Upon receiving my own dose of the grace of God people needed to overcome the shocking news of the death of a great brother and friend, Segun Awolowo yesterday, I first recollected the way I felt on a particularly unforgettable day in 1987?
It was soothing to witness the accompanying energy needed to suppress the anger and pain of the reality of the death of this beloved brother, and still muster the will to write about it with relief and reassurance in the dose of faith in God of which the human soul is capable.
This hope, accompanied by an unshakeable faith in God, will continue to quicken the inevitable weakening of death’s sting in the Awolowo family, which, by the actions of their foremost patriarch, the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, has already made life meaningful and endurable for layers of generations in Yorubaland, Nigeria and elsewhere.
In the morning of May 9, 1987, in the quiet village of Epe near Ilesa, in the Old Oyo state, I was performing my daily shores of sweeping around the compound of my grandfather’s house when Baba Ajakaiye; a popular, elderly man; a bold, politically aware and highly reverred hunter, suddenly rushed out of his house from the direction of the west wing of the village , wailing loudly and frantically calling my grandfather ”Baba Ropo, Baba Ropo, se hin mi gbo radio? Se hin mi gb’uroyin lorii radio?”, He continued along the street, followed closely by his friend Baba Kola, both exclaiming loudly and causing such a stampede that their shouting raised and forced other men to quickly jump out of bed and rush out of their houses.
Within the time it takes a crab to blink, a lot of people had gathered on the roadside in front of our house, which happened to be located near the edge of the main junction in the village, most of them with scanty clothes on their bodies, young and old, many had their hand on their heads and in that common gesture of surprise and regret.
All of them had heard the same shocking news that pushed Baba Ajakaye out of his house with barely enough clothes on.
It came from the 7.00am news thaa being read on the Oyo state “Radio OYO”.
And the broadcaster was making some shocking and forbidden statement to the effect that;
Chief Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo is dead!
Haaaaaaaa! Wahala deeeeeee! Awolowo ti kuuuuu!
Baba Yoruba,
Awooooooooo!
Haaaa, O ma se oooooo!
Why? How? I mean, how can Awolowo die? Was the question of everyone’s lips.
It was just unbelievable.
My grandfather brought out his resting chair, - a strange habit for a farmer at that time of the day. He sat down with his legs crossed and his face in his palms, saying nothing. I looked in his eyes I found nothing other than that weird expression that scares a child more than a frown; a blank.
On a normal day. He never sat in that chair or on that spot in the morning. In that hour on a normal day, he would be on the big sedimentary rock opposite that spot, sharpening his cutlasses, making ready for the farm. But this was not a normal day.
No farmer in our village went to the farm that day. Most families spent the day at the front of their houses watching how other families were reacting to the news.
What else happened elsewhere in Yorubaland that day, I can’t tell, but I know and will always remember where I was and what I was doing on the day Chief Obafemi Awolowo died.
For me, it was not only that Segun’s death and that of his grandfather will continue to remain a shocking reality. It is also because I am moved by the thought of the graceful coincidence of how much the two Awolowos; grandfather and grandson, did to get me andy generation where we are today.
Just as I vividly recollected the regret and outrage with which my grandfather and our village received the death of Chief Awolowo, I must openly appreciate Segun’s encouragement and help in alleviating my cost of living and travels across Lagos at a crucial time of my life.
The goodness of the Awolowo clan that Segun radiated and represented before he left is a trait that tricled right from Papa Awolowo and Segun down through me to reach my own children. And I have spared no details in drawing relevant correlations about the redeeming power and everlasting value of good governnance and sound policies.
For parents who had children in schools enjoying Awolowo’s Free Education policy and hundreds of thousands of farmers whose hopes hinged on Awolowo’s Cocoa Development Union, CDU grants, Awolowo’s death was clearly a calamity too massive to contemplate. It was a loss of unquantifiable scale, with political consequences of unpredictable dimension.
We too knew something had hit our parents. From village to village, the atmosphere was charged.
We were aware that Awolowo was the man on whose goodwill and benevolence our parents were managing to send us to schools. Whenever piles of textbooks on various subjects and exercise books were issued out to us, we also knew instinctively that one of the most unforgivable ways to offend the school’s authority was to mishandle, tear or damage those books.
How can I better explain why the news of the death of Mr Segun Awolowo, a scion of the collosal Awolowo name, and a major pillar upon which the great Awolowo family house rests hit me and my generation who went to school at that time below the belt. The name Awolowo is one that my generation will continue to cherish, rever and pray for.
As we mourn the death of a brother and the grandson of the man who fought the iniquitous Nigerian system and won a place for us all to go to school for free, we consider Segun’s death a fresh opening of a still healing wound inflicted in 1987 on the hearts of all true omo Yoruba by the death of the great sage.
For me as a Yoruba, you dont get more deeply related by blood to anyone whose grandfather was jailed while also enduring near death experiences in order to secure a region of a nation indee which you got the opportunity to get educated for free.
i knew and worked briefly with Segun at the onset of journey working with political leaders.
My relationship with him took its roots right from the founding days of the political group Progressive Action Movement, PAM, in 2001. My closeness to him took me to work briefly with him at his grandfather’s house in Lagos.
I had not become a photographer at the time of course.
As soon as I enrolled in journalism school in 1994, it didnot take long before I became the errand boy of a close ring of senior scholars, eminent writers, seniors journalists and technocrats including the late Professor Ayo Olukotun, Akin Osuntokun Femi Fani Kayode and Charles Akinola. I was regularly involved in many academic and political activities involving them. The annual Obafemi Awolowo Foundation’s colloquium ; the Nigerian Civil War Conference, spearheader by Professor Eghosa Esaghae at the University of Ibadan are of great memory.
My experience as an assistant, working around the people I met in PAM and these frontline researchers, public commentators and others working in the media was extensive and actually constitutes a tangible part of what claim I may make today about being educated outside the journalism school. Being an avid reader and a copious collector of books on sundry subjects from history and conflicts to diplomacy and monarchies ensured I always got called upon by any of them for assistance. It was my job in those days when there was no email to hit the Lagos roads distributing their articles to the editors of frontline national newspaper dailies. It was an especial experience distinctive from any other. By the time I was starting out as a young journalist with the Daily Times, I already had my hands full. I was starry eyed, highly impressionable and opened my mind to all winds of academic doctrines. This ringside position helped me look in early and gained advance insights into the trajectory of political developments and the activities of some of the personalities who shaped them. Distributing these articles also availed me first-hand opportunities to read before they were published, the contentious opinions of fierry columnists like Femi Fani-Kayode and the prickly arguments of Akin Osuntokun and wait to watch how they shape national discourse and public perception of burning national issues.
You can then imagine the luck I had so early into my career at the prospect of later meeting in PAM and moving around some of today’s leading names in Nigeria’s governance and political economy.
Soon after the military relinguished power in 1999, PAM attracted and brought together many of the children of the cynosure of all eyes in the first and second republic politics in Nigeria and some of the most active captains of the media and political industry.
Children of political juggernauts of early post-colonial Nigeria, popular columnists of established newspaers, political and media activists, some just released from military detention of the Abacha years, all soon came around to swell the PAM ranks. Segun Awolowo was one of them.
I still have an old copy of one of their attendance lists. It was always long and I can only recollect the names of a prominent few; the late Segun Awolowo, Opeyemi Agbaje, Akin Osuntokun, the current Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Babafemi Ojudu, Tunde Fagbenle, Toyin and Modupe Fagbayi, Femi Fani-Kayode, Jumoke Akinjide Balogun, Segun Maiyegun, Muyi Ladoja, Lai Aare, Kayode Ogundamisi.
Remarkeably, I an Ijesa son, had been in the care of prominent Ekiti sons and daughters for so long, and I still am. Perhaps it represents a token of the traditional hospitality of the Ekiti people or an extension of the goodwill shared between our fathers during the Ekitiparapo war coalition.
Whichever, as a young journalist, Akin Osuntokun, who I was living with at the time asked me to squeeze out the time to serve at the office of PAM. The meetings of the movement was initially being hosted at Osuntokun’s house, but membership soon began to swell and the need for a formal office became urgent l, and Chief Awolowo’s house at Park Lane in Liverpool area of Apapa was made available.
Every member of PAM was a very busy person. And that included me who was not even a registered member. I was only a young bookwarm who was around them, handy and also willing to serve the purposes of this movement many of which members I had only read about and around whose presence I imagined a ladder existed which God may have dropped for me to reach up to any height I wished in life.
But I wonder how many useful opportunities waiting with great mentors like Segun and others did I manage to explore before losing ties with them, losing their contacts or dissapearing from their rader screen altogether? Few, very few.
The death of this Awolowo has shocked me into wandering when I would ever be able to pinch myself enough to wake up, refresh or reestablish links with some of these my early mentors that are still alive and I can still reach.
I will keep trying and I only hope it works, because I am still doing a bad job of it. One big challenge is that I will have to figure out how to still be useful around them or what I could do to also contribute to their lives.
One way I have readily figured out and have already started exploring is that I can find away of making them see reasons to tell their own stories, NOW.
Too many good people are leaving this world too soon, and death, or our own preoccupation with the endless to-do list we carry about in this world hardly leaves the ample time to make the most of their irreplaceable precence while they were still here. I have started and am already succeeding in tracking and sitting down to work with my mentors.
Due to the fact that we live in the same town of Ado Ekiti, and if I am serious enough, I could see him at The Farm; the arts and writers rendezvous he has created to refresh his health, welcome valuable people, boost his sanity and encourage those who take themselves serious, the only one among them, who I may boast I remain close to; and who has and still play influential roles in shaping my career is Senator Babafemi Ojudu. Even at that, I doubt very much if I am not still being too much of a truant around him.
I regret never getting the privilege of ever meeting the father of the modern Yoruba race and the late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, but I had the privilege of meeting his grandson, who unfortunately, we just lost.
There are some names that have achieved so much and have been robbed in such extreme glory that they have also attained immortality, such that even death cannot wipe them out or undo them nomatter the scale of tragedy.
Such names will continue to be mentioned on the lips of men and would live in the minds of people forever.
Maybe the questions to ask is why too many great people hardly ever live long. At least, long enought for us to find them to return to when we suddenly get jolted again by the shocks of life.
If I had known I was only deceiving myself, If I had known that there was never going to be a future time, after I had satisfied my curiousity achieving the heaven and earth I am chasing, I could return to sit around one of the Awolowos and listen to lost stories just found, I would have done more in recent years to draw closer to Segun before this time of regret.
My eyes are now clear. Now that there is not going to be the Segun I used to know to return to.
I will always comfort myself with the memory of who he was to me within the short time I worked with him during the PAM days and the few other times we met at social gatheringswhen I was working as King Sunny Ade’s PRO.
There are some names that have achieved so much and are robbed in garments of such extreme glory that they have also attained such immortality that even death cannot wipe them out or undo them nomatter the scale of tragedy.
Awolowo will continue to be mentioned by the lips of men and would live in the minds of people for as long as life exists.
Source: Femi Adagunodo.
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