They labeled him stubborn. He named it curiosity. What they saw as stubbornness, he saw as curiosity. In the dusty center of old Katsina, a boy named Muttaqah Rabe Darma watched his elder brothers vanish each morning and decided to follow them. No one took him, he took himself.
At a primary school in Darma Quarters, he joined a line of children, touched his left ear with his right hand three times, and was sent to Rabin Aji, a class under three shade trees. That was the first room he ever entered as a pupil. It would not be the last he built for others.
Decades later, the man who learned under trees stood on a stage as “father,” “mentor,” and “the man that gave his all.” The speaker introducing him did not list titles first. He listed debts: “The man that impacted my life… lifted us when we were not strong.”
Then came the record. Commissioner for Youth and Sport in Katsina State. Commissioner for Works, Housing and Transport. Executive Secretary of the Petroleum Technology Development Fund. Board member at the University of Port Harcourt. Chairman of the Governing Council of the Katsina State Institute of Technology. And now, minister-designate for Housing and Urban Development under President Bola Tinubu.
But Engr. Dr. Muttaqah Rabe Darma does not tell his life as a CV. He tells it as three words: selflessness, resilience, social responsibility. “There is no need for me to give a lecture,” he said. “All I need to do is tell you stories. And one story will suffice: the story of Mutakarabidharma.”
The stories begin early. At ten, he could drive cars on the dusty roads of Katsina while children his age ran behind to watch their peer at the wheel. At twelve, he handled moving equipment, T-Rex machines and tipper lorries. By fifteen, he was a supporting driver hauling trucks from Katsina to Lagos. School did not stop the hustle. In secondary school he did menial labor for money — not for food, but for cinema. With his earnings he bought tickets for friends to watch Chinese and Indian films. “I become like a king,” he recalled. “If you dribble me in football, this night you will not go to cinema. Because I will pay for it.”
University did not tame the drive. No one guided him to engineering. A TV documentary in Kaduna did.
The narrator said, “The mechanical engineers who maintain these engines.” That sentence sent him to Bayero University, Kano. Yet even on campus he worked. At Singa Market he labored behind building material shops, loading trailers to Maiduguri, Yobe, Gombe careful to stay out of sight so no one would see him as a laborer. The money bought Fanta and Coca-Cola for friends. Then his father gave him a motorcycle to cross the seven kilometers from Kabuga to the new campus.
He stopped laboring and, he believes, became the first person to run achaba in Kano. Saturdays and Sundays he convinced bus crowds to ride with him for a fare. “That was how I became rich on campus.”
After NYSC in Ukwa West, then Imo State, he floated a private school teaching physics, chemistry, mathematics, and technical drawing. As Corpers’ Liaison Officer, his classes filled. Students paid “whatever token,” and he threw monthly parties at the corpers’ lodge.
Back at Bayero as a lecturer, he created EDUCON — a Katsina education consensus — to help Katsina indigenes gain admission. He left the university over one girl’s denied Mass Communication slot. Her 200 points cleared the 180 cut-off, but the admissions officer said, “We have so many Katsina State students. Go and bring a Kano person or a Jigawa person.” Darma had three job offers and a promise: “I will make you a professor in 15 years.” He walked away instead. “From then on, I kept on struggling to ensure that the people of Katsina gain prominence.”
He did not stay in Abuja or abroad. He came back to Katsina. He built a library. He built a university. He built a school. Skills and entrepreneurship centers followed. The introducer put it plainly: “He changed lives of millions of people in Katsina State, especially youth and women.” When he left office, the money he received, they said, “he used it to help humanity, to help society.”
Today, as minister-designate, his dream is unsentimental and precise: “Katsina State will have 11,500,000 people. And I always shed my tears when I see one person being poor.” He wants a state where no one is poor, or thinks he is poor. “I know I may not achieve this. Even if I do not achieve it, I will die with a dream.”
From the boy who took himself to school to the man who builds schools for others, the arc is unbroken. Tinubu has named him to Housing and Urban Development. Katsina already knows what he does with rooms, and with roofs, and with the space beneath three shade trees.
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