Remembering Isiaka Adeleke

AS the funeral bell clinked nine years ago, in haughty disturbance of the eerie night, sounding the reveille of his passage, it struck with mortiferous sadism. I had wished it was a dramatic stunt of some funny lots, merely playing possum, for God knows what – with this mythical palladium of Edeland. Alas, it was real, but incredibly still, that this peculiar breed, befitting of reverence with Mark Anthony’s elegy on Brutus as “the noblest Roman of them all …” in the Shakespearean epic of Julius Caesar – was pitched with irrevocable finality on the Rubicon of eternal heavenly. With this pioneer firstling in the Osun guber league, there couldn’t have been for me, a more intimate kindredship, which on this account, made his exit personally for me, an acutely sorry pass. My severe sense of loss was further accentuated by something of a memento personally handed over to me by his father, and my big uncle, Pa Ayoola Raji Adeleke, an elected senator of the Second Republic – which I had longed but in vain, to avail his son, Isiaka – foppled as I was, in the jingo-ring inertia of the familiarly notorious thief of procrastination.

Journeying down the lane of memory, one recalls that point in time, during the Bola Ige-led administration of Oyo State – Osun State wasn’t of course yet extant then – I had a demanding urge to recourse to him (Pa Adeleke) – then as a student of the Polytechnic Ibadan, Department of Basic Studies, for authentication of my Ede indigeneship for which I opted on temporary point of expedience over my ordinarily expected first preference of Iwoland; the later being my paternal place of ancestry on one hand, and Ede being the ancestoral home of my paternal grandmother – to which I also had an equally entitled claim – as statutorily requisite for my claim to the annual student bursary. Baba gladly obliged. That day,I actually met him in easy relaxation – the Senate opportunely being on recess – tippling on a bottle of beer, at his 68 Ojularede residence in Ede. I remember the mild drama so picturesquely enrapturing – as if it were just yesterday when, ever before I could settle for a seat, he immediately ordered me, to proceed to the nearby fridge and rummage through the medley of bacchic stuff fully loaded therein to the brim, for my choice. After a fleeting span of reluctance, merely feigned on my part to affect moral innocence, I was almost thrown aboard, when Baba, in a fit of jocose wit and subterranean tinge of magisterial command ordered: “Mo ni ko o lo mu beer kan ninu fridge yen. Ta lo maa lo o fi jo,nigbati o je pe Baba e gaan, Brewery ni”.

Baba was really dead right in his exactly apt portraiture of my Dad, whom I grew up right from infancy to know, along with my big uncle, Pa Adeleke in those days as jolly drinking pals ,just as he was also right on that “hereditary logic of inheritance” that I had no right to abstemious teetotalism. I had almost not settled back for a seat, when Baba dramatically dashed out of the sitting room. In a jiffy, he was already back with Mummy Adeleke, his wife, trailing closely behind. “Who is this person seated?”Baba asked, pointing at me, as Mama cast a fleeting gaze in curious amazement. The face was so familiar but she wasn’t precisely too sure. “Can’t you remember your son, Kola again at Udoji Street, Ogui? Baba asked his wife in mocking amusement, as Mama in a fit of spontaneous awareness hilariously showered tons of hearty greetings on me, asking after my mum and others. After a spirited exchange of pleasantries, I promptly apprised him of the nitty-gritty business of my bursary issue,to which he promptly obliged, scribbling a note on paper, which I presented to one Hon. A. A. Lawal representing our constituency in Ede, who would barely peruse before hastily appending his signature ostensibly prodded by the esteemed source of the cover note.

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As I announced my intention to start back to Ibadan, Baba dipped hand into pocket – lynch-pinned immediately on exit, with immaculate wads of freshly minted currencies, stretched at me for a gift. Next in line was a complimentary card given to boot, encouraging me to be free to call or see him for whatever I might require from time to time. The card, still very much intact in my custody, quoted here, in graphic exactitude, reads: ”Senator (Chief) Ayoola Adeleke. Balogun Ede. Home Address: 68 Ojularede Street, Ede, Oyo State. Office: National Assembly, Tafawa Balewa Square; PMB 12572 , Lagos.Tel:632503,635457.Telegrams Clerknas Cables: NASLAS.Residence: Crescent D,Flat 5, Block 21, National Assembly Flats, Victoria Island Lagos. Tel:615481 Curiously as if jinxed, I wasn’t just scant in keeping faith with this fatherly entreaty. To say that I was scant would amount to an overstatement. Fact indeed was that I never did; throughout my spell of studentship; to my utter pains and laments, until ten years after or thereabout. This particular point in time, I had deemed it of necessitous import to curry Baba’s favor to link me for elevated political appointment with his son,Isiaka, then the reigning incumbent and indeed the epoch maker, trailing the blaze as the first in the guber saddle of the new Osun State.

Indeed, it need be recalled that at the height of the hypodromic contestation for the Osun guber, I was then in Radio Lagos. In those days, the newsroom was always agog with exchange of boisterous wits and banters between Mr. Adeyeye Oyedokun, my big boss and later General Manager, Osun Radio, yelling that his friend and kinsman,  Chief Oladosu Ladapo, would roll my brother, Isiaka over and over on the canvass – Just as I will also yell back in counter-retort, that it was all a huge joke. I remember vividly that day, the very moment I appeared to Baba, he recalled the last time I visited him and demanded why I couldn’t get in touch with him, despite his promptings that I should always feel free to relate to him from time to time. After that, the next accusation:”Nibo niwo ti wa lati ojo yi ti egbon e ti je governor,to je pe ori olori lo nran lowo ti ‘wo sese wa nyoju nsinyi?”Baba asked in subdued but agitated angst, wondering what could have been amiss that I could afford to sit by, aloof and so far away, knowing in undoubted certitude that my brother Isiaka was governor

Before I could mumble a flit-short “J.A.C.K.” caught as I was in stupefied flush of self-guilt, he added the rider still in native Yoruba, but deliberately here expressed in English:”I never knew you are a journalist, otherwise you had all the chances to be his Chief Press Secretary”. I shivered in mournful lament! After a little more tete-a-tete: ”Kola you would have to go back and come again to see me.I just don’t want to send you there.I want to take you personally down there, and hand you over personally to him”.Thus did I leave on the mutual note of coming again of course as quickly as possible.

Thus will I defer today, defer tomorrow, again and again, only to be sent crashing and ramfeezled, reeling in numb-struck stupor at the dramatic missive of his passage to Glory.

From the futile episode, I had tried again to make something out of the situation. ”At least Baba had given me a card ten years ago, or thereabout. This card is good as a treasured memento,to be availed his son, Isiaka. This indeed is a task that must be done”.So I resolved. Little did it occur in the remotest fringe of my imagination, that it was sheer pipe-dream, otiose, effete and bound for the destinal harbor of

futile illusion with the dramatic disbandment of the civilian polity by Sanni Abacha,the savage hound in uniform, celebrated for his cannibalistic regime of the butchery, which presided over high-profile assassinations of such monstrously alarming proportion, putting Idi Amin, the notorious beast of Uganda, to shame.

My passion for the Adelekes, as of course reminiscent of my entire family, may really not sift into the recesses of a poignantly deeper grasp, without a dig into the mist of distant memory.

As for our relationship on the larger space of clanship, I shudder to lay claim to the authority of a griot.It dates back probably to the primeval antiquity of the founding of Edeland, considering the fact of our common progeny.

However, that which is specifically expedient for the moment, and within my limited cognitive ken, is that my beloved Dad, Pa Samson Adegunju Johnson, of blessed memory and Pa Raji Ayoola Adeleke, a professional Staff Nurse, and later a vibrant Union leader in the Enugu Labor space, were two intimate chums, with a chemistry, bordering on alter-ego intimacy.

Ask them of an origination – chances are that they might not know, because it was a friendship obscured in every likelihood by the hazy space of infantile memory,if not from the prenatal cubicle of motherly womb.

Such was the affectionately affinal bond that the inscrutable fixture of magisterial fate was again to locate them,in emigration to far away Igbo-speaking Eastern region, not by any premeditated mutual agreement, but by sheer whimsical happenstance

My Dad, initially a military functionary with the West African Frontier Force, ex-cashier with UAC Apapa, and now an official of Coast Construction,a corporate giant in the Construction Industry (British owned) – arrived the East in a recurring flux of occupational itinerary necessitated by concentrative deployment of manpower, gravitating to varying spot of the moment, laden with heavy construction works.

Our first spot of abode was Aba. Thus in a successive trail of occupational itinerary, we had traversed quite a considerable gamut of the eastern space – from Aba to Nsukka; Nsukka to Ngwo and finally to Enugu, where my Dad re-united in rekindled fraternal relationship with his old pal and kinsman, Pa Adeleke, having secured a new job with Nigeria Railways Corporation, Enugu.

Perhaps one might here regress in passing, for purposive emphasis of the fact that in Ngwo, where we lived as close family friends with the legendary C. C. Onoh, ex-governor of Anambra State, and father of Bianca-Onoh, later married to Odumegwu Ojukwu, ex-Biafran warlord – Adeleke soon became at our end, a familiar feature in his regular fraternal visitations to our family.

The natural chemistry between Pa Adeleke and my Dad, was to rub off in salutary consecution on my Mum and Mummy Adeleke,also a professional Staff Nurse, as her husband, whose church of the Cherubim and Seraphim sect my Mum used to attend.

I remember an occasion when, as a child, I suddenly fell ill, without the ordinarily expected symptomatic warning alert.It was the destinal sanatorium of Mummy Adeleke’s Church we took recourse for my spiritual treat. It was recurrently at the same church that a vision was revealed that my elder sibling then 15 years or there-about, should gird his loins against a fatal incident fore-seen to occur in the year, co-eval with his twenty-eighth – which indeed actually happened during my brother’s sojourn in Ibadan but with mitigated severity, ostensibly tempered by the unfailing grace of divine providence and not improbably, the prayers and spiritual treats expeditiously observed, in line with the prescription of the visioner at that moment in question

It was therefore to be expected; in keeping with the filial track of kindredship, that sometimes in the early 60s during the ceremonial opening of Pa Adeleke’s new house in Ilukwe, Enugu – my Dad, Mum, my sibling and I, could not but stay back, tarrying three days and three nights in filial embrace of our familial kins, after the ceremonial revelry and its accompanying din and hopla.I recall with fond excitement, my Dad’s memorable role as the M.C., and my Mum, who took competent charge of the culinary species for the Yoruba community in Enugu, who attended the memorable house “warming”.

I remember also, with fond nostalgia, sometimes in 1978, on the death of my paternal grandmother, Madam Victoria Adeyoola Johnson of the Jagun Olukosi family of Ede – that Pa Ayoola Adeleke was a conspicuously visible figure in the pivotal role he played during the funeral obsequies.

Such was our consanguineous passion of brotherhood for the Adelekes and reciprocally vice-versa of course, which explained our acute pathos of loss at the passage of this fallen legend and enigma of a salutarily unique stature and institution in the Nigerian political space.

This glorious day, January 15, 2026, would have signaled his initiatory ritual into the graciously esteemed league of septuagenarians, but for the unremitting great ripper that pulled a joke. May his soul continue to rest in peace.

•Johnson is a writer and journalist