By Bolanle BOLAWOLE
ALTHOUGH I love watching football, I am not a football fanatic. Each time I sit before the television, it is almost always going to be to watch one football match or the other. I don’t like watching movies.
They seem to me a world of make-believe and illusion. They make me apprehensive over nothing. Besides, our home-grown movies are damn too amateurish. It is like much time, enough resources, and adequate intellect are not invested in them to make them world-class.
The actors and producers appear too much in a hurry to hit the market. The storylines are usually not well exploited.
The plots run with the speed of light. It is like the sole motivation is to quickly hit the market and make some quick bucks. Don’t they watch Mexican movies or soaps? Even the Indians are a million times better!
Once upon a time I was addicted to watching movies, though. Practically every Nigerian, I presume, was equally addicted to watching Mexican movies like I did then.
Those were the days when Paloma, Salvador and many other Mexican movies ruled the waves. I wouldn’t know whether they still do. Unfortunately, the timing clashed with when I had to go for church service or Holy Ghost service at the RCCG campground. On many occasions I missed going because I would say, “Let me watch a little” and, then, before I realised it, the whole time would be gone! Didn’t Proverbs 24:33-34 say, “Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep:
So shall thy poverty come as one that travelIeth; and thy want as an armed man”? My procrastination at the altar of Mexican movies took a while before I received the grace to say “Enough”! I stopped subscribing! I also scrapped watching television entirely. I did not return until the addiction had completely drained out of my system.
Addiction is of various kinds and shapes. Each, anyone, and everyone of it is not just bad; it is a torment. It is not just life-threatening; it is a veritable life-terminator. There was a time I was addicted to coffee – first thing when I woke up and the last thing before I retired to bed. There was another occasion when bread was my addiction – it was the dessert after every meal, even after a bowl of pounded yam! In my secondary school days, after a friend and classmate had introduced me to football pools staking, as we called it then, I got addicted to it, such that I played pools from Form Three through to Form Five and many years thereafter. Not less than five years of my adolescent and young adulthood life was wasted on playing football pools, pouring over forecast books – Willy Akinlude, Prince Willy Ehi Obinyan’s King and George forecast books – and a whole lot of “systems” of so-called “banker draws”!
Peer group influence or pressure is a potent danger to young, impressionistic minds. The first time I got to know what was called “asewo”, friends and classmates took me there! Where and how did they get those ideas into their head? And at such an early stage in life! Children sent to school at great costs by their parents to study!
God have mercy! What do we know that our own children do today – those that we think are in school reading books? Anything that completely takes over your will-power to say ‘No” is an addiction.
Singing about his own problem of addiction to booze, the South African reggae maestro, Lucky Dube, in “This is a song called Slave”, aptly described himself as having become a “slave” to liquor. Hear him:
“Ministers of religion have visited me many times to talk about it/They say to me/I gotta leave it/I gotta leave it/It’s a bad habit for a man/But when I try/To leave it/My friends keep telling me, ’Fools, I’m fool’
“Now I’m a slave/A slave/I’m a slave/Just a liquor slave/I’m a slave/A slave/Just a liquor slave
“I have lost my dignity (that) I had before/Trying to please everybody/Some say to me yo yo/I look better when I’m drunk/Some say no no no/I look bad, you know/Sometimes I cry/Me alone I cry/My crying never helps me because now/I am a slave….
“Every night when I’m coming back home/My wife gets worried because she knows/She’s got double trouble coming home/Sometimes I cry/I cry/My crying never helps me…”
When someone is addicted, he is unable to help himself. His will-power is decimated to the point of irrelevance. Therefore, he needs a superior power; power that is outside of his own being, to be able to suppress and annihilate the forces of addiction urging him on.
An addict appears free; he walks freely; acts, supposedly, freely, but in actual sense is under the compulsion, push, and power of something or someone else, which he has lost the ability and agility to resist. The soul may be willing but the flesh is weak (Matthew 26: 41).
Says Jean Jacques-Rousseau: “Man is born free and everywhere in chains’. These are chains that ordinary eyes cannot see. Chains that are worse than prison walls. But I digress!
Yes, I do watch football, but gone were the days when I had darling teams. ICCC Shooting Stars was my team. Up Sootin! That team is, today, a shadow of its old self. It is like Nigeria happened to it, as they say. In most things Nigerian, we lack the tenacity of purpose to carry success forward and build on it.
The other day I watched with tears a gathering of the descendants of the man who started Nigeria’s first indigenous construction company – Oni and Sons. Where is the company today? If you investigate, Nigerians themselves must have been the ones who ran it aground. That is our tragedy.
The same Nigerians eating up both indigenous and foreign businesses will turn around to blame the government for the soaring rate of unemployment!
These days, most Nigerians openly and proudly declare and demonstrate their love, support, and commitment to foreign clubs! This is another facet of the stupidity and folly that have eaten deep into the fabrics of our society.
Our language, tastes, culture, traditions, and religion have all been subverted by anything and everything foreign. Whenever I have to wear a suit and knot a tie in the searing sun to go to church, I wonder what is wrong with my own native “buba” and “soro”!
Colonial mentality! Perverted values! In Burkina Faso (Land of the Upright), judges and lawyers have thrown away colonial wig and gown for traditional attires.
So I was happy when our own Ademola Lookman, voted as the African Footballer of the Year 2024, went to the crowning event resplendent in a Yoruba traditional attire. His Yorubaness, if I may call it that, was the icing on the cake for me.
I doff my hat for that lad and I salute the parents that raised him. So, you can imagine my grief when this same boy was vilified by his coach for missing a penalty that everyone else had run away from taking.
Lookman’s up-to-date contributions to Atalanta are enough to make him a legend. In the game in question, he came in and immediately scored a goal, thus helping to change the tempo of the game in favour of his team, which had lost the first leg in which Lookman did not feature due to an injury.
So, the chances of his team turning the table was uphill from the start. But it was unfortunate he lost the penalty. Had he scored, it would have further buoyed the confidence of the team and, who knows, maybe the world could have witnessed another Damian miracle! Therefore, the coach’s frustration is understandable, even if he can be accused of over-reacting.
And this brings to mind an event that happened when I was a Senior Reporter with the Ibadan-based Sketch newspapers after I had been recently transferred to the Lagos office. One Sunday at about mid-day, the editor, Mr. Ademola Idowu (Bless his soul, O Lord!), called from Ibadan.
“Where is Ayinde Teniola?”, he asked. Mr. Teniola aka Egbon ria (Our Elder Brother) was the City Editor. “He is yet to arrive, Sir!”, I responded. “Ok. Quickly go to the NNPC Head Office and file the story. The place is on fire!” NNPC Head Office was at Falomo, Lagos at the time. “And when Ayinde comes, tell him to call me. This was how he missed a story 10 years ago!”
The story Mr. Teniola missed was the capture of Buka Suka Dimka, the mastermind of the abortive coup of February 13, 1976 that killed the then Head of State, Gen. Murtala Muhammed. I went, covered the story, and returned quickly to the office to file it to Ibadan. Egbon Ria, a typical Ijesha man, later breezed into the office straight from Ilesha where he had gone to spend the weekend.
He confided in us his subordinates each time he had to travel; so we watched his back. He murmured when I told him what happened. He was the one who explained to me the story he missed 10 years ago as he threw up his arms in exasperation, recounting that the incident had continued to ceaselessly define his career, denying him his due at every turn.
A similar incident happened when Chief Segun Osoba was the Managing Director of Daily Times. The Lagos State chapter of the Nigeria Bar Association had an event to which the media was invited. We were nearing the tail end of the event when the chapter’s publicity secretary, Mr. Dipo Jimilehin, signaled to me to quickly follow him. I tried to drag our photographer along but he insisted he must collect his own “brown envelope” before leaving!
We drove in Mr. Jimilehin’s car. It was when we got to the Lagos University Teaching Hospital at Idi-Araba that he told me we were going to see the incarcerated Second Republic civilian governor of Ogun State, Chief Bisi Onabanjo aka Aiyekooto. When we got to his room, Onabanjo, clad in pyjamas and seated on his hospital bed, was packing a travelling bag.
One of the civilian governors jailed by the Muhammadu Buhari military junta, Onabanjo’s health had deteriorated while in Buhari’s gulag. With the overthrow of Buhari and the coming to power of Ibrahim Babangida, with the humane Professor Olikoye Ransome-Kuti as the Health Minister, the coast was cleared for Onabanjo to seek medical treatment abroad.
The Daily Times, Nigeria’s most authoritative newspaper at the time, had reported that the former governor had already travelled abroad for treatment; whereas he yet had not. When my story came out with the Front Page headline: “Onabanjo travels today, says: I will foot my bill”, heads rolled at the Daily Times. The past heroics of the reporters concerned availed for nothing.
There is a similar football incident involving Steven Gerrard, Liverpool’s captain and one footballer I admired so much; much for his good looks as for his football skills. There was this match that stood between Liverpool and the Premier league; Gerrard had discharged himself very well throughout the season and also in that particular match, but in the dying minutes of the game, he slipped while on the ball.
An opponent took the ball from him and scored! I cannot say who was more devastated over that unfortunate incident between Gerrard and me.
A story missed can define a journalist, ruining an otherwise excellent career. A penalty missed by Lookman has caused so much ripples. Says Mark Anthony in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: the evil that men do live after them (but) the good is often interred with their bones! Not funny!
