DAILY TRUST
By Tunde Akanni, PhD
“It’s da bomb”, yes, “da bomb”, I mean what Davido did with his popular ‘joke’ recently. No known joke has been louder. He called out friends for donations for what those friends surely knew he could afford. Promptly, they responded and eventually he netted two hundred million naira. Promptly too, he topped it up with fifty million naira. He raised the stakes further by announcing a gender-balanced committee of Nigerians with respectable social standing to administer the funds for orphanages and relevant foundations all over Nigeria.
And although Davido had been publicly identified with an unmistakable leader in the Banking sector in the past, First Bank, he revealed yet another surprise. WEMA Bank received all the recent donations on his behalf. WEMA? How did WEMA beat others to it?
Unknown to many, Davido was just exuding gratitude and aimed to support and sustain the reliable familial ties for the Adeleke dynasty of Ede. A few weeks back, Sir Dr Adewale Adeeyo, one of the most intimate friends of Davido’s father, Dr Deji Adeleke, passed on to eternity. It was a most devastating incident for Dr Adeleke. Indeed, some newspapers aptly noted that it was probably the most tragic incident for Dr Adeleke since he lost his wife, Davido’s mother, Veronica, and later, former Governor Isiaka Adeleke a few years back. Incidentally Davido’s mother appears to be all the reason for all the chain of events connected with the N250million.
Widely revered by leading writers in Nigeria as exemplified in a short Facebook tribute by Uzo Maxim Uzoatu, Dr Adeeyo was like the official chronicler for the Adeleke family of Ede, in spite of being worth chronicle on his own. In the review of the tribute published by Nigerian Tribune, Sulaiman Ajibade, the author noted that the 30-page tribute by Dr Adeeyo on the late former Governor Isiaka Adeleke otherwise known as Serubawon, is about the longest known globally, in the recent time. But Adeeyo, the publisher of the defunct Anchor newspapers, had done a similar honour to Davido’s mother, Veronica, when she died some years back. It was about the only media-published tribute on the woman whose death coincided with a birthday anniversary of the hubby.
Incidentally, though Adeeyo was a man of letters, not much has been published in the media to celebrate his legacy. This is why the singular intervention of a resilient journalism veteran, Alhaji Olumide Lawal, deserves all appreciation. Also born in Ede, Osun State, like Dr Adeeyo, Alhaji Lawal described Sir Eyo as “an illustrious son of Edeland and a phenomenon”. According to him the entire Ede universe stood still on learning of Dr Adeeyo’s passage. Why not?
