Usman Dantata, the third male child of the 12 children of late Alhaji Sanusi Dantata was born in Saudi Arabia in 1950. Just like his education, which was cut short at the post primary level by his knack for business, his promising life too was cast a spanner by the unknown assassins.
In the early hours of one night in December 1985, the hoodlums struck, and shot one of the highflying business tycoons in the country. Lying in the pool of his own blood gasping for breath, was famous Usman Dantata. Unknown to the assassins that he was not dead, they left the house fulfilled after lodging five bullets in his body.
Dantata was first flown to England , where the five bullets were successfully removed, and later moved to a Florida hospital near his Palm Beach residence in the United States . According to sources, the doctors were not successful in their over 10 years’ surgical struggle. Part of his spinal cord, the doctors concluded, was damaged. Many of his friends and his family members initially thought the quadriplegia would end in a matter of days but it lasted – day-after-day, year-in-year-out – until they gave up for the loss.
Eight years after the tragedy, his aged father, late Sanusi Dantata, visited him for the last time in US and bade him farewell. “Our destiny lies in the hands of Allah, we don’t know when our time would come. I find it imperative to see you because I don’t know what Allah will do,” the old man was said to have told Usman, who was lying motionless on his sickbed. And, since that time, Usman Dantata never set eyes on his caring father, a father who cut his son’s business teeth at the teen age.
In 1972, when late Usman Dantata went to Lagos to manage the haulage network of his father, none thought that he would rise to become a multimillionaire in a short period of time. When the military government of late General Murtala Mohammed came to power, there was a serious congestion at the port to the extent that ships carrying medicine, food, among others, were unable to berth. The government found that the solution was to give the import right to a few individuals. Late Usman Dantata, then 26, and late Yinka Folawiyo were the only people given the privilege of importing cement into the country. Dantata, at that tender age, had a sea terminal in Apapa Lagos, where his ships berthed. Had he lived healthier, he would have built the first private comprehensive cement industry in Nigeria . Even after the withdrawal of the monopoly, Usman had already made his name.
Usman Dantata was the Nigerian El Dorado – the mythical golden man. He went, like a star character in Sydney Sheldon’s Master of the Game Jamie McGregor, in search of gold, and got bars of it. And much like the mythical King Midas, whatever young Usman Dantata touched miraculously became gold. He rose astronomically to become a major cement importer, aviation magnet, farmer, industrialist and a world class polo player – all in less than ten years. Given his passion for the elitist game of polo, he once bought 70 Argentine ponies despite the fact that he only needed 10 at the time. The owner of the horses told him that he must buy the whole 70 horses, and so Usman Dantata agreed and later sold the 60 horses at give-away prices.
Apart from these, Amaka had international assets that include a sunflower farm in Brazil . Why sunflower? Dantata knew better. At that time, he was a stakeholder of no mean stake at Kano Oil Mill, and sunflower seed was a veritable source of vegetable oil. It was said that he was the brain behind large production of soya beans and sunflower seeds in the country. During his prime, Usman Dantata had that rare carte blanche to sell snow to the Eskimos.
Usman Dantata made history while he was hale and hearty and repeated another history from his sickbed. He broke a business record, just as he broke a longevity record. Usman Dantata was said to have made history as the longest known surviving person with serious spinal injury. When on May 27, 1995 famous Superman character Christopher Reeve became quadriplegic after being thrown from his horse during an Eventing competition in Culpeper, Virginia US , he died nine years after the tragedy despite his stardom and presence of medical experts hovering around him. Like Usman Dantata, he was confined to wheelchair and breathing apparatus for the rest of his life.
Much like the mythical King Midas, who wished that everything he touched should be turned to gold and with wish became a reality, whatever Usman Dantata ventured in became an instant hit. Whatever he touched literally became gold. But quite unlike Midas, who later regretted his wish, Dantata had loved to see his business empire grow till the last day. Although his limbs were paralysed, he spoke with so much confidence and transacted business from his wheelchair. His customised wheelchair had a chain of gizmos and other computerised gadgets. Despite his terminal incapacitation, Usman Dantata also became the family patriarch, who settled family disputes.
Like late pop star Michael Jackson, late Amaka was ‘a millionaire who lived like a millionaire’. Living lavishly in many king-size mansions, flying within and outside the country in his private jets, everything for Usman Amaka was befitting a king. Certain aristocrat he hosted to a dinner at his London home was the heir apparent to the British royal throne, Prince Charles. Even in Nigeria, he mingled with the rich, top government officials and governors. Not only in Nigeria Usman lived in a highbrow area, he had a house in Huston very close to the house of former President George Bush, Snr.
One of the Usman Dantata’s closest friends, the current president of Manufacturers’ Association of Nigeria (MAN), Alhaji Bashir Borodo recalled with nostalgia how late Dantata first took him to Mecca for Hajj. Borodo, who was then a civil servant, recalled that it was in 1979, Usman Dantata asked him if he ever performed the pilgrimage and he said he never did. Usman, then, asked him to prepare his papers, and within two weeks they left the country for Saudi Arabia in Usman Dantata’s private jet alongside Alhaji Uba Leader, Alhaji Abba Kura and former governors of Kaduna and Gongola States Dabo Lere and Bamanga Tukur respectively. “We first boarded one of his private jets from Lagos to Maiduguri, and from Maiduguri another private jet of his took us to Saudi Arabia,” Borodo, recalled.
Not only the poor envied Usman Dantata, even the rich did. His fleet of private jets comprising a Boeing 707, a Falcon, an HS 125, a Sikorsky helicopter and another from Bristow, were but the envy of the rich men.
Apart from mingling with the world class polo elite, Usman Dantata established a vast network of friends and business associates across the globe. In the US, he observed keenly how the Americans produced vegetable oil.
In agriculture, Dantata’s farm, Anadariya, was rated the largest poultry producing farm in the whole West Africa – well ahead of Otta Farm – in those days. In the farm, more than 100,000 broilers were slaughtered, processed and packaged daily. The feed and everything needed there were produced in the farm. We were told as young kids that the neighbouring villages stopped buying meat because the farm supplied them – ex gratia – with the heads, talons and offal of the broilers.
Although it is said that the whole world – despite its wide circumference – is a prison, Usman Dantata’s ‘prison’ was different from those who roam around without restriction. Those of us who survive to chronicle the life of the dead are also living in the prison – condemned to death. We often cherish the ‘privilege’ of outliving the dead despite the apparent fact that we are on the death-row, awaiting the hangman’s noose.
May Almighty Allah grant late Usman Amakka Sanusi Dantata eternal rest in Jannatul Firdaus.
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