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OPINION: The Body Of The Yoruba King

By Lasisi Olagunju
Okuku town in present Osun State has a well-recorded history of cultural promotion and preservation. Ulli Beier’s ‘Yoruba Beaded Crowns’ (1982) and Karin Barber’s ‘I Could Speak until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women and the Past in a Yoruba Town’ (1991) are two of the contributions of Okuku to Yoruba cultural history. The late Yoruba playwright and culture icon, Adebayo Faleti, told me in 2004 that he wrote one of his major plays in Okuku in the 1950s.
Oba Moses Oyewole Oyinlola was Olokuku of Okuku from 1938 to 1960. A very deeply religious and cultural man, he died on 20 February, 1960 and was buried two days later. Within those two days, there was a flurry of rites in the town and in the palace. The late oba’s grown-up male children feared that the king’s corpse would be tampered with by some unknown people called traditionalists. And so, they met and plotted to stop it.
One of the boys was embedded in the palace room where the remains were laid in state. Armed with a machete, he kept vigil over their dad’s remains while others lurked around as a back-up. Then, deep in the night, with curfew in place, some elderly persons, in a column, filed into the room. They turned out to be known faces; they were the chiefs that reigned with the now dead king.
The chiefs did not see the hiding young man with a machete. They started the rites while the boy watched every aspect of what the chiefs came to do. To his relief, there was no attempt to tamper with the corpse. “They did not even touch it. All they came with were words and wishes. They communicated with their oba asking him to intercede for them before the ancestors so that their own lives and that of the entire town could be as sweet as that of the departed oba.” They finished their prayers and left. Did the sentry leave too? An eye was kept on the remains until they were buried on February 22, 1960 in the premises of St Michael’s Cathedral, Okuku. The tomb is up to today the most prominent there.
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The hiding prince told me all this in 2004 as I was gathering materials for the biography of the late oba, which was published in December 2005. Some people of tradition would ask where the prince is now. He grew to become a man, became successful, earned a PhD, lived well and died a few years ago at almost 90.
The death last Sunday and burial on Monday of the Awujale of Ijebuland, Oba Sikiru Olukayode Adetona, is the top trending topic. His transition and the controversy of his burial have renewed public interest in who should bury an oba and what really happens to the body of a king in Yorubaland when he dies. Do the bodies get mutilated and the hearts removed for the installation of their successors? Do succeeding obas eat the hearts of their predecessors?
I have cited the Okuku case above. I have also read wide and consulted people who should know. All my sources maintained that cannibalism is not one of Yoruba people’s ‘disorder’ and so, eating the heart of a dead king couldn’t have been one of the ingredients of their royal installation rites. The late Awujale, in an old interview that has also gone viral lately, gave his own experience on the heart-eating myth: “I cannot recall any rite that was done behind the scene. Let them come and tell me. It is all lies. Nothing like that. They even tell you that they give the heart of a deceased oba to the new one to eat!…Nothing like that. Okay, which heart did Orimolusi eat when Adeboye died in Tripoli? Besides, when Gbelegbuwa died, I wasn’t in the country. I was abroad and didn’t return until about a year after his death. So, which heart was given to me? I didn’t eat anything oooo. So, no such thing happened.” I think other obas should come out and tell their story. Doing so may stop friends and foes of the Yoruba from looking at them as man-eaters.
Some tradition-loving Yoruba persons are angry because the Awujale was buried by Muslims. Now, I ask: What is traditional burial? What is Muslim burial? Among other obligatory steps, the Muslim corpse is washed and shrouded in a simple white cloth; prayers are offered. Inside the grave, the body is laid on its right side, facing the East. At what point does a received practice become part of one’s tradition? I asked because just like the Muslims, the Lo Dagaa of northern Ghana, who are not Muslims, also bury their dead people “lying on their right side facing the East so that the rising sun will tell them to prepare for hunt or for the farm…” So, what is ‘Muslim’ to Yoruba traditionalists is ‘traditional’ to that Ghanaian ethnic group. We can read this and more in J. Goody’s ‘Death, Property and the Ancestors: A Study of Mortuary Customs of the Lo Dagaa of West Africa’ published in 1962.
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It happened that some bad kings received bad burials in the past. One of such punishments for royal misdeeds could be dismemberment of the cadaver. There were other rewards for good and bad behaviour on the throne. When a wicked oba died, the chiefs stormed the palace and seized all items in there as communal property. When a good oba died, the chiefs delayed the announcement until the family of the departed had moved all they wanted out of the palace to his private residence. The chiefs could achieve that because in theory, the Yoruba king owned nothing as personal property. He reigned in the name of the town, got gifts and favours in their name and on their behalf he kept or used them. It was therefore the law that the palace, the king, and all he owned were property of the kingdom. All these, including the body, could go back to the people and the oba’s family stripped naked if the departed was not a good man.
If it is the Yoruba tradition that the king’s body belongs to the community, then we have to define who approximates that community today. The majority Muslim/Christian groups or the minority who claim ‘tradition’ as their religion? If tradition is a people’s way of life, have Christianity and Islam not become part of the Yoruba ‘way of life’? Indeed, there is a whole Odu in Ifa celebrating Islam and Muslims. It is called Odu Imale. Tradition is a river; it draws its strength from the source but gets stronger and larger as it takes from this stream and that tributary. It would be a dirty, diseased pond if it resists the cleansing ritual of free-flowing.
Tradition is not the earthing of a people in a past that is long gone. What is traditional is not exactly what is archaic.
The West brought Christianity and civilisation to the ‘savage’ tribes of Africa. In 1946, they stopped the suicide of an Olokun Esin in Oyo who was billed to accompany the Alaafin on his journey to the ancestors. Since then, no Oyo king has enjoyed having an entourage to heaven. Dying with the king was hugely celebrated in Oyo as the ultimate expression of love for the empire and high-end duty to the king:
Olókùn-esin İbàdàn
K’ó má ba Olókùn-ęsin Ộyộ je
Ẹni ó bá rójú b`óba kú
L’`a á mò l’Ólókùn-esin.
Eyí ti ò rójú b’óba kú
A á maa pè ‘ón l’Ólókùn-eran ni…
(Adeboye Babalola, 2001:125).
It was also part of the ritual of passage for the Alaafin that his crown prince (Aremo) must die with him. But Alaafin Atiba stopped that practice. He got his Aremo Adelu endorsed as his successor before he died in 1858 at the age of 58. There was a resistance to that change snowballing into a very bad civil war – the Ijaye War of 1860-1862. But the reform was eventually upheld because forced suicide (or murder) was repugnant to decency and a violent assault on the prince’s right to life.
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Tradition speaks to aspects of a people’s way of life. It is the “inherited beliefs, practices, and values passed down through generations.” But it is not immutable. Traditions are practices in perpetual transition. A tradition isn’t what it is called if it fails to adapt to societal shifts, to advancements in tech, to new cultural influences. Customs and traditions live when they accept modifications, reinterpretations, and even the abandonment of certain practices as societies evolve. Take a glance at the death and burial of King Francis I of France in 1547. I will rely on this quote from Ralph Giesey’s ‘The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France’ published in 1960: “With the death of a king, the body was immediately eviscerated, embalmed, and the removed remains subsequently buried apart from the corpse.” Evisceration means to disembowel a person or animal. Would anyone expect the evisceration of a king’s body today in the West? Even French that did it five centuries ago has since abolished the monarchy itself. It did so on 24 February, 1848. Have we paused to ponder the future of Yoruba kingship as democracy digs in?
While we seek to preserve what we call our tradition, have we asked how the various parts came to be? How do traditions get invented? What the French did to the corpse of their king in 1547, the act of disemboweling that took place some 500 years ago, was it for ritual or for medical reasons? W. Arens’ in ‘The Demise of Kings and the Meaning of Kingship’ (1984) from where I got the Giesey quote will serve you if you need more on the sacred and religious contents of that royal burial and the parallel it drew with the burial of kings in a part of Africa.
So, as we bid the iconic Awujale good night, it is time the Yoruba elite and commoners calmed down and got to work on the real issues of development that need urgent tackling. As I told someone at the weekend, the Yoruba have no friend in Nigeria. Onílé owó òtún kò wo niire, ìmòràn ìkà ni t’òsì ngbà, ká lé ni jáde ni tòókán ilé nwí. I will not translate this; rather, I will add that majoring in minor issues degrades the Yoruba advantage of over 200 years of education and of global engagement.
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OPINION: Ofala: Glo And An Invite From Agbogidi

By Lasisi Olagunju
‘Teacher of Light’ is the title of a biography of Chinua Achebe written by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Tijan Sallah. What does it mean to teach light? Or, rather, what is light? If you know what darkness does, you would know what light means and the value it holds.
“When the moon is shining, the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.” With that proverb and its moon metaphor, Chinua Achebe established himself as a true teacher of light. My muse pushed the proverb to my presence as I read through an invitation to me from the Obi of Onitsha asking that I be part of this year’s Ofala Festival. It occurred to me that moment that it is not only the moon that gives light; culture is an illuminator, it also gives light, especially to people like me who routinely forget how to dance to ancestral summons.
I had the very rare privilege of being honoured by the Nigerian Academy of Letters with its Honorary Fellowship in August this year. From the North to the South, only three Nigerians were so honoured: I was one; my brother, culture scholar and media icon, Jahman Anikulapo, was one; the deeply intellectual Obi of Onitsha, His Majesty Igwe Nnaemeka Alfred Ugochukwu Achebe (Agbogidi), was the third, the biggest of us. At that ceremony, the Obi, who said he had looked forward to meeting me, met me, held me and has kept me close as a son.
So, his invite to the Ofala Festival came. The festival holds this week. I wish I could be there as the king’s guest; but wishes are not horses. Because the mountain here is blocking the view of the mountain over there, I cannot honour the invitation. So I prayed for the success of the festival. The Obi answered with a thunderous ‘Amen’.
Ofala? I checked and found that the word “Ofala” is an enduring offspring of the Igbo words ọfọ (authority) and ala (land). Ofala is history retold in performance; it is also culture renewed. It relives the Obi’s authority over the land and its people.
Ofala is Obi’s return from sacred silence. The festival celebrates royalty’s reborn, and the Ndichie’s renewal of loyalty to the king. In Iru Ofala and Azu Ofala, the king returns from ancestral presence to repossess his warriors with their red caps.
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Etymologists say the word ‘festival’ derives from the Latin ‘festum’. Anthropologists have followed the word through centuries and civilisations as its meaning evolved across cultures and disciplines. Émile Durkheim and James George Frazer were influential figures in early anthropology. Scholars, in summaries, say that to Durkheim and Frazer, festivals are communal expressions of belief and solidarity. They say that with festivals, people renew their social and spiritual bonds. In Ofala, we see that they are right.
Leo Frobenius, German ethnologist and archaeologist, was in Africa on multiple occasions between 1904 and 1935. In the 1910s, Frobenius observed festivals in diverse places; he documented them and saw in them vital celebrations of familial, tribal, and religious life deeply rooted in ancestral history and beliefs.
The German observed right. Ofala and similar festivals bind communities; they celebrate social cohesion and keep sacred traditions alive. They fuse communal history with spiritual renewal and survival. In them, the rhythm of everyday life comes alive.
Ofala has grown to attract great brands. Its major sponsor is telecoms giant, Globacom, which has been there since 2011. I have very solid people in Globacom, which makes me an envoy of its greenery and deepens my interest in everything, particularly, festivals in which the company is involved.
The Yoruba tell their children: When you behold greatness, honour it with reverence. Tí o bá ri olá, pón olá lé. That is what I am doing here. It is what Globacom’s long partnership with the Obi and Ofala does; an act of reverence to the greatness of the culture that birthed them.
From Lisabi in Abeokuta to Ojude Oba in Ijebu-Ode, and from Ofala in Onitsha to other vibrant festivals across the land, Globacom’s partnerships reflect a philosophy rooted in understanding that just as a zebra is defined by its stripes, a people are defined by their culture. In other words, a person without culture is like a zebra without stripes. Sustaining culture is sustaining the people.
That is what corporate sponsorship does to cultural events. Obi’s people say in a proverb, “Nku di na mba na-eghere mba nri (The firewood of a community cooks for that community).” Globacom’s firewood has kept the flame of the festivals it supports alive, warming the hearts of millions who gather yearly to honour tradition.
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To sponsor a festival is one thing; but to nurture its essence and future is another. Through resources and resourcefulness, community engagement, and cultural reverence, Globacom has redefined what corporate responsibility can mean. That is what I gleened from the firm. I agree with those words. Shakespeare writes in Hamlet that “The purpose of playing… is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.” The playwright suggests that the aim of acting and theater is to reflect reality, showing “virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure”.
By supporting these festivals, the company, Glo, holds up a mirror to our shared identity, allowing us to see ourselves, our beauty, our resilience, our history.
Globacom became a major sponsor of the Ofala Festival in 2011 and has sustained the sponsorship yearly since then. Fourteen years on, like the Ekwe and the Udu, two Igbo drums beating the same rhythm, the company’s unwavering support has demonstrated that corporate success and cultural preservation can walk (and work) together. I read this out and my friend, the Igbo man, chipped in: “Egbe bere, ugo bere” (let the kite perch and let the eagle perch). When business and tradition walk together, culture gains.
The Yoruba routinely remind us that it is when we walk in the rain that we know who truly walks with us. Companies get involved in arts and culture for various reasons. Some, like leeches, place their names beside great traditions so as to benefit from the greatness. But what I see with Glo here is much more than profit in cash and kind. I see a telecoms giant, wholly indigenous, that has chosen to walk tall with the ancestors, deploying its enormous muscle to connect the past and their history to the world of the modern. One word defines this; it is renewal.
The rich who spend on their people’s historical and cultural essence are not frivolous; neither are they stupid. It is patriotism; if you like, call it cultural nationalism. The wealth of culture, like all wealth, grows when shared.
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Cultural promotion yields dividends that confound account books. It stitches the torn fabric of community; it keeps the hearth of local enterprise burning, and rekindles pride in who we are and where we come from. It renews pride in our shared heritage. It makes us all richer.
If you do well the society notes and records all you do for posterity. The Alake and paramount ruler of Egbaland, Oba Adedotun Gbadebo said in 2017 that “Glo is number one in culture and support for the people. The company pioneered per second billing and others followed.” The Alake wrote that admirable testimonial eight years ago. The flag of patriotism is still there on the mountain top, flying.
In Ofala, the king dances the dance of joy of a fresh start. In the drumbeats and dance steps, the king delights that yam is harvested as proof of life, not of death. The beats retell a people’s story as told by the ancestors. A people are as strong as the stories they tell of themselves.
This weekend (Friday and Saturday), Onitsha will be draped in Globacom’s green, the colour of growth and renewal. Colour green in French is vert, the Italian call it verde, the Spanish, in Castilian voice, say it is verde. They all draw their source from the Latin word for green which is viridis, a word that denotes freshness and vitality. History is an endless rope. English words, verdant and viridian, have this same Roman ancestry. To viridis again belongs “a large family of other words that evoke vigor, growth, and life: virere (to be green, to be vigorous), vis (strength), vir (man, masculine singular), ver (spring), virga (stem, rod), perhaps even virtus (courage, virtue).” For those insights, check French professor of medieval history, Michel Pastoureau’s ‘Green: The History of a Color’ as translated by Jody Gladding.
Whenever I meet Globacom chairman, Dr Mike Adenuga Jr, I intend to ask him the specific reason he chose colour green for his giant.
I congratulate the Obi and Glo as the moon glows on Ofala. In the dance of that festival, drums speak, colours sing, and heritage dances. In perfect rhythm, the people breathe, act and rejoice as tradition bathes in innovation. With the moon shining brighter, Obi’s land is renewed this weekend. Congratulations, Agbogidi.
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OPINION: ‘Federal Highways of Horror’

By Lasisi Olagunju
You know where the latest anti-government journalists are in Lagos? Kirikiri. On a day that Nigerians were celebrating an additional spur of 100 kilometres to the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Road, the killjoys of Kirikiri struck. They took a happy, joyous people of 200 million on a gruelling, bumpy ride across the country. They ran painful stories of craters and potholes and headlined them: ‘Federal Highways of Horror.’
It is a miracle that our Minister of Works, Dave Umahi, has not pummeled the Lagos newspaper called Vanguard. It ran the bad stories. It is still unclear why the minister has not rebuked its owner and spanked its journalists for publishing what they were not supposed to publish. Not once, but twice, last week they allowed the devil to use them to tell stories of collapsed federal roads from the north to the south. Their stories portrayed hardworking Umahi as a failure in monumental proportions.
Those journalists, injected with an overdose of impudence, said they did an investigation. They painted a grim picture of federal highways across multiple Nigerian states suffering severe neglect. They said the neglect has made travel dangerous, expensive, and time-consuming. They wrote as if they were sent to pull down a house built by God.
In the South, they came up with a long list of bad roads. They said northern states shared the same story of pain. They described some roads as crater-filled horror scenes; some as barely passable, others as sites long abandoned by contractors. On the few ones harbouring contractors, the signs they displayed showed slow men at work.
It does not rain; it pours. Amid narratives of millions of bad federal roads, Umahi made himself professor last week. “I am a professor of Engineering,” he announced on national television. Professor Umahi? I pray he is not asked to name the king who blessed him with that chieftaincy title. Some Arise News television journalists, whose eyes lack lashes, forced him to make himself professor. They habitually tug at the hem of Umahi’s professorial gown. They pelt him with questions that should never be asked. They remind our working Minister of Works that a river that is not dirty does not hide its depth. Last week, they demanded the cost of federal roads per kilometre. Who does that? And, I am happy, Minister Umahi gave it back to them. He said they are illiterates. Yeah. Don’t they know that for our federal government, spirits decide the total costs of projects? If they were truly not illiterates, they would know that this government is a wholesale seller and buyer; it is too rich to do retail business measured with short tape rules and elementary school rulers.
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Oyo State governor, Seyi Makinde, thought because he was governor and engineer he could join the talk and say that calculating the average cost per kilometre was possible in road construction. He was similarly told by our minister to shut up or he would be summoned to a debate on the very difficult mathematics of road construction. Umahi said he is Makinde’s senior in engineering. Senior Prefect Umahi described electrical electronics engineers as ‘technicians’ who must not speak on project costs.
Now, what we are told to hold as knowledge from Professor Umahi is that it is impossible to know how much a kilometre of road costs in Nigeria until such projects are completed. God is great. The World Bank must have missed that wisdom back in 1999 when it created the Road Costs Knowledge System (ROCKS), a database that calmly lists what it costs to build or fix a kilometre of road from Umahi’s village in Ebonyi to Makinde’s Ajia in Ibadan. A key feature of the World Bank’s ROCKS is its record of actual and estimated road work costs, clearly defined per kilometre and per square metre. Apparently, only in Nigeria do roads and their costs defy mathematics and logic.
In utter helplessness, we watch the roads and their costs stretch and shrink like chewing gum depending on whose fingers are working the calculator. While other countries classify their roads by type and cost per kilometre, we prefer a more spiritual approach – if you are an enemy, call it faith-based budgeting.
Clarity is the father of all openness. Why is it missing here? Again, that is not a question or a proverb that we must hear again from anyone, especially professional troublemakers called journalists. What is the problem of Nigerian journalists? Because their eyes have no skin, they query power. Where a cup is half-full, what our journalists see all their lives is a half-empty cup. They didn’t start today. They are historically insolent. What they do to this government, they did to even our ancestor, Lord Lugard, in 1913, one full year before Amalgamation. On 8 March, 1913, one rude journalist working with a newspaper called Lagos Weekly Record wrote that Lugard was a wicked, ruthless character, “a man whose walking stick is a pistol and whose thoughts by day and dreams at night are punitive expeditions and military patrols.”
And what was Lugard’s reaction to such attacks? He fought them with laws and knocks. At a point, he documented their impudence with a letter to his wife, Flora. In the letter, he bunched the journalist with all the other “educated native” who deserved no sympathy. He wrote about the native enemy of the state: “His loud and arrogant conceit are distasteful to me, his lack of natural dignity and of courtesy antagonise me.” Lugard’s biographer, Margery Perham, graciously remembered to put this in the book: ‘Lugard: The Years of Authority’ on page 585. If you can’t get Perham but are fortunate to get Jonathan Derrick’s ‘Africa, Empire and Fleet Street’, check the details there. They are on page 115.
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So, as Lugard, the creator of Nigeria rightly wrote, the Nigerian journalist is arrogant and lacks courtesy. Such are called alárífín in Yoruba. In the days of old, the crime of àrífín carried capital punishment. Aróbafín l’oba npa. But today’s journalists are lucky that they are in a republican democracy. Even then, someone should pay for their bad behaviour. The slap they get from ministers like Umahi is the first tranche of the cost of their bad manners.
What should the state do to the conceited who won’t let expressway contracts be awarded expressly in peace? I have a solution to their problem: Like the Vanguard, they should all be relocated to Kirikiri; all of them, from Lagos to Ibadan; from Ibadan to Lagos. And, if I had my way, I would tip off Umahi and all his harangued hardworking colleagues to award contracts this week for more cells for enemies of the president’s coastal elephant and other projects of renewal. Their new accommodation should enjoy maximum security. They deserve Kirikiri, Kirikiri deserves them.
What comes fast cannot be delayed again. It happened to cricket. Cricket set his wedding day and simultaneously asked his doctor to start preparing for child delivery. The contracts for a safe house for Nigerian journalists can be awarded today, or, latest tomorrow. There is no need for formalities. Exactly like the Coastal Road contract, this is another no for competitive bidding. We already know contractors with proven track records of expertise in casting beams and building cells. We select and hit the site digging. We can fix the contract cost after the job is done.
From this point, we see long shadows over the country; there is no clarity about important things government do. But, one day soon, like sun rays, clarity will force its way in; it is the father of openness.
Now, beyond the scaffold of satire, I wish I could just tear the mask and tell Minister Umahi that what we have today under his watch is road transportation without roads. And he is Minister of Works in charge of roads. It is a shame.
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In May this year (2025), I wrote ‘The shame of Ibadan-Ife-Ilesa road.’ The first two paragraphs of the piece read:
“Mr Dele Alake represents Ekiti State in the Federal Executive Council. Alhaji Gboyega Oyetola represents Osun State in the Federal Executive Council. Mr Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo represents Ondo State in the Federal Executive Council. All three of them are the president’s core men. Each time the council sits and approves federal roads for reconstruction in states other than theirs, what goes on in their minds? They are very powerful ministers but all federal roads that lead to their states are decrepit and abandoned. And they know. So, what is the problem?
“The Ibadan-Ife-Ilesa road that links these ministers’ states to Lagos and to the North is the worst in Nigeria. Senate leader, Opeyemi Bamidele, is from Ekiti State. He belongs to the president’s inner caucus. Tough-talking PDP Senator Francis Fadahunsi represents Ife-Ijesa senatorial district. There are seven other senators and several Reps of APC and PDP from those three states. Has anyone heard them say or do anything to make that road well again? Do these people go home and how do they get home whenever they go home? Nigerians of all states lose lives and limbs on that road daily. Death by installments on the road is harrowing and it is a daily experience. It is a fitting tribute to the attention we pay to our people’s welfare.”
That was on May 12, 2025 (five months ago). If the road was “going, going” when I wrote that piece, it is gone now. Gone. An ex-senator told a columnist in May this year that N20 billion had been “released for repairs” of that road. In August 2025, Umahi announced the release of 30 percent of the contract sum. How much is the contract sum? Don’t even go there. If you go there, the minister will be angry. He will remind you that you are not a road professor. If you must ask any question at all, ask what has happened to what Umahi said was released, his 30 percent. Ask, because, nothing that is worth one kobo has happened on that road this year.
But the total collapse of the road did not come to me as a surprise. By the noon of May 12, 2025 when I published the article, one of the senators I called out in the piece called me.
“They have just read to me what you wrote.” He told me. Big men don’t read newspapers; newspapers are read to big men. Senator said he laughed at my naivety. He wondered why I was disturbing myself writing rubbish about a contract that may never be executed.
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“Do you think Nigeria can ever be better than it is? (Sé ìwo rò wípé Nigeria lè dára jù báyìí lo ni?)” He asked and proceeded to shame me with names, facts and figures all of which answered his question with a no. He said I should record and publish all he said. I laughed at the audacity of his directive. An orphan like me will never dare court a wound on the back.
Besides, I was taught early in life to make my eyes flexible enough for them to see the nose. That was the wisdom that eluded Partridge who claimed to know it all, and because he made that claim, he blocked his own opportunity to learn Ifá from the pigeon. ‘Mo m’Obàrà, mo m’Ofún,’ tí kò j e kí ẹyẹlé k’ àparò n’Ífá (I know Obàrà, I know Ofún’ made the pigeon not to teach Ifá to the partridge).
So, my pigeon listened attentively to the incantation from the hawk. This senator ended his long, windy speech with a submission that the Ibadan-Ife-Ilesa road, and other federal roads in the South-West were decrepit and abandoned because the Works Minister “does not like hearing South-West at all.” I heard him and sighed.
When the outspoken gentleman spoke with me five months ago, he was a PDP senator. He has since moved to Dave Umahi’s party. Now, I wonder if he will still say what he said now that he is in APC.
Author and literary critic, Robert M. Wren (1928-1989), in 1982 wrote “The Last Bridge on ‘The Road’: Soyinka’s Rage and Compassion.” He tells us that in 1962, Wole Soyinka, in a Lagos Daily Express essay entitled ‘Bad Roads, Bad Users, Bad Deaths’ captured Nigeria’s enduring road crisis. Writing with outrage and in satire, Soyinka lamented the deadly state of the highways. He agonised over the state of the Lagos–Ibadan road (Mile 34); there was what he called “the death-trap at Ife”, and “the last bridge on Ikorodu Road.” Soyinka recalled and deplored a senator’s refusal to carry a crash victim with a spinal cord injury to Ibadan. More than six decades later, the roads are still bad, very bad; they still kill; senators are still cold-blooded; they still wonder why anyone bothers to care that the roads are bad.
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Edo GIS Denies Report Of 17-year-old Purchasing 14 Hectares Of Land

The Edo Geographic Information Systems (Edo GIS) has debunked reports circulating on social media that a 17-year-old boy purchased 14 hectares of land in Edo State and was subsequently denied a Certificate of Occupancy (C of O) by Governor Monday Okpebholo.
In a statement released by the Director of Press, Tunde Egbiremonlen, the agency clarified that no such transaction exists in its records.
According to the statement, a 17-year-old is legally considered a minor and, as such, is not eligible to register land ownership under Edo State law.
“The Edo GIS system will automatically reject such applications due to age restrictions,” the statement read
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“In the first place, a 17-year-old cannot apply for registration of land in Edo state because that age bracket is assumed to be a minor; the Edo GIS system will automatically reject the application.
“To compound the objective of the rumour-mongers, the peddlers of the story did not explain where in Edo state, such 14,000 hectares were purchased by the minor.
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Egbiremonlen also pointed out inconsistencies in the viral report, noting that it failed to mention the specific location of the alleged 14 hectares and described the story as “deliberately mischievous and fabricated.”
He accused the originators of the false information of attempting to cause disaffection and blackmail the government, saying significant funds were spent to circulate the fake news.
Edo GIS urged the public to disregard the claims and remain vigilant against disinformation aimed at undermining the government’s credibility.
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