By Femi Odere
I had completely forgotten about a promise I made to a friend – a good, trustworthy and dependable one at that – that I would say a thing or two about him and our friendship, until he sent me one of the pictures we took at his mother’s burial reception a few hours ago on the WhatsApp platform. After all, a promise made, especially to a friend of over 40 years, must be a promise kept.
Olumide and his siblings finally committed their mother, Princess Rebecca Omoyelade Ogunleye, to mother earth on Friday, November 25, 2022 in Ikole-Ekiti.
I met Olumide through Kunle Ashaolu, a childhood friend. Olumide and Kunle met at the University of Benin in present Edo State, where both of them became roommates.
As a bosom friend, who was the first among our moderately sized herds of close-knit secondary school leavers to gain admission into a university, having escaped the hammer of the Almighty West African Examination Council, WAEC, which hammered yours truly in the first instance, because of the poor and dark presence of English and Mathematics on his result, UNIBEN soon became my second home because of Kunle.
As one of those “rejects,” because that was what those in my class of un-admitted were called then, one had to take solace in the world of work. The Post & Telegraph, P&T, Ado-Ekiti, was where one had his first work experience, while the defunct National Bank of Nigeria, Ilupeju, Lagos, was the second.
I soon became a familiar face to one of the drivers of the so-called luxurious buses that travelled mostly in the evening and nights, as a frequent traveller, as it became habitual for me to hop on the bus after work on most Fridays at Fadeyi on my way to Benin for the weekend binge drinking, as if I was going to Obalende.
The university community became a natural attraction to yours sincerely, mostly because of the rebellion against authority identity tag one had left Amoye and Anglican Grammar Schools at Ikere Ekiti and Igbara-Oke respectively with. I shared this same rebellious and troublesome tag with friends from other secondary schools, such as: Sunday Idowu, aka Bomber, from Oyemekun Grammar School, Akure; Akinbola from Aquinas College, Akure; Papingo from Ondo Boys High School, Ondo; Emmanuel Barlow, (now late) from Anglican Grammar School, Igbara-Oke; George (also now late) from a school in Idanre, which I cannot recall and a few others from our secondary school days.
What was called our rebellious attitudes by our school mates then, which made most of the student population, except a few of our juniors who wanted to emulate our daring do attitudes, to distance themselves from us as if we had leprosy, was a kind of radicalism that was inspired by our closest companions, such as: Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital;” Feodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” and “Brothers Karamazov;” Alighieri Dante’s “Inferno;” Ngugi wa Thiongo’s “The Trial of Dedan Kimathi;” Wole Soyinka’s “The Man Died,” and other books that – in retrospect are perhaps beyond our ken as secondary school boys – we considered then as our ‘girlfriends,’ which we must talk about over booze. It was this spirit of radicalism that needed to find further expression.
Hence my frequent forays into the university campus where my childhood friend was to look for like minds.
We were especially infatuated with the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” We saw our male schoolmates reading books of such authors as James Hardley Chase, Nick Carter or Agatha Christie, while we were in the secondary school then as ‘girls,’ who had no idea why they should detest the bourgeois class, let alone have the understanding about how a society should be.
Most times, Kunle and Olumide would not know that I had arrived at the University campus until the wee hours of the morning, because I had gone straight to the drinking joints to meet my new found friends, where discussions about the ills of the Nigerian society would be undertaken. And the consensus would be reached that only a revolution could save us in accordance with the dictates of late Chief Obafemi Awolowo.
Although good, loving and dependable friends, I seldom hang out with Kunle and Olumide while on their campus, because they were just too studious for my liking. What’s more, they were not the “radical” type I had met in their university campus with whom I had had special bonding, not to talk of the fact that they were only occasional drinkers.
Perhaps, the drinks one had one Saturday night must have been a little too much when yours sincerely found himself sitting beside a girl at the campus cafeteria the following Sunday afternoon, asking her, after a brief conversation, the name of her residential hall and her room number in order to see her later. I was already fantasizing about getting laid at a university campus for the first time in my young life.
She was just about telling yours sincerely but first asked what was I studying. “I am not studying anything. I just came to visit my friends,” was the retort.
She simply picked up her plate and went asitting elsewhere. Nobody needed to tell me that she became suddenly disdainful of me because I wasn’t a student. And she had told me in no unmistakable terms that she was not in my level. It was a teachable moment for me about the importance of education.
When I later shared this horrible experience with Kunle and Olumide, they laughed and counselled that I should have lied. I may have been a very stubborn young chap who gained notoriety as a nonconformist that snipped at the school authorities, but lying was not, and still isn’t, something that comes easy for me to do.
Our friendship continued where we left off in the United States, where I had been several years before Olumide’s arrival. While there, we celebrated each other’s joy as well as shared some of our unpleasant life experiences each time we had cause to visit each other.
It was because of this inherent dependability and loyalty to his friends that Olumide called me when he heard about my appointment in 2019, telling me he wanted to assist me in whatever way he could to succeed, despite his distaste for the Nigerian politics and his wariness of anyone that participates in it. “I know you. You’re not the type who would make mess of the opportunity to do the right thing” was his admonition.
He became one of the first set of Ekiti indigenes who became members of the Diaspora WhatsApp group platform I had set up at the onset of my appointment.
Olumide Ogunleye played a pivotal role in the efforts that finally birthed the Irele-Ekiti Cattle Ranch by a group of Ekiti Diaspora indigenes before the expiration of my appointment in the government of Dr. John Kayode Fayemi.
I thank you, Ore.
And may your mother’s soul found peace in the presence of the Almighty.
•Odere is former Senior Special Assistant, SSA, Diaspora Affairs, to former governor of Ekiti State, Dr. Kayode Fayemi.
