremony moved on. It was the “testimony” time, which turned out to be emotional outpouring of tribute. As this was going on, all of a sudden, Hymn 963 intruded on my solemn mood. It punctured my thoughts and played and replayed itself in a never-ending loop until it got stuck in my head as an earworm.Paying tribute to the life of Gbenga Agbana, Mrs Bimbo Oyetunde, the Vice Chairman of Finance Correspondents Association of Nigeria(FICAN) described him as the man who made us laugh. “He always looked at how he could turn every situation into humour so as to make us laugh,” she said. This is a fact, going by my experiences: Agbana had taken a long hard look at me one day at the Nigerian Stock Exchange building and adjudged me to be too serious. Since then, whatever I did or failed to do became the butt of his joke. I can’t forget the last one on December 5, 2011, at the CAMCAN Workshop in Ijebu Ode, Ogun State, which sadly turned out to be his last. After taking his usual long hard look at me, he blurted out in his trademark baritone voice: “Baba! Baba niyen! By now you must be the oldest man in your company”. “Why?” I queried. “Am I older than my editor?” “Ah! Yes! You can be older than your editor. Don’t you see that you are completely grey now. And only the old people have grey hair.” That was vintage Agbana for you. To Mr. Kehinde Adeaga, the Secretary of CAMCAN, Gbenga paid the supreme sacrifice for what I comprehended as the stress of the journalism. It is a fact. Come rain, come sunshine, journalism is stressful: deadline must be met, your page must come out. I know of a senior colleague who had to come to office to produce his page the day he lost his 12-year old son.Oh! What a job! Perhaps, that partly explains Agbana’s joke of my going grey. As for him, He had to spend several hours everyday crawling in a never-ending Ikorodu ‘go-slow’, to and from work. Wasn’t that stressful?
Nightmare
As I left the wake-keep, Jerusalemu t’orun followed me home. In the night, as if it accompanied the deceased’s ghost, it came with drums, violin and cymbals which violently clashed in my head, I jerked awake. I was scared. I quickly groped for my wife, her place was empty on the bed .Oh, she had gone for vigil,I then remembered .I had to face the ghostly night alone. I tossed and turned and rolled only to be stopped by reflection on the life and times of Agbana: his generosity, his kind words, his fun-loving life , his knack for wringing laughs out of what could have been a broad stereotype and his trademark guffaw. Maybe we would not have lost this humour merchant to sudden death if routine check-up has been part of our lives. Only God knows. Adieu Gbenga Agbana.
