Chidi( Black) Kelechi Obinna

Today I mourn and celebrate my friend Lance Corporal Chidi kelechi Obinna who passed on just when his life was about to begin. Like one of those annoying ironies of life, he didn't fall by the expected enemy's bullet but by a seemingly common illness Tonsillitis related complications. I don't even understand what that is.

Chidi popularly referred to as Black by friends because of his generously abundant melanin pigmentation was one of the most focused young people I'd ever met. Back in school, aside from tackling Agricultural Economics in a Federal University of Technology, he was also concurrently running another course -Estate management- in Federal Polytechnic Nekede and he was also a soldier. Take that.

Prior to meeting him, I'd never really thought about soldiers as real people. You know flesh and blood. But he and his friends opened my eyes to another field of life, the joys and perils of it. More of Perils in my opinion. I mean even though a civilian knows he will die someday he can at least live in fantasy land and assume death is faraway not minding incident like a plane crashing into your building on a warm Sunday afternoon... But to an active military personnel, death and pain are constant realities. A friend of his once remarked "pain is your friend, it tells you that you're still in the land of the living". Another said "Everyman has a bullet with his name on it, and it'll find you wherever you are".

 He began his military career as a boy soldier when he was twelve years old  at Nigeria Military School NMS Zaria in 1996 and ever since then, service of motherland has been his life. He was always neat(seems soldiers are averse to dirt), well dressed, courteous with a wicked sense of humour, the definition of humility. Very unflappable. I remember always looking for ways to fluster him until he unwittingly handed me an arsenal. I overheard him asking a female friend of his why girls liked referring to each other as roomies (room mates) and bunkies (bunk mates), he asked her if she'd ever heard a guy say of another "oh he's my bunkie", he basically thought it was so lame and purely girls thing. I decided then to start calling him 'roomie' since he was rooming with my friend but then I thought 'bunkie' sounded more girlie so I took that one. I still recall the laughter of that first time I called him "my bunkie", his expression was priceless. But then he was such a good sport about it and the name stuck, so much so that when I ran into him at ISBN( International Standard Book Number)office in Lagos, I excitedly screamed "bunkie" without thinking. That outburst got us strange stares though. He had a knack for giving people nicknames as well, he used to refer to me as "Scholes" the one time Manchester United player or "madam".  He was fun, sociable and so alive.

Truly "the ground don chop better things"

Rest in peace my bunkie.