A Kanuri woman, Yacilla Zahra Jidda, who happens to be the wife of the Nigerian Ambassador to China, Baba Ahmed Jidda, is using the association which she chairs, the Commonwealth Society of Beijing, to make the needy of China smiles, Abraham Olatunbosun reports.
Yacilla Zahra Jidda is not new to administration. Born Yacilla Zahra Kakami 68 years ago in Maiduguri to Babakura Abba Kakami and Hajja Toma Mustapha, both of blessed memories.
She was the second born in a polygamous family of 14. She attended Yerwa Central Primary School and Yerwa Senior Primary Schools both in the ancient town of Maiduguri before proceeding to Government Secondary School, Potiskum in present day Yobe State in 1966 where she completed her secondary Education in 1970.
Hajja Yacilla was also at Government Secondary School, Maiduguri for the High School Certificate (HSC) which she completed in 1973 and further her study at the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria where she obtained the Bachelor of Science Degree in Economics in 1978 and participated in NYSC scheme in Lagos.
After her NYSC in 1979 Hajja Yacilla established and registered a company, Cactus Nigeria Ltd, and has been successful in her private business coupled with her duty as a mother and wife to a renowned civil servant, Baba Ahmad Jidda who through a dint of hard work and great intellect grew through the rank to Permanent Secretary in Borno State Civil Service.
He was at different time General Manager of Borno Radio and Television and Chairman of Manguno Local Government in his home state. He had an initial short stint in politics was he was elected member of the Nigerian Constitutional Assembly in Abuja and on the completion of his assignment at the Assembly, he transferred his service from Borno State to the Federal Civil Service where he served variously as Director of Finance, Federal Ministry of Solid Minerals, Director of Finance in the Presidency, Director of the National Identity Card Project and Director of National Border Patrol amongst numerous other ad-hoc assignments.
In 1997, he was appointed Secretary to the State Government and Head of Civil Service of Borno State on secondment. Two years later, he voluntarily retired from both State and Federal Civil Service to join politics whence he contested as Borno State Governorship Candidate of People’s Democratic Party in 1999, a seat which he controversially lost but a court decision which gave him victory came rather too late for him to be swore in at the time.
He was appointed Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to the Republic of Burkina-Faso in the year 2000, working shortly as head of Nigeria’s Mission in the West African country and was later appointed as Special Adviser to the President on National Emergency and worked in the State-House.
He later served as a member of the National Political Reform Conference and later again appointed this time under a civilian dispensation as Secretary to Borno State Government where he served for 10 years making him the longest-serving Secretary to the State Government in Nigeria.
He voluntarily resigned the post in the year 2015, and as they say a golden fish has no hiding place, he was appointed in 2017 as Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to the People’s Republic of China where he is currently the Head of Mission.
All through Baba Ahmad Jidda sojourn, the dutiful Yacilla has been by her side picking administrative skills. She is described by her brother, a former Chairman of Borno State Chapter of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Abba Kakami as a discipline type, with leadership qualities even at an earlier age. “She is very close to our father who sometimes consult her before taking certain decisions in the family,” Kakami said.
On Yacilla’s leadership skills and philanthropic, Kakami said: “It in the blood which a characteristic bequeathed to us all by our late father Babakura Abba Kakami and Hajja Toma Mustapha both of blessed memories.
My late father was a grand son of a Princess from the Elkanemi dynasty and was one of the pioneers of the accounting profession in Borno, he attended the Institute of Administration in Zaria which gave birth to ABU where he obtained a diploma in Account and Local Government administration in 1962 with the likes of late Matawalle Kachallah Barko and Maaji Shettima Kukawa among others.
He served as an accountant at various departments at the then Borno Native Authority before joining the Nigerian Army in 1967 where he retired as Major in 1980.
He was subsequently appointed as a Council Chairman with the Maiduguri Metropolitan Council during the Second Republic. He died in 1985 at age 65 while our mother died in 2008.”
Yacilla coming from a rich heritage from the home she was born into and the one she made with Ahmad is now a gift to the Commonwealth Society of Beijing (CSB) and the entire people of China where she has brought her gift of administration, philanthropy and passion for the needy to bear in the last four years.
Yacilla who is gifted with ability to learn and speak languages fast as she did with Yoruba and Chinese which she speaks along with what is perhaps natural with any educated Borno woman, the ability to speak Kanuri, Hausa and English languages and she can also speak Arabic.
She has led Commonwealth of Beijing, which is the society that spouses of ambassadors formed some 29 years ago in Beijing and has been more or less a social group that has grow to embrace charity works, organizing fund raising activities, raising funds which is donated to the needy.
Speaking during the occasion of International Food Fair organized by the association on the activities of the CSB, Yacilla said: “Well the pandemic really disturbed our activities but the greatest things we did was actually for the pandemic because we raised RMB200,000 and we gave it to Wuhan and we were bold enough to come out in the heat of the lockdown to go and donate that money.
So the pandemic has affected our activities, and since that Wuhan occasion we have not been able to publicly come out to organize another. We have done little since like clothes auction and donation, this activity today is the first major one since the pandemic. We have 55 countries as members with Gabon joining last month. The active members are the African members, pacific members, the Caribbean members and the Asian members.
“The vision of the association is to see if we can get registered because the impediment in China to register such an association is really tedious but we are looking for an offshore option. It is to extend our impacts and assistance to our countries because for now we are concentrating mainly in China and China as you might have known has factually eliminated poverty, so they have little need for charity but we are looking at a position we extend this to our individual countries.”
She noted that the last four years as been a mixture of challenges, “I am the only president who has been elected back to back for four years. The achievements I won’t say is much because out of the four years, the two years the pandemic nearly wiped it out. But for the little that I would say we have achieved a lot.”
And on the impacts of the association, she said: “We have been to some provinces, we have been to the School of the Blind, We have been to the School for the Deaf, we have donated to old women home.
“We donated to Wuhan during the COVID-19 pandemic and now we are doing two schools, one school for the deaf in Shandong province another school in far away northern China, in a very poor community to the extent that they don’t have good drinking water. So we are building a water project for them.
And we have another mighty vision which I hope we would realize, to donate book that we want to make into the braille to the school for the blind.”
Surely through Yacilla, the association has impacted in China it’s base but surely the rest of the Commonwealth Nations is waiting to be impacted especially Yacilla hometown Maiduguri in Borno State which has a great need after the ugly humanitarian situation caused by the over a decade old Boko Haram. Who says Charity can never be brought home from abroad.
