My first unforced error since I got to Unife was my decision to place a ban on “women affairs”. While reaching that decision, I did not anticipate that such a resolution required a special anointing. I forgot that any declaration against women is like a declaration of war. It was obvious that my naivety and immaturity about women affairs was my greatest undoing. For instance, rather than developing the capacity for the enforcement of my resolution, I was engineering a plot that further complicated its denouement. I was hunting for more women when I was yet to conclude my relationship with PMB (Peju, Mosun, Bola). I didn’t know whether to toast the three of them or just be a friend to the three of them. I wanted just one but my eyes were on the three. It was this kind of bad communication between my heart and my eyes that led me to that decision where I had to put everything in abeyance. Then, I moved on to look for more. You can see how I was complicating my life. I came to the university to give meaning to my life via academic advancement, but ironically, it was the same life that I was demeaning with my emotional greed. I wanted to marry just a graduate now I had tens of graduates dazzling me. I got myself enmeshed in a marital quagmire when I was yet to achieve my academic goals. I knew that the reason for resuming in October with the Jambites wasn’t inspired by any academic eagerness. The motive behind it had to do with the “October Rush”, which had become an annual “carnival” in the University calendar. Like I said, the ones I “rushed” in my first year were still outstanding, yet I was busy “rushing” another set. October Rush was a period for “Fishing Expedition” for guys so that good things would not pass them by. October Rush provided a window of opportunities for guys who did not have girlfriends to look for one. It was also an opportunity for those who wanted to change their girlfriends to look for replacements.
Finally, it was an indulgent activity for those who wanted to acquire more girlfriends. I fell into this last category. My desperation to acquire more beautiful ladies made me to be unconscious of my ban on “Women Affairs”. On several occasions when my “Celestial Patroness” attempted to remind me of my resolve, I pretended as if “she” wasn’t talking to me. At a stage, it was not coming as a reminder again, it was coming as a warning. Still, I bulged not. I didn’t know what came over me but I must admit that I knew what I was doing. Does a man without a marital status indulge in side chicks hunting? That was when I knew that they had finally got me. My regular “Solemn Assembly” at BOOC, which could have helped me, was deliberately abandoned because I didn’t want to interface with the truth of my derailment. A man’s descent to self-destruct begins from the moment he suppresses the force that constantly haunts him to confront the truth. Nothing is as traumatic as the suppression of a self-evident truth. Everything I was doing to myself was by design. Even when I wanted to hide behind “It’s the work of the devil” mantra, my conscience convicted me instantly that I was lying. It was not the work of the devil, it was the work of your hands galvanized by your insatiable lust for beautiful girls who flock the University year in, year out.
With my fame and my name, I made new “catches”. Some said they loved me because I was in the King Cobra. Some confessed that they liked me because of my name- Dapo Thomas. No wonder, most of them liked calling my name and surname together. Some said they liked me because I was nice. Truly, I was nice because I frequently ate with my friends who were girls at the SUB. However, one needs to be very careful when girls say you are very nice. It may be a kind of euphemism for profligacy and prodigality. I shunned the cafeterias because they were noisy for the kind of constructive privacy that Forks and Fingers would give me “to achieve my objective”. I only ate at the cafeteria when there was no company. I unwittingly tied myself to the grid of anomie because of my greed for the girls. The saddest thing about my case was that my closest friends, like Goke Folayan, Akin Akinade and Tayo Adesina, never knew about my nocturnal operations with ladies because I made women affairs a night duty like a security personnel. Now that I had the keys to my mentor’s office, it became so easy to operate without any elaborate funfare. All I needed to do was to give the direction to the office to my friends who were girls and I would be free from “monitoring spirits”. At some moments, the thoughts of complete derailment would cross my mind but I would immediately banish them the same way I was banished from Ayetoro. My mentor who gave me his office keys to help boost my reading zeal was oblivious of my secret flings.
One topic I loved discussing with my friends who were girls was my birthday. Once we had settled critical issues of engagement, the next discussion would be how to celebrate my birthday, which usually came a few weeks after the resumption. Few days to my birthday that year, I started feeling uneasy. I went to the health centre, still, no improvement. Before it became too late for me to travel to Lagos, I left Ife on 15 November 1983. That was two days to my birthday. As I was going to Lagos, I was still thinking of my new date that we planned to go out together on my birthday. What a foolish excitement!! That same night, I was taken to Vita Chemists, 75, Tejuoso Road, Surulere. By the time I arrived in Lagos, my condition had deteriorated terribly. I was fortunate to meet my brother, Mark Owhin, in my mother’s house which was my first port of call as soon as I got to Lagos. He, with my mother, was the one that conveyed me in his Volkswagen Beetle to Vita Chemists. The Chemists, founded on 15 December 1971, was an alternate medical treatment facility for most of the residents of Surulere who didn’t want to be admitted to the two major public hospitals in Surulere- LUTH and Randle. I was given full treatment that night and I was later allowed to go home. I survived the first day.
The next day was the turn of the Alfas and the Jehovah’s Witnesses in my neighbourhood. The news of my sickness travelled like wildfire throughout the community. You could always trust my mother with communal propagation. People kept coming to pray for me. I was surprised to see Alfa Ligali, the man who called me Abiku. I became worried when I saw him because from some of the plays of Duro Ladipo and Hubert Ogunde that I had watched when I was young, the Abiku always demanded for death from their members when good things began to happen to them. Good things had started happening to me. I had gained admission into the University. I was topping the class of brilliant minds. I was the scribe of the largest selling magazine in the whole of Unife. I had a sizeable number of friends who were girls and finally, my birthday was tomorrow. I didn’t know if the Abiku myth was real or not but I knew I had never attended any weird meeting near or under plantain trees except I attended such meetings through a mysterious proxy. So, I was thinking of all these and I was worried but not afraid. In fact, I was thinking about my date in Ife even though I was still very sick. Another stupid thinking!!
There were three strange women in white robes with beads in their hands and necks. Each of them had a metal gong which they were shaking. In unison and in Yoruba, they chorused this chant: “Awa iya osoronga dé lati wa mu e lo loni. Loni ni, ki nṣe ọjọ mi (We the three elders of our cult had come to take you with us today, this very day, not another time.)” I didn’t know where the utterance came from but I was aware that I was the one replying to them in Yoruba too: “O se ewoo, wọn ki nfi ọmọ ọrẹ bọ ọrẹ (Impossible. Don’t you know it’s a taboo to sacrifice an initiate for the gods)” Suddenly, I woke up to discover that it was a dream. Any time I woke up having a terrible dream, the first thing I normally did was to look at the time. It was 2.47 am, 17 November, my birthday. My mother was sleeping on the mat, in the same room with me. That was Iya Ibadan’s room when she was alive. I woke her up to narrate the dream to her. She was scared. She rushed to alert her sister, iya Enitan, who was sleeping in the living room. She was a Christian. She gave a Bible to my mother to read Psalm 121 for upto fifty times. I slept off midway. What was surprising about this episode was that I woke up to discover that I was feeling much better than when I slept. I actually wanted to travel that same day for my date in Ife but I was persuaded not to attempt it. I was advised to recover fully before traveling at all. I was back in Ife that weekend, Sunday, 20 November 1983. Till I left for Ife nobody told me the meaning of what I said to those three women despite persistent asking. On my arrival in Ife, I visited my date and I enjoyed myself afterwards.
I was back in Lagos on Thursday, 22 December, same year for our Christmas and New Year’s break. It was during the break, precisely, Saturday, 31December, that President Shehu Shagari’s government was overthrown by the military junta. Shagari’s removal signposted the fall of the Second Republic. Though Chief Obafemi Awolowo condemned the result of the election, he didn’t contest it in any court of law claiming that it was impossible to gather sufficient evidence of the massive rigging and manipulation that characterized the Presidential election of August 1983. The electoral act stipulated that any litigation challenging the election must be done in 30 days. However, the magnitude of violence that attended the election and the economic situation in the country were sufficient to predict a military intervention any time soon. The military, led by Muhammed Buhari, stated this much in the coup speech:
“Our economy has been hopelessly mismanaged . We have become a beggar and a debtor-nation. There is inadequacy of food at reasonable prices for our people who are now fed up with endless announcements of importation of foodstuffs. Health services are in shambles as our hospitals are reduced to mere consulting clinics, without drugs, water and equipment. Our educational system is deteriorating at alarming rate. Unemployment figures, including graduate unemployment, have reached embarrassing and unacceptable proportions. In some states workers are being owed salary arrears of 8 to 12 months, and in others, there are threats of salary cuts, yet our leaders revel in squandermania , corruption and indiscipline. They continue to proliferate public appointments in complete disregard of our stark economic realities”.
This was the way the military put the synopsis of the Second Republic.
As Nigeria was changing government, my department too was thinking of changing its own administration. The only difference was that Nigeria’s change of government happened through a military coup but that of my department was going to happen through an election. The final year students would have to pass the baton to those in part three which was my class. Those who were interested in the different executive positions had started campaigning as soon as the ban on departmental politics was lifted.
One of our classmates who was running for the Presidency of the History Students Society, Omowole Temokun, came to canvass our class votes, his own class too. He had gone round the other classes but ours. Since the campaign started, that was his first time of coming to talk to us. As soon as he finished telling us about his interest in becoming the President of the Society, he was walking towards the door when we all screamed that he should come and tell us about his manifesto and programmes for the Department and the students of the Department. He dismissed us insolently and told us it was not necessary. Besides, he left the class disrespectfully. His calculation was that 24 hours to the close of nominations, he was going to be returned unopposed as the President of the Society being the only candidate, as at that time, to have obtained the nomination form. He had actually started the race some weeks back as the sole presidential candidate. This attitude infuriated the class and some radicals among us led by Banji Alabi, Akin Akinade, Tayo Adesina, Goke Folayan, Greg Ileogben, Adekunle Adepitan (Per Se), Bunmi Dare , Bisi Olowookere, Ezomo Niyen and Kayode Adebayo(No Row) held an emergency meeting in the class after the lecture.
The general consensus was that I was the only one who had the clout to defeat him in such a short time. They took cognizance of my closeness to most of the students in the department, both junior and senior, as well as my King Cobra connection and my media experience. That very day, we marched to the Student Union Building to obtain the nomination form which would be closing 22 February 1984 as the election was already fixed for Friday, 24 February. We filled the form that very day, took the passport photographs to affix to the form and also attached the departmental receipt as evidence of payment of my society’s dues for the year (1984). We submitted it before the close of work. We only had a day for our own campaign since it was illegal to campaign on election day. Meanwhile, Temokun had started his own campaign the moment the ban on campaign was lifted early in February.
Realising that it would be difficult to move round the classes from parts 1 to 4 in a day, I came up with what I called “strategic consultations with class influencers”. There were some students in all the classes that I had interacted with personally since I got into the department in 1982. These were people with very strong influence in their classes. They were the ones I sent to speak to their classmates on my behalf. You can call them my mobilization teams. For the final year students, my friends were David Makanjuola , Bisi Adeleye and Chris Fajemifo. For the part two students, Ayodele Falodun, Deji Elumoye , Biodun Omoleye and Mukaila Mumuni were to do the job. For my part one canvassers, I had Sanya Oladapo leading people like Seye Kehinde, Kehinde Bamigbetan and Kola Onifade who were doing combined honours in History/Political Science. They all mobilized for me. The election was a keen one. It was a very close contest. I won with only two votes. The jubilation was electric. I had never seen anything like that before. It was a historic battle. Temokun learned the dynamics of politics in a very hard way.
This new departmental responsibility and my romantic shuttle and navigation to Moza and Morèmi halls (I avoided Sports Hall for obvious reasons ) at regular intervals, took a disastrous toll on my first semester results. I didn’t really get myself and I was unserious with my reading schedule. In the office that my mentor “borrowed” me, I started behaving like the owner. I was reading with only Mosun during exams in our first year. This second year was different. I had new friends. Therefore, I only took my new friends to “my office”. Unfortunately for me, Jambites didn’t like to walk alone. I didn’t know why. They liked walking in threes and fours. When I told my friend who was a girl to come and read with me in “my office”, she came with three of her friends thereby turning “my office” to a study centre. I couldn’t concentrate again. I was somehow stoical but I couldn’t disengage from her even though there was no engagement ring. When I saw my results, I knew the reason for the downward slope but I lied to my friends that I was frustrated by the refusal of the department to let me transfer to Law. For the first time in my exams, I didn’t make a single A. The details were horrible: HIS 301 (B+), HIS 303 (B), HIS 305 (B), REL301 (B+) and REL 318 (B). Needless to say that my cumulative plunged from 3.80 to 3.67.
Tragically, this gradual decline in academic performance and social etiquette continued uncontrollably in the second semester as a result of my irresolution. I knew what to do but I chose not to do it. My falling was my own making. In the midst of this confusion, I decided to change my two electives from Religion courses to Philosophy courses. Such a dramatic swapping was considered a risky swanking by my friends. When your CGPA was plummeting, you should look for easy courses to shore it up, definitely not philosophy, in Ife for that matter. I looked eccentric even though I was being strategic. I paid dearly for this but…
To be continued
