Opinion

The abduction of Pa Reuben Fasoranti (OPINION)

Published

3 years ago

November 6, 2022

By Festus Adedayo

In 1996, his car riddled with bullet holes inflicted by General Sani Abacha’s goons aimed at assassinating him, Yoruba Afenifere Leader, Senator Abraham Adesanya, had made a bullseye statement. That statement appeared to explain the raging furore among the leadership of the pan-Yoruba socio-cultural group today.

Adesanya’s father had 20 children. He was the only one initiated into the awo secret cult by the older Adesanya. As such, Senator Adesanya was known to be highly fortified with the powers of his ancestors. It was a time when the demonic Nigerian state under Abacha sought to wipe out any dissent to its infernal rule.

The then Lagos police commissioner had inspected the spatter of bullet holes on Adesanya’s car and concluded that no human being could have survived that assassination attempt. Alarmed and apprehensive of further associating with Adesanya, his driver, who survived the assassination attempt with him, had immediately eloped, sacked himself from Adesanya’s employ, fearful for his life. When told of his driver’s abscondment, Adesanya was said to have retorted in Yoruba that Omode lo’n se e. O ye ko mo wipe bi agbe o ba fo, omi inu re ko le danu – he is being childish; otherwise, he would have realized that if the gourd does not break, the water inside it cannot be spilled.

Last week, the gourd of Yoruba leadership broke – or was broken – and the water has since spilled like a burst cistern. The forceful break of the gourd however has a consistent tragic trajectory. The destruction of the gourd has a consistency in the recent hitorico-political tale of the Yoruba. The gourd was forcefully broken by the same evil dramattis personae, political merchants and vultures, who have consistently sought an option reminiscent of biblical Samson’s – to crumble a house that has proved impenetrable to their attempt to make it a house of Mephistopheles.

Since the founding in London in 1945 of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, the progenitor of Afenifere, by Yoruba leaders – Adeyemo Alakija, president; Yekini Ojikutu, vice president; Obafemi Awolowo, General Secretary and others like Akinola Maja, Oni Akerele, Akintola Willliams, Saburi Biobaku, Abiodun Akerele, D.O.A. Oguntoye, Ayo Rosiji and others – five persons have made futile attempts to destroy this Yoruba foremost leadership organization and its Afenifere mutation.

The first anvil of its destruction was Nnamdi Azikiwe. Though his attack on the leaders of the Egbe preceded its founding, the tribal tension in the Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM) was Zik’s – as he was fondly known – opportunity to sound a death knell on Egbe Omo Oduduwa, the first major attempt at unity by the Yoruba. The Egbe had huge prospects to unite these people who had, for centuries, splintered in discord like the seeds in a walnut pod.

In the February 1941 split in the NYM over the contest for the Legislative Council seat between Samuel Akisanya (who later became the Odemo of Isara) and Ernest Ikoli, erstwhile Daily Service editor, Zik and his West African Pilot newspaper pitched their tents with Akisanya. Yoruba leaders queued behind and voted for Ikoli. This generated further tension between 1946 and 1948 in the NYM, eventually and effectively leading to the death of this anti-colonial government movement.

Azikiwe didn’t hide his disdain for the Egbe and its leaders. Indeed, Egbe Omo Oduduwa had not been formally inaugurated by the time Azikiwe’s NCNC, in December 1947, sponsored protest demonstrations against it, using the editor of the Pilot, F. O. Coker, as the peg of the protest. Zik and his party, the NCNC, went on to form the Yoruba Federal Union (YFU) as a counterpoise to and as such, weaken the Egbe. This was at a time of growing solidarity among the Yoruba. Zik and his crew launched the YFU on June 12, 1948, at Glover Hall, Lagos but were so tactless as to make the speakers at the inauguration be Azikiwe himself, Mbonu Ojike, a known Zik apostle and columnist in the Pilot, as well as Oged Macaulay, a known Zik ally. The YFU however suffered the fate of all politically concocted contrivances – it faded out.

Zik would however not relent. Deploying a weekly newspaper called Ijebu Weekly Echo to achieve their aim, Zik and his group pilloried the Egbe headed by Sir Adeyemo Alakija. Bitter, crude and vulgar personal insults were splashed on them by Igbo, mainly residents of Lagos, using such words as “bane of our age,” “a nihilist, totalitarian, fascist organization,” as well as “dirty exhibition of egocentric stupidity, ethnocentric arrogance and capitalized idiocy” on the Egbe Omo Oduduwa. This was followed by an incendiary editorial comment in the Pilot of September 8, 1948, which said, “Henceforth, the cry must be one of the battle against Egbe Omo Oduduwa, its leaders at home and abroad, uphill and down dale, in the streets of Nigeria and in the residences of its advocates… There is no going back until the Fascist Organization of Sir Adeyemo has been dismembered.” Osita Agwuna, a leading Zikist, after his conviction for sedition, had written an open letter he entitled “To all the people of Nigeria and all Zikists” where he advocated attacks on the Egbe.

The second attack on the Egbe was led by the mercurial Adegoke Adelabu, an acolyte of Zik. Though his disdain for both Awolowo and the highly perceived Ijebu people-dominated Egbe was historical, the incendiary age-long intra-ethnic fissure and struggle for power between the Ijebu and the Ibadan was the peg. By the 19th century, Ibadan had become a very potent military force but its prowess was crippled by the embargo placed on the importation of guns and powder on their routes by the twin nations of Ijebu and Egba. Peeved, Ibadan, in the rainy seasons of 1877, matched out its military arsenal against the Ijebu and Egba, with the aim of forcing open their roads to the coast and conquer, as well as absorb, their territories into Ibadan. Unfortunately, this expedition failed and the Egba and Ijebu thereafter aligned with all enemies of Ibadan like the Ilorin, reflected in the treaty of 1886 signed to recognize the independence of the Ekitiparapo. Even after this, their mutual hostility continued. The Ijebu distrusted and feared the Ibadan. These pre-colonial polities and realities gestated into and found their way to the founding of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa.

Ibadan elites, preening themselves as warriors who would not play second fiddle to the Ijebu, rallied around to thwart the emergence of Awolowo as the modern-day dominant power. They created a counterpoise to the Egbe which they called Egbe Omo Ibile, Society for Native Sons, and appointed as leader, Adegoke Adelabu, The Ibadan Egbe later coalesced into the Ibadan Peoples Party (IPP) or the Mabolaje. The sub-ethnic threat from the IPP to Awolowo’s Egbe was so intense that, apart from the cross-carpeting of five IPP House of Assembly members to the side of the Action Group which ensured that Awolowo’s AG formed the cabinet in 1951, the IPP subsequently won the 1954, 1956 and 1959 elections. A death knell on the Ibadan advocacy however came in the commission of enquiry into the affairs of the Ibadan District Council which indicted Adelabu of financial malfeasance and eventually his death via car crash in 1958. This led to an intra-national uprising in Ibadan, with Mabolaje splintering into the Mojid Agbaje and Adisa Adeoye factions. Both groups however failed to muster enough opposition to the AG and Egbe Omo Oduduwa which eventually swallowed them.

Erstwhile editor of the Daily Service, a lawyer and polemicist who took up the newspaper’s editorship from Sese Ikoli, Chief S. L. Akintola, was the third architect of the plot to destroy Egbe Omo Oduduwa. Akintola had come into journalistic prominence by launching one of the most visceral attacks on Azikiwe’s claim of an attempted assassination on him. As editor of the Service, Akintola cut the ground from under the feet of Zik when he published the whole pamphlet alleging Zik’s assassination in one issue of the newspaper with the title, Assassination de luxe, price one penny. In the thick of the AG rump’s attempt to remove him as Premier, Akintola also formed a counterpoise to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa which he called Egbe Omo Olofin, Olofin being one of the cognomens of Oduduwa.

Named at first Egbe Omo Yoruba and later on, Egbe Omo Olofin, the major undisguised aim of the group was to finally destroy Awolowo who was by then serving a ten-year jail term in Calabar prisons. This Egbe was conceived by political arch-enemies of Awolowo and new converts who believed that his jailing had put a wedge on his relevance. Some of the coupists were the former Administrator of the Western Region in the Emergency year, Dr. M. A. Majekodunmi, who was personal physician to the Prime Minister; Chief H. O. Davies; some high court judges and traditional rulers. Some leaders of the Awolowo’s Egbe were also seen in the new Egbe, Members of the new Egbe then issued a press release where they castigated Awolowo after their maiden meeting held on January 3, 1964.

The fourth threat to the pan-Yoruba socio-political group came from a man known as the Arole AwolowoIo, Awolowo’s heir, Chief Bola Ige. His loss in the Wednesday, January 27, 1999, electoral college of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) held at the D’Rovans hotel in Ibadan threw up the messy tussle in the fold of the political children of Awolowo. At the end of the exercise, Ige got nine votes as against 14 for Chief Olu Falae. Since that election, Afenifere and the post-Awo leadership of Yorubaland have never been the same again. Though he disguised his roiling anger at the Ijebu Four – Olaniwun Ajayi, Ayo Adebanjo, Abraham Adesanya, and Pa Onasanya – with the claim that he was “gaudily joyful” at Falae’s emergence, Ige’s actions and utterances thereafter showed that he was poised for a fight with the mafia. One of the things he did was to get his long-time friend and fellow Ijesa Yoruba, Justice Adewale Thompson, to form the Yoruba Council of Elders (YCE) to rival and indeed factionalize Afenifere. Alajobi, a group headed by Bishop Emmanuel Gbonigi’s intervention couldn’t stop the derailment. After Ige’s assassination, the crisis metastasized, so much that Afenifere was broken into two factions, one headed by Fasoranti who had been handed the leadership of the group after Adesanya fell ill and Ayo Fasanmi, Ige’s friend. By the time of his assassination in 2001, Ige left a Yoruba land that was roiling in leadership crises.

The fifth threat to the Afenifere and the quest of the Yoruba is Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Using his singular win in the 2003 governorship election and the loss of his AD colleagues in the west as the propelling force, Tinubu immediately began what ostensibly was the reunification of Yoruba politics under his roof. It was however a veneer for his presidential and prebendal ambition. Deploying a huge war chest of resources of his Lagos State, he funded virtually all political activities in the region, literally heaving all his ex-AD governor colleagues, except Adebayo Adefarati, inside his pocket. By then, it had become clear to him that the Afenifere mafia who collectively ensured his emergence against Funsho Williams in 1999 would fight him to a standstill, having fallen out with him.

With all he had, Tinubu battled this Yoruba leadership hegemony, infiltrating their ranks and creating a counterpoise, the Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG). At Fasanmi’s death, his group appointed Senator Biyi Durojaiye as Afenifere leader to further delegitimize Fasoranti’s leadership. When Durojaye also died, the Tinubu group appointed another Afenifere leader. With the support of his governor colleague, Bisi Akande, who had become his bag carrier, Tinubu dismantled the AD which was the most impregnable political base of the Afenifere socio-political group, formed the Action Congress, later with Atiku, and which, in 2013/2014, went into alliance with the ultra-conservative north to form today’s All Progressives Congress (APC).

In the build-up to the 2023 presidential election, there has been a frenetic scavenging by candidates for ethnic legitimacy as affirmation of their bids. Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, Abubakar, began the forage when he asked his kin at an Arewa event in Kaduna to vote for him. Being a northerner, he told them, he was the most suited to know where the shoe pinched the region. Southeast is already agog with Peter Obi. His presidential bid is almost an obsession for a region which sees in his presidency the first opportunity for a “highly vilified” Igbo stock to come back to the mainstream.

Until the Akure fiasco, Tinubu wore the Olusegun Obasanjo visor of 1999. In that year’s presidential election, a high chunk of Yoruba leadership openly disclaimed Obasanjo who was seen as a Yoruba enemy. This antagonism led to Obasanjo’s election by “outsiders”. Frustrated by the prospect of a repeat of the route Obasanjo trod, Tinubu’s desperation to procure Yoruba leadership legitimacy, no matter how crooked or brimming with fraud, becomes understandable.

His recent visit to the Akure home of Pa Reuben Fasoranti has been generating a lot of seismic comments. Like Michael Adekunle Ajasin and Abraham Adesanya before him, Fasoranti had ceded his headship of Afenifere to Adebanjo almost two years ago when it became clear that age would impede his leadership. This same Fasoranti was fought to a standstill by the Tinubu group whose goal was to make his leadership inconsequential. Most of the pilgrims with Tinubu to Akure were conscripts of the coup that unsuccessfully delegitimized Fasoranti and serially appointed renegade leadership for Afenifere.

Tinubu, acting as if coerced to go pay this same man a condolence visit after his daughter was brutally killed by Fulani herdsmen, literally urinated on the balcony of the Yoruba leader. In an attempt to deflect arrows shot at Muhammadu Buhari’s marauding, bloodthirsty kin, Tinubu had asked “where are the cows?” He similarly exhibited such conceit to highly respected Chief Olu Falae during the invasion of his farm by Fulani herdsmen.

The Akure pilgrimage was an abduction of 96-year-old Fasoranti by elements who spent over a decade undermining his Yoruba leadership. They took advantage of Baba’s advanced age and the suspicious company of turncoats who enveloped him to get Tinubu to reap where he did not sow. The coup reeked of corruption, abduction, and coldblooded execution of a most clinically infernal hijack of ‘power’ in Yoruba history. It was originally convoked by a group of hungry lay-about who went by the name Conscience of Yoruba Nation, a name reminiscent of a Babangida era ragtag military apologia crusade which was masterminded by a man who claimed to be driven by conscience but whose spineless interventions brimmed of a ‘conscienceless conscience’ even as he sought to grease his esophagus from crumbs that fell off Babangida’s table. In Akure, that Conscience of Yoruba Nation gathering was then criminally labeled with the mis-biology of an Afenifere endorsement of Tinubu.

The fraudulence of the whole enterprise was to be revealed when the coupists issued a communiqué, not under the conscienceless banner with which they invited conferees to Akure but Afenifere. Respected Prof Akin Onigbinde said that not only was the assemblage “essentially a gathering of chieftains of APC in the South West,” many of them couldn’t claim linkage to Afenifere nor did they attend its meetings in the last ten years. They were just interested in the spoils of dollars allegedly left after the disastrous show. They then added a disgraceful icing on the cake of the infamy when they concocted a Fasoranti claim that he had taken over the headship of Afenifere which he vacated almost two years earlier. This lie thrived for a few hours, landed with a thud thereafter and scattered into smithereens.

Instead of going through the futile attempt to abduct Afenifere and its leadership, I wonder why the group behind this penkele mesi – the offerees and offerors of legitimacy – did not deploy ARG for the legitimacy-hunting game; or simply create a brand new organization. That would have been neater in this last-minute tan’na w’ebi – grope in the dark for kin – that they are engrossed with.

Related Topics:Afenifere Festus Adedayo Tinubu

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Opinion

Super Bowl: Can Africa Spring Up anew?

Published

4 days ago

March 28, 2026

Trends Admin

Super Bowl: Can Africa Spring Up anew?

With a landmass of approximately 9.83 million km² and a population of 334–336 million as of 2025—making it the third-largest country in the world—the United States is massive. It is four times the size of Algeria, Africa’s largest country, and dwarfs Nigeria, the continent’s most populous nation.

The United States is a titan among nations. Who knows—perhaps neologists will coin a new term if the U.S. eventually purchases or forcefully takes Greenland from Denmark, further surging its landmass and population. When this massive scale fuses with unparalleled infrastructure, world-class venues, and a vast market, the USA becomes an ideal host for international sporting events with strong returns on investment.

Between 1904 and 2025, the USA hosted one FIFA World Cup (with another to be co-hosted in 2026 with Mexico and Canada), four Summer Olympics, four Winter Olympics, and one FIBA Basketball World Cup. Unlike soccer, which is still finding its footing in the United States—even with Major League Soccer (MLS) having existed for 30 years—American football is the undisputed number-one sport. The Super Bowl—born from Lamar Hunt’s “light-bulb moment”—is the crown jewel. The Super Bowl has become what sociologists call a secular ritual, binding the social fabric of Americans together.

Beyond the Vince Lombardi Trophy, the Super Bowl has evolved into a global marketing masterpiece. From the famous 1984 Apple commercial introducing the Macintosh, which is studied in MBA classes worldwide, to the 1979 Mean Joe Greene Coca-Cola commercial that showed genteel human warmth winning over fearsomeness, the intentionality of brands going head-to-head with rivals has been a recurring feature of every Super Bowl.

While the USA is always attractive for hosting events, the Super Bowl’s success pivots on intellection that results in ingenious marketing. For the recent Super Bowl LX on February 8, 2026, two brands mirrored David Ben-Gurion’s principle of “taking the fight to the enemy.” Pepsi and Anthropic’s Claude entered with an offensive strategy: Claude’s AI ad—“Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”—was a calculated strike in the competitive AI market, while Pepsi’s polar bear blind test revived the sulphurous rivalry with Coca-Cola. Many companies use their ad slots to build brand identity and equity or announce arrival in the business world.

Where does Africa stand in this Super Bowl business and sports calculus? While developed nations are making groundbreaking launches with chutzpah and creativity from creative shops—all resulting in a participatory economy—Africa’s involvement is largely an on-the-field display of Négritude spirit and ravenous passion.

For Africa, the Super Bowl has become a “badge of honor” through representation. Mohammed Elewonibi, a Nigerian raised in Canada, was the first player of African origin to win a Super Bowl (XXVI, 1992, with the Washington Redskins). Since then, nearly 41 players of Nigerian origin or heritage have won—the most of any African country—including six who tasted victory with the recent Seattle Seahawks: Uchenna Nwosu, Nick Emmanwori, Boye Mafe, Jaxon Smith-Njigba (of Nigerian and Sierra Leonean roots), Jalen Milroe, and Olu Oluwatimi.

Yet, as impressive as African athletes are in making the continent proud, we have blatantly failed to translate that audience engagement into commercial windfalls like the Super Bowl on home soil. It is appalling that most of Africa’s sporting events—the Durban July Handicap, Senegalese wrestling (Laamb), or the Safari Rally—have not fully harnessed the intersection of sports and marketing. Even the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON), despite its 3.45 billion cumulative viewers (far surpassing the Super Bowl’s ~125–127 million), lacks comparable marketing prestige. Why are there no global product launches during our matches? Why aren’t AI giants capitalizing on Africa’s tech startup boom?

Africa is being fed celery when it deserves the whole salad. This asymmetry stems from structural economic factors, but the genie is out of the bottle—we must be forward-looking. To turn African sporting events into “goldmines,” we must reinvent the industry, much as Cirque du Soleil did for the circus. Facing declining audiences, rising costs, and fierce competition, it lost its grip on the circus business. Cirque, however, escaped the dying circus business by reinventing it.

By viewing competition through a new lens, Africa can transform massive viewership into unparalleled economic advantage and value. Just as Cirque du Soleil created uncontested market space, African sports must adopt what W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne called a “Blue Ocean Strategy”—creating uncontested market space and making competition irrelevant. Much as we can not compete toe to toe with advanced economies , we should not follow them like zombies.

In their book Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, the authors highlight how companies in “red oceans” fight for shrinking profits in crowded, defined markets. African sports events currently sit in those crowded red oceans. To elevate them, we need disruptive leaders willing to venture into untapped markets, create new demand, and unlock unlimited growth opportunities.

Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, in their book The Experience Economy, wrote about the need to transform commodities into experiences. As Africans, we have been able to move our sporting events from the commodity stage to the third stage—service delivery—but the experience stage is the North Star we should aspire to reach.

Our cultures, as varied as they are, define us. Despite dilution by Western civilization, our culture stands uneroded, like the mountains that litter our landscape and serve as a canopy to preserve our common heritage. This means our forefathers took culture into the realm of experience—something we are still grappling with in our sporting spectacles today. For us to make headway, our cultures—already bubbling with experience—must mix seamlessly with our sporting spectacles.

Now is the time to merge cultural events like the Eyo Festival, Argungu Festival, Gnaoua World Music Festival, Osun Osogbo Festival, Meskel Festival, and others with our sporting spectacles—that is the Blue Ocean Strategy. This can only be achieved through close collaboration between leaders in sports administration and marketing professionals selling experiences, and the time is now. As this is done, a line from David Diop’s poem Africa—“That is your Africa springing up anew”—would fill our lips.

The experience stage is the nirvana!

Toluwalope Shodunke

Can be reached via tolushodunke@yahoo.com

Super Bowl: Can Africa Spring Up anew?

Opinion

Dele Momodu vs. Fani-Kayode: The pot fighting the kettle

Published

6 days ago

March 27, 2026

Trends Admin

Dele Momodu vs. Fani-Kayode: The pot fighting the kettle

Tunde Odesola

(Published in The PUNCH, on Friday, March 27, 2026)

Back in the Italy of 44 BC, there lived a babalawo called Spurinna. Spurinna was a haruspice. In ancient Rome, a haruspice was a priest or soothsayer who practised divination by inspecting the entrails–specifically the liver and gallbladder–of sacrificed animals, to interpret the messages of the gods. Spurinna was popular in his time and was much sought after. He was like Nigeria’s present-day A-list religious leaders.

So, it was to Spurinna that the Roman military general, Julius Caesar, went when the exceptionally important month of March beckoned. In ancient Rome, March was the first month of the year and the start of military campaigns and farming seasons. Caesar offered a bull for sacrifice; Spurinna inspected its entrails, communed with the gods, who showed him that the sacrificed bull lacked a heart, a metaphor for the pool of blood ahead.

Therefore, the diviner went up to Caesar, hit his staff on the ground, and warned, “Roman General, I see danger in March! Beware of the Ides of March! Danger lurks, Caesar. Yes, the Ides of March, beware!” And he left.

But, Caesar, engrossed in statecraft, never remembered the warning until the day the siegecraft of his enemies subdued him at the Senate, and he fell to their swordcraft, as he was stabbed 23 times by his fellow senators, crying, “Et tu, Brute,” at the final stab. Ironically, the assassination that was meant to save the Roman Republic from Caesar’s dictatorship led to its end, giving rise to the Roman Empire.

Just like Caesar, two Nigerian politicians, Chief Dele Momodu and Chief Femi Fani-Kayode, in the March of 2026, forgot the Ides of March. They threw caution to the wind and engaged each other in a dogfight that members of the National Union of Road Transport Workers had outgrown. The bloodless power tussle between the forces of Alhaji Tajudeen Baruwa and Alhaji Musiliu Akinsanya aka MC Oluomo over control of the national headquarters of the NURTW in Abuja a few days ago shows that ‘Up National’ members are far more civil than many Nigerian political leaders.

If we share the same parentage, both Momodu and Fani-Kayode, at 65, should pick pieces of meat ahead of me at the family table. Ẹ̀gbọ́n Momodu should pick meat before ẹ̀gbọ́n Fani-Kayode because he arrived in the world five months before FFK. By reason of age, both should talk before me in family gatherings. And, I should wash the plates and pots if the three of us had a family cookout, and there was no Reno Omokri, who I’m older than, around. But when old men fight dirty and disrobe themselves in the marketplace, society allows their younger brother to separate them, exorcise the March Madness and call a spade by its proper name.

I knew FFK between 2009 and 2010 when he eyed the governorship of Osun State on the ticket of the Peoples Democratic Party. In a field brimming with Ife-born political heavyweights such as Senator Iyiola Omisore, former Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice, Chief Niyi Owolade; former Nigerian Ambassador to Cuba, Senator Segun Bamigbetan-Baju; former Commissioner for Education, Prof Muib Opeloye, etc, the young Fani-Kayode stood little chance in emerging the PDP candidate, despite the ‘it is our turn’ clamour by Ife. Femi Fani-Kayode aspired and failed.

Like FFK, Momodu, in 2011, ran for the nation’s presidency on the platform of the National Conscience Party, losing in his ward, where he got just one vote, according to a Vanguard newspaper report. In the PDP presidential primaries, which he contested in 2022, Momodu, who bought the PDP presidential primary form for N50 million, lamented the monetisation of Nigeria’s electoral process. He magnanimously donated copies of his magazine, Ovation, at the PDP primaries. But, for his troubles, Momodu got the type of fat zero mischievous teachers draw in the books of dullard students. PUNCH newspaper reported that no delegate voted for Momodu.

When glitz and glam fuel political aspiration, and public service becomes trackless like a snake crawling on a mountain, prefixes such as ‘former governorship aspirant’ and ‘former presidential candidate’ become mere tickets to the corridors of power.

Though both Fani-Kayode and Momodu never won an election, both are streetwise. Both are grandmasters of Nigeria’s prebendal politics. They understand perfectly how the crooked Nigerian system works. They know the power of visibility, timing and positioning. They understand power and its laws. Both know that most Nigerian men and women of power are vulnerable, lonely and insecure creatures who need public validation to ease the guilt their conscience suffers from years of public mismanagement. The brains of Bob Dee and FFK calculate better than the best Casio calculators.

When FFK wants something from you, you cannot survive his pressure. During the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan, FFK would daily bombard me with press statements. One day, after speaking with me a couple of times on various press statements, he called me yet again. So, I sighed and sounded sleepy. Quick-minded, FFK noticed the drop in the cadence of my voice and said something like this, “Tunde, I have spoken to you many times today, and on each occasion, your voice was different. How many voices do you have?” I smiled at the other end of the phone, and intoned silently to myself, “I go let you kill me with PDP stories, abi?”

For someone who started from scratch, Momodu’s life story resonates with the rags-to-riches tales of resilience and consistency among never-say-die Nigerians. For this, I choose Momodu’s plastic spoon over Fani-Kayode’s silver spoon. Momodu’s youthful life leaves a noticeable trail of labour and salary, while FFK’s life reflects connection and affluence. But that is where my admiration for Momodu stops. The Yoruba say ‘kò sí bí ọ̀bọ ṣe ṣorí, tí ìnàkí o ṣé…’, meaning that there are similarities in the features of the monkey and the gorilla.

‘Trouble dey sleep, yanga go wake am’ when Momodu, in a television interview, said the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Bola Tinubu, was a civilian image of former military dictator, General Sani Abacha, the rogue. An angry Fani-Kayode, who had just been named ambassador-designate to Germany by Tinubu, argued that comparing a democratic government to a military regime was a distortion of history. Thus, FFK threw down the gauntlet and flung his hat into the ring, but an unfazed Momodu laced his gloves and rolled on his side into the ring, barechested. No way, we die here today!

For calling Tinubu, Fani-Kayode’s current benefactor, a dictator, FFK opened the Book of Remembrance to Chapter 1, and recalled how Dele is ‘friend and brother’ bagged a Third Class degree in Yoruba, and how the late Chief MKO Abiola picked him up from the gutter, washed him, and employed him. Not done yet, Femi, the son of Remi, flipped the Book of Remembrance to Chapter 2, recollecting how unhinged, emotional and illogical his friend, Dele, could be, stressing that he (FFK) had been loyal to the President, unlike Bob Dee, whom he accused of being a back-biter, untrustworthy, and ungrateful individual.

FFK said, “Unlike Dele, I did not benefit from him (Tinubu) for close to 40 years, eat from his plate, collect handouts from him, stayed in his house, claim to be his brother and yet refuse to support him in achieving his dream of becoming president.” The former aviation minister went on to call his publisher friend a glutton, saying Momodu’s big size was evidence of his gluttony.

Momodu roared back. He grabbed the Book of Response, and read from Chapter 7, saying, “He (Femi Fani-Kayode) went to Cambridge University…but became an enfant terrible, fighting anyone and anything in sight. All supplications and intercessions by friends and family on his behalf have failed to cure his malady. And this is the man President Tinubu is about to unleash on Germany as an ambassador of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, for God’s sake.”

Bob Dee did not stop. He attacked Omokri, who was in the same boat with FFK over the issue. He said, “I was going to ignore these two, but later decided to respond to them just in case they thought they could bully me into silence and submission. No, they can’t. They both have no credibility whatsoever.

“Together, they have expressed the worst views ever about Bola Tinubu that they will never be able to erase in a million years, except the world finally comes to an end. The only reason I could adduce for Tinubu’s tolerance of both irritants is desperation and his inability to find better people to do the dirty jobs. The brains of these ones have been configured to say anything and delete immediately.

“I have never disparaged Tinubu in my life. I have never called him a murderer. I have never called him a drug baron or addict. I’m intelligent enough not to say what I have no proof of. Only morons talk without thinking. I thank God for a good upbringing. I do not fight like pigs. And I have a job and manage my modest income. I’m not seeking government appointments. I know how many times Femi and Reno have reached out to me, privately, either begging for publicity or apologising for attacking me publicly.”

But Omokri denied the claims of him reaching out to Momodu, challenging the Edo-born politician to make his claims public. He said the only time he reached out to Momodu was when he urged the opposition stalwart to carry blood thinners such as aspirin along with him because of sudden death associated with frequent flying. He maintained that the Tinubu administration had recorded giant strides in economic growth and security. “Based on the aforementioned statistics devoid of emotions, I put to you that your claims are alarmist and a misrepresentation of the true state of Nigeria and the health of our democracy,” Omokri said.

If you think the Momodu–FFK-Omokri fight is a contest between democracy and dictatorship, you are missing the point. No, it’s beyond such smokescreens. Neither is it a struggle between light and darkness, nor is it a tussle between good and evil.

The fight among the estranged friends and the younger Omokri could be deconstructed through a layered prism. Sitting smugly at the heart of the fight is the degeneration of elite political communication, battle over access to power, struggle for relevance in political-media space, egocentrism, and the fleeting nature of loyalty.

While Momodu put the loyalty of Fani-Kayode and Omokri to the test of integrity, and found them both falling short, FFK’s recall of how close Momodu was to the late MKO Abiola, and how he (Momodu) later went back and associated with the family of the late dictator, Sani Abacha, after Abiola died, put a big question mark on the honour of Momodu. The pot knows when the kettle whispers.

In October 2025, a former Mayor of Blanco, Texas, Mike Arnold, labelled Omokri a “pathological, habitual liar’ and ‘social media influencer’ who misrepresents facts for political gains. Arnold, the founder of Arise Africa International, was formerly associated with Omokri, but broke up the friendship after enumerating instances of ‘constant, calculated lying’ by Nigeria’s ambassador-designate to Mexico.

Arnold accused Omokri of screaming ‘Christian genocide’ during the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari, but turned around to call it a hoax under Tinubu, accusing Omokri of possessing the penchant to flip to the side that holds the fattest chequebook.

Omokri never responded to Arnold’s accusations, even as the former mayor accused the ambassador-designate of begging him to cease fire. Uhmm, Omokri, renowned for his caustic wit and quick fingers on the keypad, has never said ‘pim’ in response to Arnold. Does silence mean guilt? Abi, where has Omokri’s courage gone? Arnold said many other unprintable things about Omokri, but Omokri is my aburo, so I won’t drag him.

The fight of the Three Lions is not in the interest of Nigeria. All three men are public brands, not just political actors. So the quarrel is also a market contest over visibility. Momodu typifies elder-journalist candour; FFK typifies gladiatorial loyalty; Omokri typifies data-driven regime advocacy. FFK and Omokri write not just to wound Momodu, and vice versa, but each writes to reassure his own constituency that he is still indispensable.

The roforofo fight shows that proximity to power in Nigeria speaks the language of outrage, where defenders of incumbency no longer defend policy but often attack dissent as betrayal. It also exposes how fast media and social reaction change once policy debates become public discourse, with the way attention shifted from Tinubu’s alleged authoritarian tendencies to personal attacks.

None of Momodu, Fani-Kayode and Omokri was fighting for Nigeria. The three of them are fighting for power.

Email: tundeodes2003@yahoo.com

Facebook: @Tunde Odesola

X: @Tunde_Odesola

Dele Momodu vs. Fani-Kayode: The pot fighting the kettle

Opinion

OPINION: Refining Without Relief: Nigeria In The Midst Of Global Oil Wars!

Published

1 week ago

March 25, 2026

Trends Admin

OPINION: Refining Without Relief: Nigeria In The Midst Of Global Oil Wars!

The vision was bold. The expectation was clear. And the promise was powerful. When the Dangote Refinery began operations, it was hailed as Nigeria’s long-awaited escape from decades of energy contradiction, which involves exporting crude oil while importing refined fuel at high costs. It was meant to guarantee supply, stabilise prices, conserve foreign exchange, and most importantly, deliver relief to ordinary Nigerians.

What appears to be a distinct contradiction is that, despite months into its operation, a different reality is emerging, with fuel prices rising sharply. Inflationary pressures are intensifying. This occurrence has forced Nigerians to ask a difficult question once again, one that calls for an urgent answer.: Why does a country that produces and refines crude oil still suffer the consequences of global oil shocks?

Looking at the trend, it is clear that the answer lies not just in geopolitics, but in the deeper structure of Nigeria’s oil economy, where global pricing, policy gaps, and now the looming risk of monopoly intersect.

With the recent development, the latest alarming surge in petrol prices has been driven largely by escalating tensions in the Middle East. This is particularly the U.S-Israel strikes on Iran and retaliatory measures from Tehran. A well-known fact is that at the centre of the crisis is the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil transit route through which a significant portion of global supply flows. Any disruption, even a speculative one, triggers immediate spikes in crude prices.

Within a week, oil prices jumped from the mid-$60 range to nearly $120 per barrel. For global markets, this is expected. For Nigeria, it is devastatingly ironic. This is because, despite having crude oil in abundance and despite refining it locally, Nigeria remains fully exposed and this has continued to re-echo the same ironic question.

In a rare moment of corporate candor, the refinery’s leadership acknowledged this reality. The plant is deeply affected by global shocks. Crude oil, even when sourced locally, is priced at international benchmarks. Shipping costs have surged dramatically, from about $800,000 per tanker to as high as $3.5m. Insurance premiums have climbed, and logistics have become significantly more expensive, with total costs further driving higher.