Terror war: Sambisa awaits Oluwo, the Àrólé Elédùmarè

By Tunde Odesola

(Published in The PUNCH, on Friday, June 26, 2026)

Tales by moonlight thrives on call-and-response give-and-take. “Story, story,” the storyteller invites the audience, honey in his voice, suspense in his eyes. “Story!” the audience booms back. “Who knows the meaning of this proverb? A fish rottens from the head,” the storyteller asks. Under this moonlight, I am the storyteller. I can see some eager hands up, waving frantically to answer my question, confidence breathing heavily, but, please, please and please, allow me to illustrate this proverb with a short story.

In the 1990s, a random Abdulrasheed found his way into the US. Burning with unquenchable greed fuelled by criminality, the empty madcap soon showed up at a branch of BankBoston, in Boston, USA, presenting a stolen cheque of £247,000:00 from the world-renowned aviation company, Boeing. Before the ink of the signature he wrote on the cheque dried up, cops had flooded the bank, and Abdulrasheed was handcuffed and bundled away in a police vehicle.

Hahahaha! “Were ni Abdulrashidi pe Oyinbo, o ra ago pọnnkan, o ni ko ni àláàmù.” Abdulrasheed thought the white man was a fool; he bought a wristwatch from the white man for a penny and complained that the watch did not have an alarm. After he was busted in the £247,000:00 scam, the notorious ‘419’ kingpin was indicted in another scam, with the American police charging him with forging a £59,000:00 cheque, using the name of one Thomas Eyring.

For his troubles, Abdulrasheed was rewarded in 1998 by the court with a 15-month jail term in Boston, deported to Nigeria in April 1999, after serving the term, and banned from re-entering the US.

But this Odídẹrẹ́ was super stubborn. It was unmindful of that proverb of caution, “Odídẹrẹ́ kii ku si oko ìwájẹ.” Abdulrasheed Odídẹrẹ́ flew back to the US and was caught at the border in March 2011. This time, he was convicted in New York and banned for life from entering God’s Own Country.

Abdulrasheed’s first and secondary mercenary journeys to jails grabbed the front pages of two British tabloids, The Mail on Sunday and The Sun, on May 19, 2024, with screaming headlines. As a reputable storyteller, I will not desecrate my lips by mentioning Abdulrasheed’s full name because the blemish of his profanity is unwashable. Electronically speaking, therefore, I will simply refer to Abdulrasheed as a woebegone e-king, who perpetrated e-fraud, to inflict e-woe upon himself. Ehn, yes! You heard me: ‘e-woe’. If you don’t gerrit, forget about it!

Like Àsàake the singer, Abdulrasheed’s ears have been cut off, and he has remained lonesome at the top. It was this Abdulrasheed, whose education confirms the scantiness of his logic, that rose to become king. It was he who had been disturbing the peace and tranquillity of the land. It was he who recently puked in his palace and challenged babalawos to go after bandits and terrorists. This was the battle cry from the throne of the Aláṣe Lori Oriṣa, “All the Babalawo, Araba and Alfas who are always boasting of one charm or another, the time has come to use your powers to rescue the abducted children of Oriire. If money is the problem, I will provide it. Or are your charms effective only when it is time to afflict innocent people? Iṣé ti dé. War is here. The children are still in the bush.”

As a storyteller who craves fairness, I went in search of the foremost Ifa scholar and Awiṣe Agbaye, Prof Wande Abimbola, to seek his view on the babalawo challenge the king had thrown.

Baba Abimbola, sage and scholar, said in his soft voice: “It’s needless to respond to such a character.” But the former Vice Chancellor of Obafemi Awolowo University told me a tale. He said, “When I was about five years old, I went with my elderly ones to a nearby river in our community. When we got to the river, we saw a strange man darting in and out of the bush across the river. Gripped by panic, we hid in the shrub nearby, keeping our eyes on the man, our hearts in our mouths. When he dashed into the bush for the umpteenth time, we all fled homeward.

“On our flight homeward, we ran into an old man called Baba Ladeji. We told him what our eyes had just seen. Baba Ladeji said, ‘Wèrè ni, wèrè ni, ẹ jẹ́ ó lo’, meaning: ‘He is mad, he is mad; don’t worry yourself about him’.

Abimbola was not done. He throws in a proverb, “Asapẹ fun wèrè jó, òhun wèrè ẹgbẹ̀ra: He who claps for a madman, he and the madman are the same.” And he added a piece of advice, “The community should not wait for the madman to bite a tree before they take care of him, because he might bite someone before he bites a tree.”

Remember, I am the storyteller. Also, remember the proverb we are interrogating in the moonlight. In case you have forgotten, it is, “The fish rottens from the head.” I think with my little illustration of the fish proverb, I have been able to convince you, rather than confuse you, on the need to have correct heads wear crowns and caps in our society, because it will be too late to cry when the head is off.

Sadly, Nigeria happened to Oṣun when Abdulrasheed suddenly showed up and took the crown, steeping his utterances thereafter in bile and bigotry, invalidating the very essence of his legitimacy, and his reasoning dried up afterwards before sundown. Or how can any right-thinking being call on babalawos to take up arms against terrorists and bandits when the land has an army? If the snake does not hide its hands inside its body, why was the call to babalawos so strident while the call to imams and pastors was a mere whisper? If someone who calls himself the representative of God on earth cannot decree fire and brimstone to rain on terrorists and bandits, it does not befit his mouth to call out babalawos. The same reality that befuddles the babalawo when confronting science and technology is the same hamstring that snaps in the thigh of Abdulrasheed or any pastor, who cannot go into Sambisa.

For all the superiority Abdulrasheed has been attributing to his Elédùmarè, so the Arole of God cannot march all by himself into Sambisa, resplendent in aṣo òkè, an abetí ajá cap on his head, gold chain on his right ankle, horsetail in his left hand, and face those stupid Boko Haram terrorists?

I ask: Who is afraid? Rashidi or his godfather? Is Abdulrasheed’s godfather dead? Or deaf? And dumb? Like the gods of Baal? Abdulrasheed boasts more than any babalawo, imam or pastor about his indestructibility, so he should lead the way to the Sambisa Forest. He can take Odumeje and any boastful imam along with him.

When calamity befalls a Nigerian or any of its entities, Nigerians say Nigeria has happened to that person or entity. Heartbreakingly, Nigerians have substituted the name of their country for calamity. But I beg to differ; the Nigeria that Nigerians say happens to Nigerians is just the symbolic fish and its rotten head. When an unfit head wears the crown, it rots together with the body. Whenever a square peg is put in a round hole, a cretin is at work, not creativity. When the head is rotten, what becomes of the rest of the body?

May Nigeria not happen to us. Amen. The rottenness of the Nigerian head has resulted in sorrow, tears and blood for families nationwide, irrespective of ethnicity. On April 15, 1960, the Ama Ezike town of Ummunya autonomous community in Oyi Local Government of Anambra State produced one of the finest sound engineers, music producers and songwriters ever to come out of the bosom of Nigeria. The rotten fish head killed him on October 15, 2020. His name is Osy Denobis Obidigbo.

I was friends with Osy’s younger brother, Chuks Denobis, back in the day on Omotoye Estate, Orile Agege, Lagos, where we lived our youthful years. Despite reading Economics at the University of Lagos, Chuks had followed the musical path paved by his elder brother. Osy was reserved; he talked little, but you could see kindness, trust, wisdom and resilience in his eyes.

I had lost Chuks’ number since we spoke about two years ago. I needed him to help me reach Nigerian music icon, Darey Art-Alade, whose outfit, Livespot 360, my mentee was seeking to do her three-month IT. I combed the internet to get hold of Chuks, but I met with no luck. How can I get Chuks, I pondered? Oh, his brother, Osita! I went on Facebook and typed Osy Denobis; his handsome smile lit up. Chuks must be on his friends’ list, I reasoned. I raced through his friends’ list. Chuks wasn’t there. “Iru kileyi, omo Odesola? Why would Chuks not be on his brother’s friends’ list?

It was when I was going through Osy’s posts that I saw the picture he took with Femi Kuti. And I saw, “Adieu,….” It was Femi Kuti’s tribute to the chief sound engineer of the Afrikan Shrine. So, Oga Osy is dead? When? 2020.

I needed Chuks’ number more than ever. I called Laolu Abegunde, the son of my elder sister from another mother. “Ha, Boda Tunde, I missed your call. I’m just landing from Barbados. I’ll call when I get into the Arrival Hall.

Laolu called and later sent me Chuks’ number. I called. “Chuks, how you dey?” “I dey o, my brother.” “I no know say Osy don die o.” “Ha, e don die.” How? Wetin happen? Na for Facebook I see am when I dey look for you.” “Tunde, na Nigeria happen to my brother o.” “Why you no tell me when we spoke two years ago?” “Talk no enter dat side.”

Then Chuks told me the full story behind Osita’s death, “It was during the #EndSARS protest in 2020. He had an ulcer. He was stooling as a result of the ulcer. I took him to a hospital on the island, but there were no medical staff to treat him. So, I brought him back to the mainland, where they were telling me that the medical staff could not come to work. It wasn’t a question of lack of money. I bought blood and all the medicines I was told to buy. The blood is still at the hospital.”

For context, Osita was not an anonymous personality. He handled Fela Anikulapo’s shows, the popular Benson and Hedges shows, and Star Trek shows, among others. He produced the sounds in the works of Onyeka Onwenu, Christy Essien-Igbokwe, Majek Fashek, Mandators, Ras Kimono, and a host of others. That was the man, the rottenness of the fish head killed. Goodnight, the husband of Chinwe, may the Lord look after your five children. That’s how Nigeria kills its children.

If not for the rottenness in the fish head, shouldn’t Nigeria be at the ongoing FIFA World Cup, where Cape Verde, a country of 530,000 population, shocked the entire world by holding the reigning European champion, Spain, to a goalless draw? If not for the rottenness, should our public office be an avenue for looting, should our schools be without pupils and teachers, our hospitals bereft of medicines, and our national life shattered into smithereens?

Email: tundeodes2003@yahoo.com

Facebook: @Tunde Odesola

X: @Tunde_Odesola

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The corpse, the camera and the controversy: Dele Momodu answers the Abacha question

Tunde Odesola

(Published in The PUNCH, on Friday, June 26, 2026)

I am too young to put my mouth in the affairs of elders. But the call of duty and poetic licence imbue the writer with the power to put their nose in matters that don’t concern them.

I was a nosy parker in the messy online fight between Chief Dele Momodu and his erstwhile chum, Chief Femi Fani-Kayode, four months ago. I advised both elders in an article titled, “Dele Momodu vs Fani-Kayode: The pot fighting the kettle,” published in The PUNCH, on March 27, 2026.

After reading the piece, the Orangun of Oke-Ila, Oba Adedokun Abolarin, called me. He said, “Tunde, you have hit my friend, Dele.” “No, kabiyesi, I’m too small to do that, sir,” I responded. Kabiyesi asked if he could give my number to Bob Dee. I said it’s ok.

When Bob Dee rang my phone, I picked up the call with certain scepticism. “He would want to throw his weight around,” I thought. “Good morning, sir,” he said. Good morning, sir,” I returned greeting for greeting. I read your brilliant article. When I see a sound mind, I recognise it. That was a brilliant work.”

“Thank you, sir,” I replied.

“I don’t have any issue with the article, but there is one aspect that I would like to comment on. It is the aspect in which people say I defected to Abacha’s family after Abiola died. Sir, I never did. I stayed with Abiola till the end. I’m still in contact with the family to date. I went to the double weddings of the late General Sani Abacha’s daughters as a journalist, not as a guest. It was I who made Nigerians know the mausoleum where Abacha was buried behind his Kano palace. It was through Ovation that the world saw the mausoleum. It was I who took the pictures of the opulent weddings for Ovation. It was a call of duty. It’s only that Abacha angle that I want to comment on.”

I promised Bob Dee I was going to set his record straight on Abacha’s myth. I think I’ve done just that.

Email: tundeodes2003@yahoo.com

Facebook: @Tunde Odesola

X: @Tunde_Odesola