When Fatima Abubakar Hassan was divorced by her first husband, her first fiancé, Ibrahim Musa believed fate had thrown him a second chance to spend a lifetime with her after poverty forced him to give her up the first time in 2014.
That time, Fatima had followed Ibrahim’s advice and opened her heart to another lover, who married her and fathered her two children before their divorce a while back.
When Ibrahim returned with a second proposal, this time to be his second wife, Fatima did not hesitate to say yes. Again.
March 27 would have been their wedding day. By March 21, they had already conducted the premarital screening to determine their HIV Status and to shop for her new life, Fatima went with her brother, Mas’ud Abubakar Hassan.
“On March 21, Fatima and I went to a furniture showroom to choose her furniture and buy other necessities for the marriage,” he said. “We returned home but I later left her for town to meet up some engagements.
I later received a call that my attention was urgently needed at home, that all was not well with Fatima.” Worried and left guessing, Mas’ud had rushed home and enquired what could have been so urgent that he was called back.
When they told him that Fatima, with whom he had been shopping a few hours before, was gone for good, Mas’ud was stumped. A sister of Fatima, who had witnessed the incident,said Fatima had been doing the dishes in the compound and when she wanted to stand up, had grabbed a satellite dish pole in the compound for support.
She was instantly electrocuted. Apparently, before the incident, the area had experienced a four-day power outage occasioned by disputes between the power distribution company and some youths in the area.
After the disagreement was resolved, power was restored to the area much to the delight of residents.
What Fatima and her family did not know then however was that a high-tension cable had broken during the outage and fallen on their roof, which somehow connected to the dish and the pole that Fatima would grab.
“I met her lying on the ground,” Mas’ud said. “She looked lifeless but I decided to take her to a nearby hospital where she was confirmed dead. I then took the corpse home where funeral prayers were observed according to Islamic rites.”
“When news of her death reached me, I burst into tears,” Ibrahim, Fatima’s fiancé said. “I was speechless.” Three days after her death, he needed IVR drips to regain his vigour.
And weeks after the incident, he is still distraught by her passing.
“Her death has taken me into deep despair,” he said. “I always shed tears anytime I think of her because we both loved each other. If not for death, we wouldn’t have been spending our lives together.”
Ibrahim recalled the times he would spend hours on the phone with Fatima and how she would always want to stay on the phone longer. On March 20, a day before she died, Ibrahim recalled they were on the phone for two hours and she had shared her excitement about attending a naming ceremony of a child who was her namesake.
“Before attending the naming ceremony, she informed me via phone of her desire to attend and equally notified me on her return from the event,” he said. Ibrahim said they always kept each other abreast with their daily activities and that day was no different.
Their love had a history that stretched several years and two engagements. “Upon our meeting in 2014, she accepted to marry me. I tried all I could to secure money for the marriage with late Fatima but was unsuccessful.
I then opened up to her and advised her to marry whoever she found and so she got married,” he said. Fatima had two children, one of which is already five and the youngest still a toddler.
Ibrahim would also go ahead and marry but the moment he learned that Fatima was available, he made his move. “When I learned that Fatima’s first marriage had ended, I just felt that if she would accept me I will be happy to marry her as a second wife,” he said.
“On getting to her parents’ house, she accepted me wholeheartedly knowing fully well that she was going to be a second wife and so we rebuilt the relationship to the level that we agreed to stay together and thereby fixed a date for our wedding.”
He felt that his first wife was not opposed to the marriage after he had convinced her that he had no plans to mistreat her or to end their marriage because of his marriage to Fatima.
“I am very sure that based on many discussions I had with her, deep inside her, she (my first wife) had made up her mind to live peacefully with both Fatima and me,” he said. He said Fatima and his wife had already established a good relationship and they spoke on the phone.
“That is why my first wife is disturbed by the news of Fatima’s death. She cried so much that I couldn’t control her emotions,” Ibrahim said. Fatima was someone who was always keen on his advice and was a caring and respectful person.
Three weeks after her death, it is clear neither Ibrahim, nor Mas’ud, her brother, have got over Fatima’s death and there is no saying how her two young children are coping with the loss. “Her love will continue to linger in my memory. That is certain,” a heartbroken Ibrahim said.