The particular point in reference was sometime in the early 90s.As a reporter with Radio Lagos,the onus essentially devolved on me – as the media anchor officially deputized for coverage of events within the Mainland Local Government Council; its subsidiary out-stations,Markets,Community Development Associations,in the area,etcetera, in addition to other duties as might be assigned to me day by day.
The Information Officer then, Alhaji Laguda,more elderly, black in complexion and a graduate of University of Ibadan, and I,then related on remarkably mutual chemistry to the extent that in the event of an impending function billed to happen pertaining to the council,he would often brave the strait jacket, officially demanding that invitation notice be served at our Awolowo Road office – for the extra-official option to take it personally down to my Oloto Street residence,also within Mainland,where-in of certain,he would often meet my beloved Dad,a retired Railway man,of blessed memory.
I remember strikingly lucidly as yesterday,one particular moment that we were as usual, lynch-pinned at Alhaji Laguda’s office,for an important event about to happen within the council precint.
As usual, fellow correspondents gathered at Laguda’s office were spontaneously enraptured in animated chatters as a routine matter of course.
The issue as of course to be expected,soon dilated to politics.A particularly interesting moment in this narrative was the point at which the Concord Newspaper Correspondent in the employ of the Abiola-owned newspaper there present,regaled us on pathetic point of lament that the unanimous majority of Concord staffers were pretty distressed by the sudden turn at which their proprietor and publisher, Chief Abiola, dramatically settled to throw his hat into the political fray.
Barely within a jiffy that you might start imagining “why,”the Concord guy supplied a clincher. The Junior bracket staffers of the Concord Press in particular,were awrily struck by the ominous portent that Abiola wading into the the turbulent waters of politics will spell for them a denudation of support from a pillar-figure who over the years, had in no unmistakable terms, succeeded in warming himself into the topmost shelve of their emotional closet, because Abiola it was,that would often evince the onus of humanitarian concern to legislate on issues of welfare pertaining to them.
A couple of times, these welfare recipes as directed by Abiola would languish in the limbo of passive inaction,courtesy of the calculated nonchalance of the management on whom statutorily would normally devolve the mantle of execution
Noting the lingering lull by the management in bringing necessary action to bear in effectuating these populist directives to the humanitarian destination of the Junior workers for whom they were meant,the onus would once again devolve in discretionary initiative by this same man, Abiola to evoke the issue on the front burner,with sanction for immediate action to be taken.
Moshood Kashimawo Olanbiwoninu Abiola was a classic proverb in irony.His saga was equally weirdly.
He wasn’t just the ordinary run of the mill mortal.In other words, there was something special about him.Do you call it “weird?” as of course earlier referenced in passing but perhaps deserving a re-mention if only for special emphasis.
This was a man of multiple incarnationary experiences.In other words,his beloved mum of blessed memory was by the magisterial buffettings of fate,plagued with multiple tragic experiences of infant mortality.For repeatedly umpteeneth times,this had been his unfortunate experience.
Therefore by the time the buck of fate would shift to Moshood,it would appear as if they had already resigned to the jingo-ring recurrence of the inevitable.
But all the same, a faintly ray of faith, somehow seemed to have buoyed them on, even if in benign low morale,fired by the hope that perhaps the young earthly visitor may have come not only to live, but even stay through the distance, as aptly denotative of his christened native nomenclature “Kashimawo” a shortened “let’s look on” – which stretched for contextual clarity, was aptly expressive of the eagerly cherished hope fully spelt as “Kashimawo boya a domo” “Let’s look on whether he will live”
As luck would have it this time around, a dramatic twist of fate intervened to unfold a departure for fulfilled hope.Kashimawo broke the incarnationary in-box jinx to live.It was that material point in time on attaining a relatively matured 15 years of age,that he was now properly christened “Moshood”
Thus did he scale the first hurdle only to be haunted by an inherent poverty dilemma, verily entrenched in its regal majesty in the family.
Such was the existential fiction-like but real-tale epic of acute misery – that young Kashimawo was as a matter of course, left with no option than resorting to a glorified spell of mendicancy, albeit veiled in a peripatetic bout of minstrelsy of such ignoble specie that saw him roaming the streets with rudimentary implement improvised as musical instruments with which he entertained in return for sheer crumbs of food.
However,at later times,as he graduated a little more organized with few rag-tag street boys enlisted into his ensemble,stipends of
financial reimbursements began to stream in,in return for his services – unlike the dispensation of old that would fetch only bare crumbs of food.The proceeds accruing there-from,he would thence avail for payment of his school fees and daily feeding of himself and family.
Complementing the fore-going – was his abiding pattern of routine – such that he would startle from sleep very early in the morning; head straight to the forest, gather shacks of firewood and hawk through the streets before hurrying forth to school.Proceeds accruing there-from, would immediately avail for the family,in feeding for the day.
However, for all the primordially inherited hosts of familial disadvantages, a redeeming feature of it all, would expressly unfold in the cerebral endowment of remarkably extravagant proportion divinely deposited in this amazing juvenal prodigy
As it would turn out, Kashimawo eventually managed to brave through the odds, breasting the tape through a successful five-year course of secondary education at the famous Baptist Boys High School Abeokuta, a year above Olusegun Obasanjo, ex Nigerian military and later civilian ruler, who also attended the same school.
And just about the moment that his beloved parents were about to enthuse in hilarious spree of chest-thumping,having seen their darling son through the crucible of secondary education, to the decisive moment that saw him a notch higher to the self- dependent phase of paid employment,as a clerk with Barclays Bank – sadly that particular moment – his very first day at work, did his beloved mother pass on to Glory.
Undaunted, young Moshood forged on, and as mother luck would have it,he burst onto a scholarship garnered under the benevolent auspices of the progressive, visionary distinguished and dynamic Awolowo-led A.G.administration of the old Western Region.
His destination port was the prestigious University of Glasgow – emerging from that reputable academic citadel with a First Class Honors in Accounting.And as if confirming that his astounding academic feat was anything but by sheer opportunistic happenstance, Moshood enlisted for the professional exam of the Institute of Chartered Accountant Scotland coming out again not just with a pass,but a regal all-round distinction.
He returned to Nigeria in 1960 in successive employment with LUTH, Pfizer, climaxed with a remarkably successful turn at ITT, which unfolded to usher an immensely definitive watershed that was to prove a defining turning point in his glorious destiny
While at that global multinational behemoth, Abiola was soon to ascend the towering height of Vice-Chairman ITT Middle – East, Asia and Africa
Having attained this vantage height, it was only a natural matter of course that he was able to integrate into the power dynamics of the global world of nations, winning and dinning with notable global leaders and intensely more-so in his native Nigeria in a strategic diversified networking which began in earnest with his pivotal fraternal cohabitation with the then Minister of Communication and assassinated military ruler, General Murtala Mohammed.
A notably momentous phase in the efflorescence of his political clout was the Shehu Shagari-led epoch of the Second Republic at which he deployed his media armada,the Concord Newspapers, towards a truculently implacable demonization of Awo and the Unity Party of Nigeria,his evocative alter-ego on the political divide – formed and also led by him.
It was indeed on the leveraging forte of this spoiler’s role formidably ranged against the Awo-led opposition that inspired his over- bloated estimation of self acceptance, by his powerful Hause-Fulani friends;which in turn availed to fire his Olympian tall order vision for presidency
Of course all along,this phanthomely castle on the air would not dawn on him – at least not until the dismissively laconic spitter that “presidency is not for sale” – a staple profanity and classic ‘ piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense’ courtesy of Lord Talleyrand,the French Diplomatic envoy – bellowing from the horse mouth of Umaru Dikko, distinctively sui-generis as the number one megaphone and ambassadorial confessor of the hegemonic assertiveness of the Hausa-Fulani superiority and their divinely ordained prerogative as the solely anointed legatee, authoritatively nominated to call the shot within the vast Nigerian fiefdom .
This for the Gbagura-born politician was to turn a shocker too many – for which he would later recoil from the political fray into a “hermetic” engagement with the variegated diversity of his intensely competing private concerns
And luckily as it would turn out, Abiola’s apolitical paradigm shift,newly fangled was all the more aided in considerably comfortable adaptivity by a new-order inter-regnum imposed barely few months after the declamatory gaffe of the notorious rantipole, Umaru Dikko – in a coup master-minded by ruthless tough-acting duo of Muhammadu Buhari and Tunde Idiagbon to occupy the center-stage of power – having unseated the crassly inert,inane and suppuratively decadent regime of the Second Republic, irredeemably sunk in the infernal pit of hell, with the extremely brainless,directionless and visionless Shehu Shagari entrapped with dismissively ignoble mediocre incompetence and crass naivety at the presidential cock-pit.
And to further enhance the political self- ostracism was the fact that the emergent new regime had everything but a hand-over to civil democratic polity in their programmatic lexicon.
However August 1985,came a dramatic wind of fate, that was to upstage the despotic but benevolent government of the immediate past, in a coup that was to usher the ambitious military adventurer, Ibrahim Babangida commonly “adorned” in not so honorific allusion,with the familiar cognomen of “Maradona” on account of his wily subtleties, orwellian guile and deceitful punic faith outwardly garbed in an affable mien,and mystifying genial warmth.
It was on the beguiling spell of these meretricious facade of friendliness,and expressly vaunted but deceitful endorsement,that Abiola was vulnerably felled in hypnotic stupor to swallow the bait that negotiated a compromissorial revisionism of his apolitical aloofness for a hat in the turbulent presidential hippodrome thus igniting a fission chain reaction culminating in the proditorous shenanigan of the phantomic June 12 annulment to the horrifying anti-climax of his indefinite immurement in the Abacha gulag leading to the dramatic finality of his passage to the other-worldly realm of the world beyond.
Though gone. He lives forever in our heart looming larger over the lilliputian traducers and demi-gods hunting him all the distance to his untimely grave. May his great soul continue to rest in peace.
*KOLA JOHNSON IS A WRITER AND JOURNALIST
