Last week Monday, Professor Shehu Ahmad Jimoh, Chairman of the Governing Council of the Kwara State Polytechnic, Ilorin, died at the age of 70. Shehu Jimoh was also a retired Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Ilorin. His death has robbed Ilorin of an outstanding intellectual and the quintessential community person. I served with Professor Jimoh on the board of the Adisa Bakare Educational Endowmnet Fund, ABEEF, which is a scholarship fund endowed by the late General Abdulkareem Adisa.

From 1998, we have offered scholarships annually to indigent students from Kwara and other Nigerians resident in the state. It has been a very well managed scholarships scheme that has outlived General Adisa and the work has largely been effective because of Shehu Jimoh's commitment, long after many of us located to other cities, away from Ilorin.

Most people, especially the younger generation, probably don't even know that Shehu Jimoh was a pioneering newsreader with us at Radio Nigeria, Ilorin and then Radio Kwara, during the 1970s and 1980s. I fondly remember his high quality microphone voice and the fact that he always arrived from his schedules as a lecturer, to read his news, unfailingly.

He was married to my cousin, and I recall all those early years of their courtship, when he was regularly visiting our family house. It was from those early years that we became close and we kept the mutual respect, till his death. We have lost a very decent man, with the passing of Professor Shehu Ahmad Jimoh. Allah ya jikansa. Amin.