Published Tributes

The Death of Mrs Katryn Hauwa Hoomkwap

Author: Mohammed Haruna | Date: 26/03/2008

Few Nigerians may have heard of Power Works Ltd (PWL), a company of which Mrs Kathryn Hawwa Hoomkwap, nee Bala, was a principal shareholder. Kate or Hawwa, as her friends called her, was wife to Senator George Hoomkwap, himself a pioneer editor of the Plateau State-owned Nigerian Standard in its hey days in the early seventies.

Penultimate Sunday, March 16, which was Palm Sunday, Kate died. This was two weeks after she suffered a stroke and two days after she celebrated her 60th birthday on February 28. The stroke resulted into a coma from which she never woke up. Sometime in 2006, I think, Kate sought my help to see a very senior government official whom she believed could help her to solve a serious difficulty her company had run into. PWL had entered into a contract with Ajaokuta Steel Company Ltd (ASCL) to rehabilitate, operate and maintain its existing 110 megawatt power plant. Her company was also to install, operate and maintain an additional 800MW plant for ASCL as well as upgrade its transmission facilities.

Accordingly, PWL took a massive loan from its banks and used part of it to rehabilitate a portion of ASCL’s abandoned housing estate for its local and foreign staff in readiness for work on the power project itself. Then out of the blues, ASCL terminated the contract. The next thing PWL knew, the contract had been re-awarded to an Indian company in which Gbenga, Obasanjo’s now famous – some would say infamous — son was suspected to have an interest.

Somehow, Kate believed the senior government official she wanted to see through me could intercede with the then all-powerful Mr Liyel Imoke, President Olusegun Obasanjo’s trusted minister of energy to either help her company to get back its job or, failing that, get another which would compensate PWL for the work it had already done and the loss of profit it was bound to suffer, something running into hundreds of millions of naira.

Kate did see the government official in question. In turn, the official did all he could to get Imoke to bale out PWL. In the end, nothing came out of his intercession. Before then, Kate had on her own approached President Olusegun Obasanjo whom she had worked closely with going back to 1999 when she was part of the team the late Chief S. B. Awoniyi had formed to put together a blueprint for the country’s development for the then president-elect. She had worked her heart out in the firm belief that the country had at last found the messiah it needed to end its rot. So impressed it seemed was the president-elect with Kate’s dedication that he reportedly asked Chief Awoniyi on more than one occasion to tell her he was considering appointing her the Secretary to the Federal Government.

Chief Awoniyi never believed the president-elect and so he never told Kate, whom he regarded as a favourite daughter, until much later. He didn’t tell her because he had a sneaky suspicion that the old man had designs on her as an ageless and natural black beauty, given the man’s notoriety for sowing wild oats. Whatever may have been the president-elect’s motive, nothing came of his promise. Indeed, as Nigerians have painfully found out since then, nothing came of the Awoniyi blueprint.

Seven odd years later, Kate approached the president, whom she regarded as a father, to intervene and solve her company’s financial predicament, especially given indications that his son, Gbenga, may have been the cause. In the end, her pleas fell on deaf ears because she was unwilling to pay the price the old man demanded of her.

It was against this background that she brought me into the picture of her company’s woes. She and I went a long way back to our Main Campus days at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, in the early seventies. At the time I was among the student radicals, the so-called Bala Brought Ups, named after Dr Yusuf Bala Usman, A.B.U.’s most well-known radical lecturer who died in 2005. Although by no means a hot-head herself, perhaps because she came to the campus already married, she belonged to a small and informal study group that included me, Comfort, younger sister of the late novelist, polemicist and human rights activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and a few other studious types.

Long after we graduated from the university, Kate never let me forget those heady radical days. Until she died, she never called me by my name. Instead, she always teased me by calling me Moja (Movement for Justice in Africa), which was one of the radical student organisations that existed on the campus.

I never understood how she thought anyone else could solve her company’s problem after she failed to get the president himself to do something about it, except, of course, that in her desperation, she seemed prepared to clutch at a straw. In the end, it seemed the straw did not stop her company from drowning.

Kate deserved better than the raw deal she got because of the greed and heartlessness of those in power. She was as brilliant and hardworking as she was beautiful. And perhaps because she came from a family with both Muslims and Christians as brothers and sisters - altogether 19 of them including herself - she never allowed religion to get in the way of her relationships.

Her father, who was originally from Ondo and who was one of the most accomplished police officers in the country before he died, was a Muslim. Her mother from Shendam, Plateau State, is a Christian. Kate herself devoted her life to the Church. As a devout Catholic, she rose to become the president of the Catholic Women’s Association of Nigeria and also of the Catholic Health Association of Nigeria. These attested to her caring nature and leadership qualities.

Her immediate family was as political as any. She once served as a commissioner of health in her native Plateau in the administration of Chief Solomon Lar. But long before then, George, her husband, had been a member of the 1978 Constituent Assembly and, eventually, a senator during the transition regime of military president, General Ibrahim Babangida.

It is one of those bitter ironies of life that Kate died just when help for her beleaguered Power Works Ltd seems on the way gauging from the ongoing House of Representatives investigations into the power crisis in the country.

One of those who must be thinking over the irony of the timing of her death is George. Over 30 years ago, I interviewed him as a young reporter for the New Nigerian. Then, he was a budding politician who in the tradition of great nationalists like Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe had moved from journalism into politics. At that time, he was a member of the Constituent Assembly which fashioned the 1979 Constitution that changed Nigeria from parliamentary democracy into presidential.

I had asked George if he subscribed to the presidential model in the light of the controversy the proposed change had provoked. "I subscribe to it," he said unequivocally. "If", he added, "along with independent judiciary and legislature, you have a free press, things will be alright. At any rate, the wrong use of power is sure to cost any government the next election, that is, if it lasts till the next election."

When George said these words with so much confidence over 30 years ago, he obviously never imagined that the country could produce the monstrous and tyrannical regime of President Obasanjo which, from day one, rode roughshod over the legitimate interests of Nigerians including those of his immediate family with so much impunity, and apparently got away with it.

May the Good Lord give him and the four kids and mother-in-law Kate has left him with the fortitude to bear their great loss.

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