Ibrahim Kaula Mohammed.
There is an old saying among sailors that a ship does not creak the loudest on the day it finally comes to rest at the harbour; it simply glides in, quietly, having done its work in service of those it carried.
That image came to mind on 19 August 2026, when members of the Nigeria Customs Service Management Team gathered at the Service Headquarters in Maitama, Abuja, not for a routine meeting, but to watch one of their own, a true patriot in every sense, take a final, well-earned bow.
After 35 years of meritorious service, Deputy Comptroller-General Ahmed Tijani Abe, until then in charge of Human Resource and Development, was stepping away, and the room, by all accounts, felt the weight of the moment.
It takes a certain kind of career to draw an entire management team to its feet, and DCG Abe’s evidently was that kind.
Comptroller-General of Customs, Adewale Adeniyi, who led the tributes, did not reach for grand titles or superlatives to describe him. Instead, he spoke of faith, of calm under pressure, and of an integrity that never wavered, the sort of quiet consistency that outlasts trends and outshines louder résumés.
The CGC also pointed to something deceptively simple: DCG Abe’s habit of saying thank you. In an institution where rank often speaks first and gratitude comes as an afterthought, this small but telling trait, the CGC noted, spoke volumes about the character of the man.
“You are a man of integrity, and integrity pays,” Adeniyi told him. “May God increase you in wisdom and happiness, and may your years ahead be even more pleasurable. We are all very proud of you, and we wish you well.” He was quick to add, and rightly so, that the bonds built within the Service do not simply dissolve the moment a badge is handed in.
If the Comptroller-General set the tone, the senior officers who followed painted the fuller portrait, and theirs was a chorus rather than a solo. One after another, they described a leader whose authority never needed the crutch of rank to be felt. Courage, humility, sacrifice, kindness, these words surfaced again and again, not as scripted tributes but as lived observations from people who had watched him operate up close, through easy seasons and difficult ones alike.
For many in that room, DCG Abe was not only a colleague who happened to outrank them; he was a mentor in the truest sense, the kind whose example does the teaching long before any lesson is spoken aloud. It is often said that character is what you do when no one is watching, and by the weight of testimony that filled that hall, I can confidently affirm DCG Abe had been consistent long before the cameras and closing remarks arrived.
True to the man they had just finished describing, DCG Tijani Abe received the tributes with the same grace that had apparently defined his three and a half decades in service. He did not linger on himself. He thanked God first, then the Comptroller-General, and finally the colleagues who had walked the journey with him, expressing genuine gratitude for a trust that had been extended to him for thirty-five unbroken years. It was a fitting close, humble in tone, generous in spirit, and entirely consistent with the reputation the room had just spent an afternoon celebrating.
From all indications, I was clear to say, DCG Tijani Abe leaves behind more than a vacant office; he leaves a standard, a template of patriotism that money cannot buy and rank cannot confer. For a nation like ours, where citizens are often quick to lament the scarcity of dutiful hands, DCG Tijani thirty-five years stand as a firm, reassuring answer: a patriotic public servant has passed this way, and the nation is better for it.
Ibrahim Kaula Mohammed writes from Modoji, Katsina.