'Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet
After I researched and wrote his biography, anytime I saw Abiola Ajimobi it was not the politician, or governor or senator that leapt into my eye. It was the altar boy, crisp, smart, the sparkle of childhood. In his primary school, he was selected to that status, though a Muslim, by the school because he was spick and span. Face upended faith.
He was always the model student in hygiene and fashion. His shirts, his trousers, his shoes, body cream, haircut were examples for others. His daughter Abisola told me how he paid attention to his appearance. From his skin, his bath to his clothes for the day. He would spread a variety of apparels on the bed and meticulously make a judgment, sometimes consulting wife or any member of his family, on what to wear.
Even his colleagues at
If what the experts say is correct that we should follow the laws of hygiene in this era of COVID-19, the last person I expected to fall victim is Ajimobi. Yet, that virus that respects neither class nor faith nor courage struck, and fatally. In his play, Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's
It is a lesson in human impotence. It is not a time to say with the superstitious folks that he died because he wished to say his farewell at 70. Now many will say his 70th birthday was his big, final valediction to the world. It was a fanfare of a party, the big and mighty in the nation came, so did the small in
And he was. He was agile, full of the gift of life and possibilities, and he earned his place again atop the political world. He died as acting chairman of his party. He had told me in his last days as governor that he was contemplating going back to school. During the lockdown before the flu struck, returned my phone call and assured me he would keep in touch over his new post as deputy chairman. But as
In that destiny was a managing director of the top oil marketing firm in the sub-continent, senator, governor, party leader, and statesman. When he was a child, according to the story, he visited the Governor's House in
He never forgot that moment in prophetic attitude. But he did not seem the man for politics when he travelled to
He did not return with any connections or plum jobs waiting in
He understood himself, and applied his energies and vision as governor in Oyo State. He is the most consequential figure in modern Oyo State. He was focused, if sometimes too blunt for his people. But he was authentic and refreshed with his candour. He did not play double standards or suffer fools gladly. He had a portrait of a lion in his sitting room in which the lion says he will not eat grass no matter how hungry he is, not because of pride, but that is who he is. Hence an Ajimobi would berate some errant students who would not listen to a governor. He asked them to obey constituted authority because that was how he was raised, not as a generation of petulant boys who look their elders in the eye with impunity. Or in the Obaship struggle in which he confided to me that the people agreed to his reforms in private only to turncoat in public. He did not chafe under pressure but insisted on the point he had made. That is the measure of courage in leadership.
He had his flaws. But he was more tender than many knew. A childhood friend of his in
When he was a teen, he accompanied his mother to a village in the southwest where she sold gold. They had an accident in which the vehicle somersaulted. He survived with his mother. But a certain fellow who was walking by, looked at the lad, still bleeding from a wound that become a lifelong scar. 'Take care of that boy,' he charged his mother, 'he will become somebody big in this land.'
Whatever the status of the man, whether prophet, or whether human or spirit, no one could discount that his tongue lit with fire. The boy, who fell into a ditch in an accident and bore a scar on his head and escaped death with his mother beside him in a rustic retreat in Yoruba land, grew over the years to travel all over the world, to school in some of the world's tony universities, to grow in fame and fortune, to become a headline grabber in the nation's television, newspapers and magazines, became a mobiliser of men and resources, became a helmsman in corporate
© Pakistan Press International, source