During one of our spirited arguments about the old and the present generations, Pa struggled to keep up with me. That Tuesday morning, he buckled under the weight of my carefully laid arguments. He was as helpless as a fly caught in a spider’s web. He grumbled as he conceded, unwillingly, that every one of his points had been countered. Realising this, Pa spread a sheepish grin across his face, tugged at the stubble on his chin, and ordered me to be silent. But I wouldn’t.
He began, slowly, “You don’t have to celebrate winning a small argument.”
Papa was trying to flatten my win. But I played along. I laughed heartily, ignoring his embarrassed demeanour. This was what Pa did after losing an argument. Feigning ignorance. I excused myself, celebrating my win quietly.
Arguing with my father, a renowned disciplinarian, still felt surreal. Pa’s authority was so firmly established that neighbours often sought his help when their own iron fists failed to tame their unruly children. Every boy in the area knew his name and dared not forget it when tempted by mischief. Pa was a predator of sorts, striking when disobedient children least expected.
Like when he sneaked up on me and other boys playing a local game in our school uniforms. We had been shooting at cashew nuts half-buried in sand, using stones or bigger cashew nuts we called alapomba, pomba, or apomba. That day, Pa sneaked up while we were slingshotting the Pomba and caught us completely off guard. He ordered us to kneel on the untarred ground, where silts ate into our knees, and Kogi’s sun scorched our stubborn heads. His short frame somehow seemed to tower above us. He rebuked us for so long that we braced ourselves for a flogging. But instead, Pa shifted into a lecture about opportunities. He talked about the chances available to us now that his generation never had, and how carelessly we were wasting them.
“Are you not going to school? Instead of Apomba, can’t you people read your books?”
One after the other, he asked if we had a parent paying our school fees, and we all nodded fearfully. He asked me too, and I found it weird telling my father about what he already knew.
“From today, all of you will be thankful for the privilege, did you hear me?”
“Yes, sir!”
“I cannot hear you people.”
“Yes, sir!” we yelled at the top of our voices.
Satisfied, Papa made us swear off our unrewarding shenanigans. We promised, even though we knew we would still default.
Throwing down his sandals, Papa began to recount the golden opportunities he had lost — how he never earned a bachelor’s degree, how his parents couldn’t even afford the fees to complete his primary education. He said the least we owed our visionary parents was excellence and a refusal of waywardness.
As if to drive the lesson home, Pa stepped closer and knocked our heads, one after another. Still unsatisfied, he picked up his sandals and struck our palms, one after the other. Not hard, but hard enough for his words to sink into our blocked ears. We tried not to cry. We tried to honour an unwritten code which banned boys of our age not to cry in public. But we failed. Our eyes flooded.
Pa’s corporal punishments only reduced when I turned 17, or thereabouts. I was in senior secondary school 3 (SS3). Pa stated no clear reason for quitting his beloved community service work, allowing me and other boys to whisper speculations. We, the boys, attributed this laxness in Pa to our puberty. Our chests had become broader, our voices deeper, and hair sprouted from our armpits. We were convinced our growth compelled Pa to stop his corporal punishments. While I was still unsure about the veracity of our conclusion, it didn’t stop me from getting closer to Pa.
It was from this period that Pa leaned towards using argument instead of brute force to discipline young boys.
I remember our first argument. Pa had stumbled on me and other boys playing Jokers under a big tree where adults play draughts. O’levels and UTME exams were almost upon us, but instead of reading, we sat before a pack of cards, fondling them passionately as if Jokers were part of our forthcoming exams.
When Pa saw us, his face was a mixture of emotions. I watched as he seethed, his hands itching to correct our misdoings. But he didn’t spank us. Instead, he came and sat beside us. He gave us a chance to vindicate ourselves. He demanded from us five reasons Jokers should occupy any position in our scale of preference when our exams were a few days away. The other boys were lost for words. Swiftly, as if I had anticipated the situation, I rambled out five plausible reasons. It left him speechless.
One of the reasons I put forward was that probability in mathematics required familiarity with packs of cards to properly understand the concept of randomness and independent events. Pa stared at me for a long time and then puffed a sigh. He stood up and left, nodding his head. Perhaps, he might have heard something similar in his primary school days. He never had the chance to further his education, but he ensured I did.
A week before I gained admission into Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU), Bauchi, Pa had completely stopped any form of disciplinary services, both solicited and unsolicited. I thought it was a parting gift to me until university threw me into a world of contagious unfamiliarity that craved Papa’s disciplinary services.
The university was a world of young people with bold and unusual beliefs and ideologies. The boys there were different from the boys in my neighbourhood. They were more confident and enjoyed more freedom.
They weren’t so different because, just like a guy from the Biochemistry Department, who tinted his hair golden yellow, Lukman had also done the same in our neighbourhood where the great disciplinarian lived. When I saw Lukman’s tinted hair a day before my departure for ATBU to begin the 2020/2021 academic session, I knew Pa won’t ignore such immorality, and it would only be a matter of time before the great disciplinarian would invite him for questioning and some advice.
On campus, there was no such disciplinarian as Pa. The guy with the golden yellow hair rocked his hairstyle for months, peacefully, before he decided to dye it back to black when exams were fast approaching.
It was here in the university that I saw the full blossom of freedom, which many boys from my neighbourhood and I had never experienced. Here, it wasn’t uncommon for boys to do what Pa would condemn. Something like discussing an unrelated topic openly during an ongoing lecture, like cryptocurrency trading, at the back of a lecture venue. Sometimes, I wondered if lecturers intentionally ignored the distractions. If Pa was the lecturer, he would have definitely detected those muffled voices and meted out punishment to the unruly students.
At the university, boys whistled at girls and asked them out. Boys at home did the same, but secretly, often at night when the eyes of fathers couldn’t easily identify the boys’ faces. The fathers of these girls, as strict as Pa, would discipline any boy who appeared to be in a hurry to become a man. But at the university, there was freedom, and parents were always far away, busy with their work. Even if they were near, I feared some wouldn’t mind.
There was another day when we argued about parental negligence. It had rained that day. The sun could hardly peer through the gathered clouds. I was stating my points as usual when Pa noticed a boy, slightly taller than me, whose hands were curled around the waist of a voluptuous girl. The duo were crossing a gushing drainageway that ran through the entire Kuroko community. Pa drew my attention to them as they crossed the drainageway and moved under a shed to await a taxi.
We couldn’t identify them, so Pa called them immoral products of a bizarre civilisation. I argued that Pa might have misconstrued their closeness and that, even if he were right, they could be products of parental negligence. Pa agreed immediately. He then narrated how life had been simpler and more straightforward when he was a boy — how boys of that age dared touch any girl whose parents’ consent they hadn’t sought, how boys of the duo’s age were even afraid of women. I laughed at the dullness of such a time. Of course, behind his back. Before I excused myself.
Pa believed the world had gone berserk — that the moral compass, once steady, now spun without direction. He often declared with certainty that he would do anything to go back to the olden days when uprightness was non-negotiable for everyone. I, too, often wondered how people in that period survived without the present innovations and socialisation patterns.
Once, Pa had narrated the story of him burning candles every night to read his books.
“Are you serious?” I had asked, but got no further explanation.
A few weeks later, I tried using candles to read, and the next day I woke up with catarrh and a body as hot as a smartphone that had been working all day long. Pa had always said phones were a distraction. I didn’t believe him and had argued against his position until I met the “update boys” on campus. I only used my phone to read PDFs of my favourite books, type Word documents, or doom-scroll on social media when bored.
Pa saw only these uses and called phones a distraction. According to him, phones had been inaccessible when he was young, and many students still failed miserably, so phones would surely be a massive constraint to the present generation’s journey toward academic excellence. I smiled when he said this and jokingly told him that if his statement was a ploy to avoid buying me a better phone for university, it wouldn’t work. I told him I would reject ATBU’s offer of admission if he didn’t provide me with a phone that had larger RAM storage. Pa had no choice but to get me a bigger distraction because he would do anything to ensure his children earned the baccalaureate degree he never had.
If Pa had met the updated boys on campus, he would have realised how right or how wrong he was to label phones as distractions. Phones were like double-edged swords in the hands of brave Spartans or Vikings. Boys traded and made fortunes with phones. In my first year, I heard boys discussing crypto trading constantly on campus, bickering about pancake swapping, hoarding assets, airdrops, non-fungible tokens, and more, far more than I ever heard them discuss integration and differentiation, analytical chemistry, thermodynamics, or electronics.
With phones and small capital, they had allegedly made thousands of naira, some even hundreds of thousands, just through learning and trading NFTs and crypto coins. But these boys were often the most distracted in class, and I always wondered if their CGPAs were as impressive as their bank accounts.
So, during the ASUU strike, when I was at home, before the resumption of the 2021/2022 academic session, I took the art of “pressing phone” to another dimension. “Time is of the essence, boy!” Pa’s complaints didn’t deter my newly found addiction. In addition to reading and writing on my phone, I also watched tutorial videos that covered the nitty-gritty of cryptocurrency trading, with the hope of earning my first hundreds of thousands of naira. But I guess crypto wasn’t my thing. Ultimately, Pa let me be and didn’t start any arguments about my new hairstyle. Perhaps my CGPA convinced him of my commitment to academics.
But it wasn’t the same with the other boys in the neighbourhood, especially the defiant ones, who had refused to take the JAMB exam and the ones who hadn’t secured admission into any higher institution. Pa terrorised them, especially Lukman. With his newly tinted brown hair, Lukman would swagger past the great disciplinarian’s house with confidence, in sleeveless jerseys, knickers, and long, multi-coloured socks. Pa would warn him against such nonsensical attire and bizarre dress sense. However, that didn’t stop him from swaggering past Pa’s house the next day, as if daring him to do his worst.
It was funny watching him and Pa play hide-and-seek. But what I found funnier was the urge growing compulsively inside me — the urge to tint my hair blue, deep blue, and wear the hairstyle around the neighbourhood with the same confidence the biochemistry guy had on campus. ♦
Abdulrahaman Adeiza Jimoh is an Ebira-Nigerian writer and a chemical engineering undergraduate at Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, Bauchi. He was second runner-up in the 2025 Chartered Institute of Personnel Management (CIPM-Nigeria) essay competition and won the 2024 Academic Elite of Ebiraland (AEE) writing and PPT presentation contest (both). He was also a finalist in the 2023 Kikwetu Flash Fiction contest and made the shortlist for Abubakar Gimba prize for CNF in 2023. His poems and fictions have been published in international and national literary magazines, including Blue Marble review, Kikwetu East African Journal, SprinNG, Naira Stories Magazine, and elsewhere.
