Albert Oladapo Ogunwusi and Dele Momodu

By Albert Oladapo Ogunwusi

I knew Dele Momodu from a distance when he worked as a youth corps member at the Oyo State College of Arts and Science, Ile-Ife.

He walked with a deliberate swagger in his trademark Kampala kaftan. Another icon of that period was the indomitable Oba Adedokun Omoniyi Abolarin.

Dely Mad, as he was known then, was a hit with the students. His lessons were the talk of the campus, though I wasn’t in his course.

It was easy to see in him a star destined for the firmament.

Momodu hit national consciousness when, as a writer in the Guardian Express, he (and a colleague) alleged that a top iconic columnist was a plagiarist!

The piece shook the nation and rattled the press.

He then got employed at the Concord as a writer and later Assistant Editor for Weekend Concord. He ravaged the landscape with one spellbinding story after another. Weekend Concord became the most famous title in the stable and the most popular in the country.

He was later Editor of Classique, a soft magazine that revived the fire of that genre in Nigeria.

One thing you cannot take away from Bob Dee is his capacity for building castles from the stones thrown at him. His lemons always turn to lemonade. Exile became another platform for re-launching himself into the media. OVATION was born.

I recall meeting with him on several occasions in London in company with another colleague. I appeared a few times in the magazine, generating a rumour that I was a director of OVATION. How I wish I were.

Momodu makes it clear, not in many words, that a celebrity journalist need not necessarily be judgmental.

He featured characters from a wide spectrum of society and shone like a million stars.

Never mind that he wasn’t starting celebrity journalism as a genre. He stamped the practice with his name in capital letters.

One day, there was a debate about why I never featured myself pictorally in the titles I edited.

Momodu listened unconvinced to my stock defence. I would turn the back of the paper and show them my signature like the governor of CBN on the Naira. Why struggle with others for the insides, again?

Fashion houses, business outfits, government offices and those in the know stocked OVATION. There were frequent quarrels over who stole OVATION from the shelves all over Nigeria. The rich and the poor met in OVATION as readers or subjects.

It was the greatest journalism coup in my memory. The OVATION magic.

In 1999, Bob Dee wanted to be President, and some thought it a subject for comedy. I rose stoutly in challenge. This is a self made man. An impossible story of renown; the kind of character Nigeria seeks in her distress.

Imbued with a boundless capacity for reinventing himself and his craft, Adojutelegan Momodu never stays down.

Physically, his head stays upright and his eyes look boldly forward. That is not an ambience he learnt. It is a feature of his redoubtable irrepressible spirit. Like a valiant cobra.

Days have really gone by.

At 65, Momodu has cause to look back with some satisfaction.

The laundryman’s son from Ile- Ife has become by merit, one of the true princes of the land.

Many happy returns, sir.

*Albert Oladapo Ogunwusi, a former Editor of Tribune is a UK-based lawyer