There is a peculiar affliction that visits our public space whenever a man refuses to fit neatly into the caricatures society has prepared for him in our clime. It begins as a whisper, graduates into suspicion and matures, inevitably, into accusation. The charge is always the same, delivered with the laziness of minds untrained in inquiry but well versed in envy. *How did he make his money?* It is not a question born of curiosity but of resentment. It is not asked to learn but to indict.
I have lived long enough to recognise this disease for what it is. It is the inability of some people to accept that discipline, patience, lawful enterprise and time can still produce substance in a land where shortcuts are loudly advertised. When wealth does not announce itself with thugs or sudden proximity to power, it unsettles those who have convinced themselves that illegality is the only viable route to comfort. And so, to calm their own unease, they invent crimes for others.
Ordinarily, I would have remained silent. Silence, after all, is often the final insult to falsehood. But there are moments when silence risks being misread as retreat, and restraint mistaken for guilt. This is one such moment.
For more than 40 years, my life has unfolded in the open. Not behind curtains, not through proxies, not under the protection of fear. In all those years, I have never been invited or questioned by any law enforcement agency for fraud, drugs, theft or any act bordering on criminality. In a society where innocence is often accidental and persecution sometimes recreational, that record is not trivial. It is the quiet testimony of a life lived deliberately.
Yet suddenly, because I chose to lend my voice to the voiceless and my shoulders to a poor bricklayer being slowly crushed by a coalition of power, influence and cultivated violence, I have been recast as a villain in a story written by men with dirty hands and louder mouths. That irony is so thick it hardly needs commentary.
Let us be honest with ourselves. This outrage is not about me. It is about discomfort. It is about the irritation that arises when someone refuses to mind his business in the face of injustice. It is about the anger reserved for those who disrupt convenient lies with stubborn facts. In this country, neutrality is safety. Conscience is rebellion.
Those now parading my name in their gossip columns and beer parlour tribunals are not strangers to moral compromise. They are men who have perfected the art of losing cases and winning vendettas. Men who drag judges through the mud whenever rulings refuse to kneel. Men who weaponise petitions, blackmail institutions and mistake noise for evidence. That such men now presume to lecture the public on ethics would be amusing if it were not tragic.
What is most revealing is the poverty of their imagination. They cannot conceive of wealth built slowly, lawfully and without theatrics. They cannot imagine a life sustained by work, partnership and long years of consistency. Theft is easier for them to understand than discipline. Crime is more familiar than restraint. So they project their own moral anxieties onto others and call it inquiry.
To deepen the absurdity, a particularly grotesque theory has been floated to explain away a heroine’s death, a virtuous and sweet goddess in whom I found a mother. It is suggested that she was felled by those in camouflage apparel who struck in vengeance and, unable to corner their target, settled for a softer target in his mother. In God’s holy name, how does this infantile nonsense from the pit of hell add up? Given that a large chunk of our laid back society relishes such folktales as a derivative of a disconnected third world misfortune, one might perhaps forgive such crass nonsense if it emanated from the gutters where rumours thrive and logic starves. But when it is advanced by lettered men, polished into argument and repeated without moral suasion, it reveals how far our moral compass has slipped. The truth, stripped of embellishment, is neither mystical nor complex.
A saintly old goddess was felled simply because of a fairly large sum extended to her in a small case that morning, for the completion of her building project. She had even made some payments to her artisans right there as I stood, before my departure to Lagos. Then the unthinkable happened. The police would then later finger her artisans as persons of interest, but the four had since left town. Their trail yielded results when their families were traced to Oshogbo and Ikirun, ceased and brought back to base because a large chunk of the money were recovered from them, saying the culprits left it with them for safe keeping, complete in same brand new notes in its case. They said if the police had come seventy two hours earlier, they would have been caught red handed. The old women and an elderly man were later released, but the sixty eight thousand naira was confiscated by the police as exhibits and it remains so till this day. The police did a marvelous job but it bore no fruit.
How then can anyone with a sound mind spin a caricature narrative of the dead in a manner that ridicules even the brightest minds out there, merely to score a cheap point enmeshed in bad fate. The evil that men do lives after them, and every living being has his final end in the hands of his Creator.
This conspiracy theory and make believe spurious story are not meant to uncover justice but to obscure responsibility. In that desperate effort to explain away blood, we are forced to confront not merely the crime itself but the frightening depths to which public conscience has fallen.
The goodness of a man lies not in the rumours of those who wish evil for a large hearted soul, but in the richness of his heart. There was an issue from years past involving a jolly friend of mine, Senator Polycarp Nwite, who was then very close to our present day President. It was at the height of the Abacha years. They were stubborn but courageous men. It was during that period that my path crossed with Jagaban at Gbagada in the early nineties. When the Abacha dust finally settled, my friend Nwite later went on to become a Senator, and Jagaban a Governor. Their friendship thrived. Jagaban did not concern himself with whether one was Yoruba or Ibo. He appreciated loyalty, and Nwite benefitted greatly from him.
Later in life, however, Nwite became ill, he can’t see well. And so eye surgery became imminent, and that was when he sent for me frantically. I went with his son who came to pick me on a Sunday morning. He ushered me into his bedroom where he had arranged a pile of documents and handed them over to me. He then said, “My friend, I am going on a distant journey to fix my eyes. I cannot see well. I have this strange premonition I cannot explain. If it turns out badly, take care of my children. They are young. This is all I have. I empower you today to share it all amongst them without rancour, as I do not believe in probate. You are now in charge. If I return, I will retrieve all I have given you.”
I tried to protest, but he was done with me. I then pulled another string as a lawyer because life is transient. What if I dropped dead myself and you are saved? I told him he was too emotional and insisted on proper documentations! But he ignored my superior argument and insisted on my exit. Nwite’s life inheritance was then in excess of 1.8 billion naira. If that was the money they later rumoured that I pilfered and adduced as the reason my princess was harmed, then the shame rests with the writer and his evil cohorts.
That’s because, shortly after I got home, I called another friend, Professor Olaniyan, then Head of the Department of Law at the University of Lagos, for advice haven briefed him. The Professor said the man had spoken his mind and that he shared his sentiments.
Needless to say, that as he had predicted, that dreaded unthinkable happened. If his doctors ever shared anything with him regarding his state of health, he didn’t share with me. And so that responsibility became mine. I rose to the occasion and executed everything exactly as my friend had dictated.
When I finished, the children cried. The eldest son, Mike, would not let me leave. He insisted I take at least ten percent for my troubles, even as the counsel, since I am a lawyer. I refused. I was not their father’s lawyer, but his friend.
The Professor had advised me to follow my heart, and I just did.
Even when a powerful director in the land’s ministry, who knew of the man’s demise and relying on tribal bigotry, attempted to sleaze one of the choice waterfront properties, I would have none of it. I consulted with Governor Babatunde Fashola, and followed up with several visits to his office, insisting that these prime landed properties were allocated to Nwite by his predecessor, and that I will never cede a minutest portion of it. Governor Fashola, a good and kind hearted man, intervened, and the rest is history.
This is who I am, not what rumour mongering perverts would love to propagate because of my insistence on justice, fair play and equity for all. We are all equal before the Creator. The poor, the impoverished, the oppressed, the voiceless, the bricklayers and the downtrodden must survive, and all that is theirs, truly and legally earned in inheritance or otherwise, must be preserved.
Fortunately, Mr Nwite Jnr and the Prof are both alive, meaning I just can easily be fact-checked.
Let it be said clearly. My businesses are not hidden. My records are not mythical. My life is not a mystery novel. Everything I have built exists in the open, viable and verifiable. Those who know me know this. Those who do not are free to investigate, not speculate. Evidence, not envy and not bad blood, is the currency of serious discourse.
What truly rankles my traducers is not my livelihood but my refusal to look away. I refused to applaud while a man’s inheritance was rebranded as loot. I refused to nod along while violence was explained away as theatre. I refused to accept that stitched skulls could be dismissed as street drama or some ‘tolotolo’ blood, ultimately reducing it to some ridiculous folklore. That refusal offended powerful sensibilities. It still does.
But history has never been kind to those who confuse power with permanence. Time, unlike men, is incorruptible. It records patiently and judges without emotion. When the dust settles, as it always does, noise evaporates and only facts remain. On that day, gossip will find no refuge.
Until then, I remain unperturbed. A man who knows the provenance of his bread does not tremble when accused of stealing garri. I will continue to stand where I have always stood, with the oppressed, the inconvenient and the unfashionably truthful. If that posture earns me enemies, so be it. Hostility is often the tribute paid by injustice to conscience.
And if anyone still insists on asking how I made my money, let them ask properly. Let them ask with documents. Let them ask with proof. Let them ask like adults.
Until then, they may keep their whispers. I will keep my peace…
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