With 10 years between us, you were
already in the boarding house at Ibadan Grammar School by the time I
became fully conscious of my environment and circumstances.
And it was about the time when I entered secondary school that you departed Ibadan to read accountancy in England.
On your return, you worked in Lagos, as a
qualified Chartered Accountant of England and Wales; at that time would
have worked only in Lagos.
I was then at the University of Ibadan
and, four months after graduation and some teaching at your old school,
I, too, left for London.
Those comings and goings did not allow for as much interaction between us as I would have wished during my early years.
Had I entered the world earlier, I
probably would, as a kid, have smelt you long enough to imbibe more of
your exceptional boyish exuberance, your unusual freedom with money, and
your spirit of joie de vivre, even as it would have been
impossible for me to acquire your impressive physical stamina and
stockiness which contributed to your being a good footballer at school.
I still remember furtively enjoying and
swallowing what I later came to recognise as dangerous quantities of
your “Macleans”, as I revelled in the taste of the product. The word
“toothpaste” had not yet entered my vocabulary at the time of which I am
speaking, as I had only just started primary school. Everyone else in
the house, except the secondary school boy, still used the superior,
native “chewing stick”, and mother particularly preferred the yellow,
tangy genre, the orin ata.
Every six-year-old must have seen some adult or colleague quaffing gari
with sugar, with the better-off ones sometimes adding Peak milk; but it
was from you that I first learnt the simple delicacy of ewa
mixed with sugar, and because granulated sugar had not yet become
popular, the cubes had to be crushed in advance except when the meal was
hot enough to melt them.
Your inability, from youth, to tolerate
the smell of oranges, I casually explained away by the fact that Iya
Agba, our maternal grandmother, once sold tobacco snuff which she
fervently believed would be rendered ineffective if contaminated by
orange, and therefore discouraged having oranges around her. It was
later, much later in life, that a probable explanation of your reaction
surfaced: citrus fruits allergy.
I never told you how the mere thought of
that your right shin bone injury while splitting firewood at the
backyard of the house kept me depressed and frightened for days on end.
The wound eventually healed, of course, but your scar never completely
disappeared.
That was Oranyan, your years of adolescence.
While working at my actuarial
examinations in London, your visits there were for me moments of special
delight particularly while I was still single and solitary as I greatly
enjoyed and appreciated your taking me along to visit your friends; to
watch the “latest” musical films at the cinema; and to excellent,
sometimes exotic, meals at your favourite hotel, the Royal Lancaster.
And after I got married, Iyabo could be numbered among your fans.
But it was the outbreak of the Punch
shareholders’ crisis of which you were the central victim and your
attendant, high voltage, psychological trauma that gave rise to our
closest emotional attachment.
It is at the time of tribulations that a
man knows his true and loyal supporters. You needed as much
psychological anchor and independent ideas analysis as you could get,
and in that, led by Chief Moyo, I hope we did our best. I visited you
with far greater frequency than before, and the depth of omo iya elements that attended our discussions and interactions was far greater than it had ever been.
Why was this dispute among the
shareholders so critical to your fortunes? Well, because, as the
chairman and single largest shareholder (before and after your own
proportion came under dispute), believing that your business and social
image and stature were tied to the fortunes of the newspaper, you had
pledged substantial assets with the banks to support the company, while
no other member of the company had pledged his own. An unravelling of
Punch could lead to your own unravelling.
And, meanwhile, because Punch was
perceived as an opposition newspaper by the federal authorities, the
company and other companies in which you had controlling interest were
starved of “import licences”, an arrangement adopted by the government
at that time to ration foreign currency among importers, thus
jeopardising the viability of your companies.
These pointed daggers notwithstanding, I
was confident, we were confident that, with your aggressive business
acumen; your innate, unbounded optimism; your ability to sniff money
where others could not; your zest for life and living, you would pull
through.
No one could have foretold that what you
were experiencing were merely the opening stanza of a deeper, more
sinister tragedy, which would not only hit your family severely, but
would also alter the course of my own life.
The stress and the strain of the period
compromised your vital immunity; you then succumbed to a terminal
disease of the lymphatic system, through which you eventually succumbed.
Now, today, 30 years after, what can we say?
All we have to say is that the storms and the floods are over, and it’s a different world.
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