Farooq Kperogi : Identity questions in IBB’s autobiography

The autobiography of former self-styled “President” Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida has already been parsed for its self-serving mendacity, moral spinelessness, maddening insensitivity, self-glorification, and cowardly posthumous smears of dead colleagues.

I won’t revisit those points here. As someone who has a scholarly interest in—and is actually working on a book on—the rhetoric of collective identity construction in Nigeria, I was drawn to IBB’s self-definition of his identity in his autobiography.

It was Gimba Kakanda, SA to the Vice President and former newspaper columnist, who first quickened my appetite about this in his February 19 Facebook update.

Kakanda had read an advance copy of IBB’s autobiography and wrote this intriguing summation of it: “It’s a journey that begins with his origins, as the son of a Gbagyi woman, and leads up to the June 12 questions—the answers to which you’ll have to read to discover for yourself.”

In a February 15, 2020, column titled “True Ethnic Origins of Nigeria’s Past Presidents and Heads of State,” I had observed that “IBB’s ethnic identity is surprisingly a magnet for controversy and speculation. He has been called Gbagyi (whom Hausa people call Gwari), Nupe, and even Yoruba from Ogbomoso or Osogbo. But he told journalists and his biographers at different times that his immediate ancestors were Hausas from Kano who migrated to what is now Niger State.”

I was curious if IBB admitted that his maternal filiation was Gbagyi (or Gwari). He actually did. But while he is very specific about his maternal line of descent, he was vague about the ethnic identity of his paternal ancestry.

This is how he describes his paternal ancestry, beginning from his grandfather: “Snippets of details I heard suggested that earlier on, he was a bit of a wanderer, migrating from Sokoto to Kano and Kontagora and settling in Wushishi.”

Contrast this with the specificity with which he describes his maternal heritage: “Apparently, [my grandfather] met his future wife, a young Gwari girl called Halima, in Wushishi, and since his future parents-in-law would only allow him to marry daughter if he agreed to make his home in Wushishi, he readily complied with their condition before settling down in Wushishi and marrying his pretty wife, Halima.”

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In yet another description of his Gwari maternal descent, he is informatively direct and specific: “But before he left, my father met and married a beautiful light-skinned Gwari girl, Inna Aishatu, who would become my mother.”

His paternal grandmother was a pretty Gwari woman, and his own mother was a “beautiful light-skinned Gwari girl.” Why did he have a need to call attention to their pulchritude and complexion?

Why did he withhold such details about his grandfather and his father? Sokoto, which he says is the apparent root of his paternal ancestry, was populated by both the Fulani and the Hausa in the “later part of the 19th century” when his grandfather left it for Kano and later Wushishi.

Although interethnic marriage between the Hausa and the Fulani began to intensify at this time, people still identified their heritage through their fathers. Ethnic identities or labels weren’t hyphenated. Was his father Hausa or Fulani?

Did he, perhaps, obliquely answer that question by gratuitously calling attention to the light skin of his Gwari mother in order to let it be known that his own light complexion is inherited from his mother since the Fulani are stereotypically light-skinned?

Well, IBB told a biographer that his great grandfather hailed from the village of Kumuria [Kumurya?] in Kano State from where he went to Sokoto. But in his autobiography, he only mentions his grandfather migrating from Sokoto to Kano and later to Wushishi. Is this intentional, strategic paternal ancestral ambiguity?

We see evidence of identitarian anxieties in IBB’s life after he left his Niger cultural cocoon. Up until age 23 when he returned from India as a Second Lieutenant, his name was Ibrahim Badamasi, Badamasi being his father’s first name.

“However,” he writes, “before I settled down to work at the First Brigade, a particular incident led me to add ‘Babangida’ to my name. During official engagements that led to my deployment to Kaduna, officers who confused the Yoruba name, Gbadamosi, with my last name, ‘Badamasi,’ repeatedly asked me whether I was Yoruba. That question had come up a few times during my enlisting interview for the military. Since that question persisted (and since I knew I wasn’t Yoruba!), I decided to take on my father’s other name as my last name.”

Three things jumped out at me after reading this part of the book. First, I find it intriguing that he had no hesitation telling us about his mother’s and paternal grandmother’s ethnic identity and even disclaiming a Yoruba identity that he knew would constrain him but chose to conceal his paternal ethnic identity.

Second, IBB didn’t mention Babangida as his father’s other name when the reader first encounters him in the book. He identifies his father as Muhammad Badamasi, not Babangida Badamasi. Maybe this oversight is attributable to sloppy (ghost) writing.

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Third, Gbadamosi is not, strictly speaking, a Yoruba name. It’s the Yoruba domestication of Badamasi, which is understood to be a Muslim name in Nigeria. Many people in northwest Nigeria, where he says his paternal roots sprouted from, bear the name.

When I wrote about unusual Muslim names in Nigeria that don’t seem to have any links with the rest of the Muslim world, among which is “Badamasi,” readers who are familiar with the etymology of Badamasi told me that the name (which was probably originally some variant of Badmasi) belongs to an Arabic poet whose book advanced students in traditional Arabic schools, called makarantun soro in Hausa land, study.

The book, a Sufi poem, is used as a resource for Arabic vocabulary lessons. Over time, it became popularly known as Badamasi, named after its author.

I haven’t found any scholarly corroboration for the claim that Badamasi is the name of an Arab poet, but there is a late nineteenth-century Ilorin Muslim scholar and poet by the name of Badamasi whose poems are often utilized to enhance Arabic vocabulary and are a staple in the curriculum of traditional Islamic schools. But it’s not clear if he is the original bearer of the name.

Badamasi was Yorubized to Gbadamosi and later anglicized to Badmus in Yoruba land.

Curiously, Muslim names, which should transcend, even neutralize, ethnicity, at least on the surface, can become the carriers of the weight of ethnicity in Nigeria. There are notions of “Yoruba Muslim names” not just because of their peculiar Yoruba domestication but because of their higher than usual frequency among Yoruba Muslims.

For example, many northern Muslims and Yoruba Muslims have concluded, without a shred of evidence, that House of Representatives Speaker Tajudeen Abbas is a Zaria man of Yoruba ancestry because “Tajudeen” occurs more frequently among Yoruba Muslims than it does among Hausa-speaking Muslims.

But Tajudeen Abbas is a Zaria prince. A Yoruba editor friend of mine pushed back when I said the Speaker was at least paternally Fulani by asking which Fulani or Hausa man I knew who bore the name Tajudeen.

I mentioned Tajudeen Dantata. I then asked if he thought the Dantata family was Yoruba because they named one of their progenies Tajudeen. That ended the conversation.

Dr. Raji Bello, a Fulani man from Yola, also talks about how he is often mistaken for a Yoruba man because people assume that Raji is an exclusively Yoruba Muslim name even though it’s a Muslim name commonly born by South Asian and West African Muslims.

Dr. Bello resisted the type of urge that IBB succumbed to. He once said he was advised by an elder in Zaria to change his name to Rabiu. But he was named after one of his ancestors, a prominent nineteenth-century Muslim scholar in what is now Adamawa by the name of Modibbo Raji.

Finally, IBB described his father as a “messenger/interpreter” in the colonial district office but didn’t say what he interpreted. Since he had no Western education and didn’t speak English, did he translate Gbagyi, his mother’s language, to Hausa or vice versa?

Well, I am not done reading the book.

Farooq Kperogi : Identity questions in IBB’s autobiography

Farooq Kperogi is a renowned columnist and United States-based Professor of journalism.

The witches on Portable’s road to madness (2)

Tunde Odesola

As the crowd moved in the pillar of early morning fog, their song became discernible on the dewy road of the thickly forested Aji town. The road in front of Enwe Nwanjo’s house was that type of decades-long, durable earthen road built and maintained with townspeople’s sweat, long before government came and built its own road of potholes amid applause and blinding camera lights.

So, it was on this road that the crowd was trekking, singing a medley of Igbo Christian songs, with tenor, soprano, alto and bass twanging from honeyed throats – in fantastic acapella.

I love good music, so I listened and watched. I thought the crowd was moving up the road that stretches beyond the nearby Aji High School, but right in front of Enwe Nwanjo’s multi-residence house, the crowd turned into the expansive compound, still singing.

“Who are these?” I wondered, struggling to make out their faces in the fog. Then, I heard familiar voices. They were students who lived in the students’ quarters built around the main building where I lived. They stopped smack in the middle of the compound and said a prayer like football players do before a match. Then, they dispersed into their various rooms.

But one of them didn’t go to the students’ quarters. In the fog, she headed straight to the main building. “Who is this familiar figure?” I wondered as the figure moved closer to the house. “Haa! It’s Eucharia, my Eucharia! What!? How come? So, she wasn’t the one in the room? Who then were those lovebirds inside her room?

My chest heaved a sigh of relief to see Eucharia wasn’t the one in the cozy blue room but I was curious to know who those two bedmates were. Eucharia came up to the balcony and greeted in her melodious voice, “Ndi corper, good morning. You no sleep?”

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My face creased into a frown, then a wry smile. “I just came out to enjoy the early morning breeze,” I said. “Uhmm, you and cigarette!?” she said as she made for her apartment. “Where una dey come from?” I asked. “From church, we go do vigil,” she said.

She knocked on her door gently and waited. She knocked again. After a moment, the door swung back but before she could enter and close the door, I leapt up from my chair and was right behind her. Using the advantage of my height, I scanned the whole room ultra-carefully as she walked in with her back to me. What I saw was shocking!

I saw a little girl between eight and nine years old who came to open the door. She went back and curled up in bed, pulling the sheet over her head. Ha!? Eucharia probably woke her up from dreamland.

“Who is this,” I asked. “My niece,” she replied, “I went to Nsukka yesterday and I came back with her.” “I was wondering who was inside the house. I peeped through the keyhole and saw two people in bed,” I stated jokingly. “You must be seeing double,” she said, laughing. Little did she realise I really saw double.

When I sat back later and put what happened to me in perspective, I came to a profound understanding of the power of the mind. The incident buttresses my belief that the mind is the most powerful part of human physiology. It strengthened my resolve that I can achieve anything if I put my mind to it. When people give up on life and watch their dreams die, they do so from the mind.

In Eucharia’s case, it was my mind that sent suspicion signal to my brain which imaged the signal to my eyes and my eyes duly manifested the negative content of my mind.

I hadn’t settled down to drinking when I first peeped into Eucharia’s room. So, what my eyes saw wasn’t a product of drunkenness. It was a product of a mind wandering off. As a sound mind can be the teleport to self-actualisation so can an unsound mind be the shoestrings of the sneakers of a potential marathon champion, tied together while running. It’s all in the mind.

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Today, social media has broken the backbones of witches and wizards, just like it is exposing the ruts of fake religious leaders, traditional rulers, celebrities and all.

Hitherto, in our communal mind, we believed witches and wizards were everywhere, sucking blood and cracking bones. So, we hid ourselves from ourselves – nobody wanted people to know the names of their children, their ages, their pictures, what they ate, where they lived, what they did, their achievements etc.

But nowadays, people live on the internet, showing off their families and achievements. So, I ask: where are the witches and wizards against whom we sing, “Oro nla le da, eh eh eh, oro nla le da…” when tragedies happen? Are they no more potent? Are witches and wizards too old-fashioned to join social media to wreak havoc?

It’s strange that people drive recklessly under the influence, killing others along with them, yet relatives and friends turn their mouths up to the heavens like homeless sparrows, crying and blaming the devil together with his witchy disciples. It’s all in the mind.

In most cases, after suffering self-inflicted tragedies, some people go to the same dreaded witches and wizards in search of redemption while some go after pastors and alfas who are not better than bats – blind, blatant, blasphemous and base.

When you see some people falling for the miracle pranks of some manipulative pastors, alfas and babalawos, you wonder why the gullible worshippers can’t see through the foolery, but it’s not their fault, it’s their minds, in which the clerics live rent-free.

Please, tell me why do people believe a stinking, poorer-than-poor babalawo has the power to use a human head for money ritual? If there was ever a ritual potion for money-making, babalawos and their families would be richer than Elon Musk and they won’t tell anyone about the potion.

From the outset of his career, controversial musician Habeeb Okikiola Badmus aka Portable declared himself ‘were olorin’, and people took it as a metaphor that means ‘mad musician’. Little did people know Portable was truly mad.

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Going by his antecedents and being very sure Portable was suffering from ángàná, I came to an audacious editorial conclusion last week when I headlined the first part of this article, “The witches on Portable’s road to madness (1).”

In validation of my headline, Portable, during the week, personally declared himself a patient of the Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital in Aro, Abeokuta. In an online video, Portable raved, “I am mad. I have medication for madness. You can go and ask about me in Aro. I have a card there…I am mad.”

Portable calls himself a child of grace. Truly, he’s one. But when the mind is messed up, especially with drugs, grace wears the toga of a prefix and becomes disgrace. If the disgrace becomes consistent, the disgrace wears an embroidered suffix and changes to disgraceful.

From North America to Asia, Europe, South America, Antarctica, Oceania and Africa, drug use has destroyed the careers of many superstars. From Michael Jackson to Witney Houston to Bobby Brown, Elton John, Majek Fashek and countless others, drug use has been the bane of many music careers.

Portable is a dot in the galaxy of the aforementioned superstars but his example teaches a lesson in gratitude, decency and humility.

A dirty-looking hussler, the child of grace received favour from hip-hop star, Olamide, who collaborated with him to produce Za Zoo Zeh, a song written by Portable. If not for Olamide’s collaboration, Za Zoo Zeh wouldn’t have blown the Nigerian music charts.

He who the gods want to ruin, they first make mad. Portable became mad and he turned against Olamide. Olamide simply ignored him. Portable went ahead to diss another Nigerian music star, Davido, whom he first ingratiated himself to, but later turned against when Davido wouldn’t collaborate with him.

Since hitting the limelight, Portable has been a fly in the ointment of the Nigerian music industry, fighting everyone in sight. His online fight with his ex-lover and ex-wife of the late Alaafin, Queen Dami, was despicable, to say the least. The only fight he fought which got the approval of the general public was his fight against Bobrisky, the cross-dresser.

Since Olamide cracked the nut of fame for him, Portable has seen himself as the biggest Nigerian musician, calling himself the late Abami Eda, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, yet begging bigger stars to feature him in their songs. No bi juju bi dat? It is not juju, it’s hard drugs.

It’s hard drugs that could make him beat up the environmental officials from the Ogun State Ministry of Physical Planning and Urban Development, who faulted his building construction. He ran into hiding for many days before finally giving himself up to the police amid altercations between him and his elder brother, Akeem, who expressed joy over his travails.

Portable needs psychiatric help fast. The witches on Portable’s road to madness are in his mind. Though he has lost money and goodwill to this travail, his court trial should run its course and justice should be served to teach celebrities and people in authority that the law is not totally dead in Nigeria.

*Concluded.

The witches on Portable’s road to madness (2)

Playing Scrabble with the murderous king of Orile-Ifo

Tunde Odesola

(Published in The PUNCH, on Friday, February 7, 2025)

Despite being jobless during the decade-long Great Depression that ravaged the industrialised West, American architect, Alfred Mosher Butts, never turned his mind into the devil’s workshop nor allowed idleness to find employment for his hands.

Butts reckoned Americans needed an indoor game to ease the stress of the biting depression, so he invented the trademark crossword game called Scrabble in 1938. The word ‘scrabble’, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, means ‘to use your fingers to quickly find something that you cannot see’.

Ever since I learned to play Scrabble in the 80s, and going ahead to become champion at the University of Lagos and Abia State University respectively, wordplay has luxuriated in my heart.

Everywhere I go, I unscramble the words on vehicles, billboards, number plates, packs, etc moulding letters into words to test and increase my word-power, and sharpen my word recall skill. Everywhere I go, I carry a pen, jotter and dictionary with me, writing down words and reading the dictionary from páálí to páálí.

Scrabble is psychedelic: a stimulant when you win; a depressant when you lose.

Though we lived two houses apart on Omotoye Estate, Orile Agege, Lagos, Uncle Paul Bassey – FIFA and CAF instructor – was already a national sports oracle when my homeboys and I were fledgling undergraduates in the second half of the 1980s. Good Lord, Uncle Paul loves Scrabble! Though he was our idol, we didn’t have the chance to know him intimately until one day when I set a trap for him.

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That day, as I opened the gate to our house while seeing a friend off, I saw Uncle Paul, aka PB, walking up the road. I put my hand through an opening in the gate and intentionally delayed the locking of the gate from outside while I waited for him to come within earshot.

When he was within range, I greeted him and stepped onto the road, alongside my friend, and I suddenly began, “Yesterday, I played five premiums in a game. I beat Lanre so badly, I felt pity for him.” My friend looked nonplussed, wondering how Scrabble crept into the little talk we were having before we got to the gate.

But the arrow of my message had hit the bull’s eye. Uncle Paul stopped and looked back, “You play Scrabble?” he asked. “Yes, sir,” I said, a laughter of accomplishment welling up inside me. “Can you meet me in my flat at PUNCH Quarters by 10 tonight?” he said. That was the moment I knew my rascality na follow come. We met at 10 pm, played four games and began a lifelong journey of mentorship, love, trust and integrity.

This was how I opened the door of Uncle Paul’s home to my scrabble-playing buddies on the estate and beyond. Here comes our line up: Niyi Adebayo (Poovy), Tayo Odusina (Scrappy), Seyi George, Adeyemi Adebayo aka Kisko (deceased); Leslie, Segun Adeyina (OB), Charles Onyeshidi (Charlo), Dele Taiwo; Duke Orusara (Ikéràbà), Lai Ibidunni (Oòshà), Kola Dada (Ògo), Biodun Oyegunle (Longman), Rashidi Odurinde (Ayétótó), among others. This is the first time ever I’m divulging the secret of how I ambushed PB and lured him to be my friend.

Every Saturday morning, we would gather at PB’s flat, play Scrabble late into night, sleep in his flat while some would go home. We would wake up to Scrabble early Sunday morning and continue till late into the night, with food and drinks provided by PB, whose wife, Aunty, and all-male children were always happy to see us.

Oh, Aunty! May her sweet soul continue to rest in peace. She was particularly pleased to welcome us because we kept her husband company at home during weekends. With many family members living under his roof, Uncle Paul’s house was a beehive. PB, who is currently the Chairman, Akwa United FC, was a former sports editor of PUNCH Newspaper, deputy General Manager, Champion Newspapers, before establishing Today Sports, a national sports newspaper which has been rested.

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To play Scrabble, you dip your hand into a small sack containing 100 tiles of calibrated English alphabets and scrabble for seven letters which you put on a rack, unscrambling them to form English words that you place on a tile board to earn a score. If you play all seven letters at once, bingo! – that’s a premium. A premium score gives you 50 additional marks to your original score.

In a video which went viral for its evilness, 73 years old Pa Areola Abraham was first shown kneeling and later prostrating on the floor as a nearby voice, which investigation said belonged to Ogunjobi, rained curses and death threats on him, his wife and children while physical assault lasted.

By his heartless conduct, the suspended king of Orile-Ifo, Òlórí-Òfo Abdulsemiu Ogunjobi, is likely not lettered enough to play the beautiful game called Scrabble. I’ll play some Scrabble with the letters of his village, O-R-I-L-E I-F-O, to x-ray the character of the bloodthirsty beast called king. Unscrambling the eight letters of the hamlet will give you many six, five, four, three and two-letter English anagrams.

However, I’m only going to dwell on the words that describe Ogunjobi, the misfit monarch, retired ruffian and serving scoundrel on the throne. O-R-I-L-E I-F-O will give you F-O-O-L. No be so? Na so. It will also give you F-O-O-L-E-R, F-O-I-L-E-R, O-I-L-E-R and O-R-I-O-L-E.

Are you following me, dear readers? Everyone knows who a fool is, except a fool. The F-O-O-L who calls himself a monarch feels that inasmuch as his face isn’t in the depressing video, he stands absolved. That assumption shows the shallow thinking of the low-cadre officials of the Nigeria Police. In the main, it’s this cadre of officers, with their sawdust thinking, that investigate, prosecute and mess criminal cases up in court.

A F-O-O-L-E-R is someone or a thing that fools, tricks or deceives someone. Ogunjobi has been living in a fool’s paradise, thinking himself a king when he’s worse than a slave. For years, he has masked his barbarity with braggadocio that indigenes of Orile-Ifo fearfully took his butterfly for an eagle, and he soared to perch on the sun…burnt he tumbled down broad daylight ashes.

A F-O-I-L-E-R is a person who frustrates, foils or defeats. As a retired police inspector, Ogunjobi should be a foiler of crime but his attack on the Ile Oluji-born Pa Abraham showed he must have been a foiler of innocent members of the public. Rather than be a legit F-O-I-L-E-R, he must have been an illegal bunkerer, an O-I-L-E-R in the corrupt Nigerian system. I need no ‘Ga’nu si’ alfa or a miracle-inventing pastor or fake babalawo to tell me that Ogunjobi never collected huge bribes while in the police. When you see the mouth of the grasscutter, you will know it can eat foliage.

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Still scrabbling. When you shuffle the tiles O-R-I-L-E I-F-O, you will get O-R-I-O-L-E. An Oriole is a beautiful, vibrant songbird resplendent in its yellow and black or orange and black plumage. It is found in Europe and North America. Yellow and black colours are good on an oriole. Black and Orange colours are good on an oriole. But they are not good on Ogunjobi, whose skin typifies the mishmash Yellow Fever in Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s 1976 monster hit.

A Yoruba anagram of O-R-I-L-E I-F-O is O-F-O. O-F-O means a misfortune or empty barrel. I thought Ogunjobi had the Ogun State Governor, Prince Dapo Abiodun; the Inspector General of Police, Kayode Egbetokun; and Aso Rock in his pocket when he boasted of being the owner of Nigeria, the police and that he could kill Abraham without repercussions. But as the empty barrel that he is, Ogunjobi couldn’t meet his bail conditions and has yet to be released from prison days after he was charged to court. I had thought he owned the Central Bank.

The police shouldn’t treat Ogunjobi with the gloves of camaraderie. He should be treated like a criminal suspect because Abraham said in the press conference facilitated by the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights that Ogunjobi had been involved in numerous murders in Orile-Ifo.

The score is now 2-2 between Osun and Ogun states. Osun scored the first goal with its Canadian jailbird king, who belches hemp smoke like a locomotive train. Also in Osun, we have a warmongering king in the Isokan Local Government Area, who called for mayhem in favour of the Peoples Democratic Party. In 2022, Ogun State scored its first goal when the Onifojege of Fojege, Nureni Oduwaye, blinded a chef for dancing with his queen. Ogunjobi has now equalised for Ogun State: 2-2.

The person who stole palm oil from the attic is less guilty than the one who collected the oil from the thief on the ladder and put it down. Yoruba traditional rulers dancing the dance of shame are less guilty than the politicians who enthrone them. During elections, politicians need hoodlums to kill, maim and snatch ballot boxes. After elections, some of the killers turn up to be rewarded with traditional stools. One of such hoodlums has Oshodi in his vice grip and he’s scheming to be rewarded with a crown.

I wonder what would have happened to the septuagenarian if Ogunjobi and his mob had met him on a lonely road at night. Governor Abiodun has taken a commendable step. He should prove he’s got the balls by going further to do what ex-Governor Olusegun Mimiko, did to a Deji of Akure, who publicly fought his wife.

Governor Abiodun, please, do the needful.

Email: [email protected]

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Playing Scrabble with the murderous king of Orile-Ifo