The new book titled A JOURNEY Is Service which is the autobiography of former Military President, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida has revealed a lot of things about his life. One of it is how IBB adopted Babangida his surname in 1964.
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According to IBB, “I was born in Minna on Sunday, August 17, 1941, when my father, Malam Muhammadu Badamasi, lived there. My father moved to Minna in 1941 from Wishishi, where he and his siblings were born.” IBB’s grandfather bore the name Malam Ibrahim. …CONTINUE READING
IBB didn’t know his grandfather because he had passed away before he was born. He was said to have been a prominent Muslim cleric who made Wushishi his home in the latter part of the 19th century.
That wasn’t his original surname. His surname was Badamosi.
IBB’s father, Muhammadu Badamasi & his siblings were all raised in Wushishi. It was IBB’s grandfather that named him Badamasi after a particular religious book that he consulted regularly “My grandfather was so fond of the book that he decided to name his 2nd child after it. And that was how the name Badamasi came into our lineage!”
He had his primary schools in Minna. He went to a school once known as the Gwari Federation Primary School but the British Colonial authorities renamed it the Gwari Native Authority Primary School.That was the school’s name when IBB arrived there in 1950. The school was renamed Minna Elementary School.
From there, he moved to a Provincial Secondary School, Bida which today is called Government College, Bida. He arrived there in 1957 at the age of 16. That was the school that transformed his life, when he arrived on his first day at Bida, he still had the name Ibrahim Badamasi.
It was from that school that he left for the Nigerian Military Training College, Kaduna. On April 20, 1963, he passed out of NMTC and from there he took off to India for the 2nd half of his training at the Indian Military Academy, Dehradun. He returned to Nigeria from India in January 1964 as 2nd Lt. Ibrahim Badamasi.
According to IBB, what led him to add, Babangida to his name was because many officers felt he was Yoruba going by his surname Badamasi.”
“A particular incident led me to add Babangida to my name. During official engagements that led to my deployment to Kaduna, Officers who confused the Yoruba name, Gbadamosi with my last name, Badamasi repeatedly asked me whether I was Yoruba. That question had also come up a few years before, during my enlisting interview for the military. Since that question persisted (and since I knew I wasn’t Yoruba), I decided to take on my father’s other name.
-Citypeople
