By Femi Akomolafe
First, a question—Have you ever been contacted by someone who was your literary god in your formative years and said he had been searching for you because he appreciated what you were doing? It happened to me last year when the man my generation regarded as The Greatest Thing in Nigeria’s Professional Journalism sent me an email to say precisely that. Of course, I thought I was either dreaming or a prank victim. I replied to voice my skepticism. Not even a reply could convince me. I asked for a WhatsApp number on which I could contact the emailer.
Lo and behold, within a few seconds, the gods of the ether did their magic, and I was in a video communication with Chief Tola Adeniyi himself.
Me! Wow! I could die and go to wherever with a Big Smile on my face.
No amount of money would ever compensate for Chief Tola Adeniyi’s endorsement of my work.
Please help me celebrate the man who epitomizes the finest of Nigerian journalism.
Here is my tribute to a man I consider among my mentors.
In a land where most writers have long traded their pens for porridge and akara, and where the Fourth Estate of the Realm has been debased, and now grovels at the feet of its would-be subjects, the political scoundrels who continue to misrule Nigeria, Chief Tola Adeniyi stood like a defiant Iroko in a forest of wilting shrubs.
He turned 80 recently. And while the Nigerian media—ever quick to roll out front-page tributes to thieves in agbada and career sycophants—barely whispered his name, some of us who had our formative years in the heat of the 1970s and 1980s cannot allow such deafening silence to stand unchallenged.
In Chief Tola Adeniyi, we did not just have a journalist, but an iconic warrior of a better world. A custodian of conscience. A thorn in the side of tyrants. A man whose type today is as rare as rain in the harmattan.
Born on May 29, 1945, in the heart of colonial Nigeria, Chief Tola Adeniyi was a man whose pen was sharper than a sabre and whose wit cut deeper than any decree from the jackboots that plagued Nigeria’s many lost decades.
Educated at the University of Ibadan—yes, that same once-proud institution now reduced to a glorified tutorial centre for future economic migrants – Chief Adeniyi began his career at a time when journalism in Nigeria was still an honourable craft, when editors could look rascalic soldiers and political scoundrels in the eye without shaking, and when columnists wrote not to please their godfathers in Abuja, but to disturb the sleep of corrupt generals.
Unlike many of his contemporaries who pirouetted between newspapers and government contracts like drunken dancers at funerals, Chief Tola Adeniyi remained that rarest of breeds: consistent, courageous, uncompromising, and incorruptible — a tower of integrity.
I belong to a generation of Nigerians that came of age when newspapers were bibles. We read them not just for news but also for education, intellectual development, guidance, ideology, and moral backbone. The Daily Times, Nigerian Tribune, and The Punch were our classrooms. We devoured them.
And towering above many of the names on the masthead was Tola Adeniyi.
He wrote like one who feared no man. And indeed, he did not, and still doesn’t.
As editor, poet, publisher, and columnist, Chief Adeniyi became a household name. Under the pen name “Aba Saheed,” he captured the hearts and minds of Nigerians with biting satire, unapologetic candour, and prose that made us giddy with admiration.
Man, could Chief Tola Adeniyi turn words! A superb wordsmith, Chief Adeniyi is up there with Mark Twain, the great satirist, and he could rub shoulders with Frederick Douglass, the most outstanding polemicist ever to wield a pen.
When Abacha’s goons terrorized Nigeria, many colleagues fled abroad or fell silent, their once-roaring pens reduced to meows. Not Chief Adeniyi. He lived up to his Akogun (War Leader) Title and continued to speak truth to power, even when the consequences could be terminal.
What do you do when a man wrote, “It is better to die for truth than to live as a liar.”
Only the truly favoured could say such things in Nigeria and live to see 80? O
His satirical essays, often cloaked in humour but dripping with venomous truth, spared no one. Military tyrants, civilian thieves, religious racketeers – he roasted them all with equal fervour.
Chief Adeniyi wrote not to entertain but to educate and to liberate. He liberated me, as he did many people of my generation.
“Nigeria’s problem is not that we lack intelligent people, it is that our intelligent people lack shame.” How many so-called “public intellectuals” today have the guts to utter such blasphemy against the Nigerian ruling class?
Sadly, today, most of them are more likely to be found composing love letters to power than holding it to account.
Sadly, journalism in Nigeria today is on life support. The stouted press freedom is little more than a euphemism for state-sponsored silence. Too many editors are mere errand boys for political godfathers. Too many columnists trade their voices for contracts. Newsrooms have become laundromats for corrupt reputations.
Editorials have become a glorified tribune for parochial interests.
To no one’s surprise, Chief Tola Adeniyi refused to join the corrupt circus.
Like the northern star, ever constant, he maintains his professional integrity.
He turned down lucrative offers from military regimes that tried to buy his silence. He walked away from cushy government appointments that would have muzzled his pen. He never sold his integrity, because he understood that some things are not for sale—no matter how tempting the price.
While others boasted of their closeness to power, Chief Tola Adeniyi wore his distance from it like a badge of honour. “If you sell your voice today, you will buy your shame with interest tomorrow.”
This principled stubbornness, this unrelenting refusal to lick the boots of oppressors, made him a target—and, for us, a legend.
Although a very proud Yoruba, Akogun Tola Adeniyi refuses to be bound by the constraints of tribalism or parochialism. He is a thoroughly cosmopolitan human being—no, make that a universal man who understands the complex dance between ethnic identity, national, and global responsibility.
Akogun Adeniyi celebrates his heritage while calling for a just and united Nigeria—one not built on lies, loot, and laziness but on equity and truth.
Even in old age, he continues to lament the erosion of cultural values in the face of Western mimicry.
Chief Tola saw through the fraud of imported democracy, the facade of fake independence, the bastardization of imported religions, and the hypocrisy of the so-called international community. He consistently calls on Africans to reclaim their minds and their sovereignty.
Chief Adeniyi’s writings were intellectually stimulating, pleasing, and aesthetically intoxicating. We loved them and consumed them voraciously. Chief Adeniyi was to us what Moses was said to have been to the Hebrews in the Sinai.
Aba Saheed had a gift for turning the mundane into the monumental. In his column, he wielded satire like a scalpel, exposing the gangrene in Nigeria’s political corpse. He was Nigerian Frantz Fanon with a typewriter. We all loved his inimitable style: Satirical, Surgical, and Subversive.
“A country that spends more on cows than classrooms should not complain when herdsmen rule it.” “Only in Nigeria do you find criminals praying before they steal, and pastors blessing their loot after they do.” These are not the truths you would find on the pages of today’s Nigerian newspapers. Most have been domesticated by their owners – by corrupt billionaire bandits with press cards.
Chief Adeniyi remains one of the few journalists whose name invokes not scandal, not suspicion, but solemn admiration, even reverence.
Nigeria is a nation that forgets its prophets but celebrates its plunderers. It builds statues for charlatans and silence for sages. It immortalizes thieves and ignores the truth-tellers. It recently doles out national awards to nation-wreckers and declared seven days of mourning for a departed ethnocentric tyrant.
Chief Tola Adeniyi deserves more than this belated tribute. He deserves a national holiday, a journalism school named in his honour, and a national prize for integrity in public communication. But of course, in Nigeria, integrity is not something we reward but punish.
But if there is hope, it is always in remembering men like Chief Tola Adeniyi. It lies in teaching the next generation that you can wield a pen without prostituting it. You can be fearless without being foolish, old-fashioned about ethics, and still be eternally relevant. More importantly, you do not need to join nation-wreckers even if you cannot beat them.
So, Chief Adeniyi, I salute you.
You made people like me believe, question, and think.
May your tribe increase—or, at the very least, not go extinct.
Tola Adeniyi at 80.
The Last of the Mohicans.
A lion among jackals.
A pen that never trembled.
A conscience that never wavered.
A legend who taught us that in the face of tyranny, silence is complicity—and that the ink of the righteous shall always outlast the blood of the oppressor.
Long may your words echo.
Long may your spirit burn.
Thank you for giving us your example.
I am your disciple,
©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀
(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Polemical-General of the Pan-African Republic.)
My Mission: Stultitia Delenda Est – Stupidity Must be Destroyed!
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