‘Jos and death of the Field Marshall’ – A small tribute

Mabo

At dawn of March 13, 2023, the ‘Field Marshall’ died.

The sound of messages bombarding my phone woke me up that morning.

The first came from my former classmate and childhood friend, retired Director-General of the Nigerian Television Authority, and Captain our football and athletics teams in St. Murumba College, Jos, Mallam Yakubu Ibn Mohammed, ‘Planner the Dazzler’, the man who dazzled with his feet as well as his brain whilst we were in school.

With his message came a flood of memories of Jos and of the Field Marshall.

I spent the first 17 years of my life in Jos, undoubtedly one of the most beautiful places on the face of the earth. Anyone that knew Jos before the internecine crisis of 1966 and even into the 1980s, would tell you exactly the same thing – Tin City was the best place to be born, to grow up, to work and to live a life in search of genuine happiness. The city had everything good as sample to offer the world.

Its climate was, and still is, one of the best in the world – cold for 2 months, cool for 2 months, mild for 2 months and warm for the two months preceding the rains, every year. Hail storms of falling ice are not an uncommon occurrence.

Scooped as if with a spoon by some natural cataclysmic occurrence (a meteor or asteroid) in the distant past, Jos ‘sits’ in the resultant trough, a plateau ringed by dark rocky hills, some 2000 feet above sea level. The city and its surrounding villages are an enchanting landscape of rock formations, ravines, valleys, cascading waterfalls from huge boulders, and artificial lakes from old mines.

Around the city could be found some rare earth minerals. That explains why the city was a great attraction for foreigners prospecting for the rich minerals abundant in that