There is the legend of a newspaper journalist who had an issue with his uncle, an oba in present-day Osun State, and threatened the king with death. The man needed a favour; the oba closed his eyes to the man’s demand. “Kabiyesi, you will die,” he reportedly informed the oba. “Iku boo?” Everyone who heard him gasped and upbraided this man for the sacrilege of speaking ill to a king in the palace. They thought his beer and booze had again taken hold of him. In response to demands of apology, the man stormed out of the palace, back to his base in Lagos.
We say a tree does not fall in the forest and kill someone at home. I used to believe that proverb would be true at all times until I heard how this man carried out the regicide he promised. He got to Lagos and submitted a report to his editor that his uncle, the oba, had joined his ancestors. Did the editor pass the story for publication? Well, who else could be the best source and authority on the life and times of a king if not his own kin, the king’s man himself? And so, an abnormal tree that fell in Lagos killed the oba at home. The king read his own obituary, courtesy of his own nephew who worked in faraway Lagos.
The event happened in the 1970s, so we were told in the 1990s. And we were warned as newsmen never to build our truth on a foundation laid by only one source. The man got the fake news of the oba published and stood by it. We couldn’t really get hold of the publication but we were told the man’s name. When the second republic came with its opportunities, the man moved to Ibadan. He had to. His ways had made the waters of Lagos too shallow for his shark to swim.
Our man edited an ephemeral newspaper for some politicians in Ibadan in the early 1980s. Then he spiced it with some other extra journalism stuff. I wished he were alive now for me to ask him why he ‘killed’ the oba with his pen. But if we did not see what his Ajantala did in the bush, we saw the man’s face as he joined in shredding icons on the streets of Ibadan on days when the metropolis lived its reputation. What reputation? I have beside me here a copy of Ruth Watsons’ ‘Civil Disorder is the Disease of Ibadan’. Everyone came to this world with a disease which defines their existence. The end came twenty-something years ago for the man who used his pen to kill his uncle, the king. It was not a nice end.
The world was crazy fifty years ago when a newspaper was deployed to ‘kill’ a monarch. It is crazier now with social media and its unhinged tendencies. I remembered the death story of the undead king when some unknown persons with unknown motives used social media to announce the death of Globacom chairman, Dr. Mike Adenuga, Tuesday last week. I also remembered the Zik-is-dead hoax of 1989. Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe was in his study in November 1989 working on book manuscripts when he read his own obituary complete with a list of a committee to bury him. It was crazy. One thing is clear, the one who wishes one dead is not a friend. A death wish whether oral or written is an enemy action.
The social media can be rumour pro-max. Rumour, most times, come false and in unfriendly costumes. While its currency is virality, it easily spins out of the spinner’s control. Robert H. Knapp in his ‘A Psychology of Rumour’ (1944) avers that “if leaflets, newspapers or radio broadcasts are likened to bullets, then rumour must be likened to a torpedo, for, once launched, it travels of its own power.” Social media scholars have at various times raised the alarm that false information is a threat to modern society. Lt Col. Jarred Prier of the United States Airforce in 2017 published a seminal piece that demonstrated how social media had become a tool for all kinds of ‘war’. In his ‘Commanding the Trends: Social Media as Information Warfare’, he mentioned “malicious users” and “malicious actors” creating malicious trends and manipulating internet platforms to spread negative messages, most times fake news. And, fake news he defined as “propaganda composed of false story disguised as news…”
Death rumours rarely have an identifiable source. The one about the Globacom chairman did not appear to have any. What it had were internet rats in desperate grab of trends. Whoever started the fire disappeared soon after lighting the match. I got calls; the first from a colleague in the United Kingdom; another from Benin, yet another from my office in Ibadan. A friend sent the screenshot of a Facebook version of the vile announcement. Everyone who contacted me sounded alarmed and apprehensive. But, why would they be calling me for a confirmation of bad news? Who do we call – or text? My friends suggested names. First a text to a certain number. “Good evening, sir”. No immediate response. Then I placed a call. A laugh; the line went dead. Then a response came in one minute: “Chairman is fine…” That was a text message from the man I called; we call him Bob Dee (Chief Dele Momodu). Two other messages of reassurance soon followed from that channel. Then, the newsroom went calm, and the same social media that created the topic of death scrambled to quench the fire. “Are rumours just rumours?” Rumour theorists, Heng Chen, Yang K. Lu and Wing Suen, once asked themselves. And they answered, yes. They also noted that rumours (that are not rooted in truth) “often disappear quickly without a trace.” I read all that in their ‘The Power of Whispers: A Theory of Rumour’.
I asked one of my callers why he sounded so troubled by last Tuesday’s death rumour. He told me what I already knew: You remember that old song by Juju music commander, Ebenezer Obey? Anyone who knows the evil ways of darkness will not wish the moon bad (Èdá tó mò’se òkùnkùn, kó má mà d’Ósùpá l’óró) And, I think I heard a new one from Obey on Friday. He weighed in with a new song, using his music to list the benefits of the moon and why its soft, golden glow must continue to drape the night in ethereal light. It fits this hour. There is so much darkness here, in the public space and in the space we call private. That was why as children, we got sad whenever the full moon was seen reducing in size and getting far gone in distance.
Why were my friends almost hysterical at the virality of Adenuga’s death rumour? I can tell why. You know how many people work in that man’s businesses – telecoms, oil (downstream, upstream, midstream), banking, construction etc etc? Some trees singularly make a forest. This is one of them – one of the reasons Nigeria is not completely an economic arid zone. Read Martin Williams’s ‘When the Sahara Was Green’ (2021). The Sahara desert was once lush with greenery. It became what it is today because of unconscionable humans, agents of eco destruction. Malicious bush burning joined hands with other vices to tip the land’s moisture balance. Collectively, they degraded the green that made that stretch to breathe. The result is what the Arabs saw and gave the label ‘sahra’ – the meaning of that word is ‘wilderness’. Now, apply that to our economic situation and be alarmed. Foliage is the canopy of the forest. When you remove trees that make forest forest, the forest dies. That is why we say this China shop should not be heady goats’ playground. Mortar, we can roll; pot, we mustn’t. If you roll a pot like you do pounded yam’s mortar, the master potter will roar in angers of lightning and thunder.
When someone of value is pronounced dead and they refuse to die, the Yoruba have a name for such a hard-to-crack nut. They are called Kokumo (This-is-no-longer-dead). Such are moulded into Ìkòkò ribiti (well-rounded pot); they are, in carefulness, protected from wanton eyes of malice. Adenuga’s ConOil struck gold in 1991, the first indigenous oil company to achieve that feat. His Globacom is also the first and has remained the only wholly indigenous telecoms company in Nigeria. The fact of these businesses coming first serves not just the owner; it serves more the country. It has served as a bulwark against the exploitation of foreign waves. That is why we say the man behind it must live and why we say “no time to check time” to his death wishers. They are a dead horse. Who are they, anyway? And why are they angry?
The invidious, false news of a top entrepreneur’s death should interest the state and its operatives. Howard Wolk, co-author of ‘Launchpad Republic: America’s Entrepreneurial Edge and Why It Matters’ said in a December 2022 interview with Forbes magazine that America is great because it consciously nurtures its businesses and protects their owners even from the state itself. “We limit the ability of incumbents to stifle entrepreneurs,” he declared with an air of pride. Here, the challenge is not a threat of state stifling, it is the menace of bad belle, threats from fake news and the odious bile of idle envy.
His Wikipedia page speaks to where he is coming from: “Adenuga made his first million in 1979, at age 26, selling lace and distributing soft drinks. In 1990, he received an oil drilling licence, and in 1991, his Consolidated Oil struck oil in the shallow waters of Southwestern Ondo State, making it the first indigenous oil company to do so in commercial quantity.” Then, he branched off into telecommunications. He got a conditional GSM licence in 1999. It was revoked. But where he comes from, a man is not allowed to lie supine because a stupid horse flings them off. He must get up and mount the horse again. Which is what the man did. He joined the fray again. He won and received a licence when the government held another GSM auction in 2003. Then the story of telephony changed in Nigeria – for the better, forever.
Nigeria should not be a graveyard of businessmen and their businesses. Great businesses make great economies. A Nigeria without four-star businesses cannot have a five-star leadership. The world has no seat for the poor. We have an environment that is toxic enough for entrepreneurs, we should not add for them rumours of ill-timed setting of their radiant sun. We have lately seen, not one, not two, very big entrepreneurs having issues just for giving Nigeria what Nigeria desperately needed. Now, it is Adenuga. How does that encourage economic growth? And a country and its leadership are as great as their frontline businesses. We see this in America’s political and financial systems which empower entrepreneurs to create and invest capital, and compete without the fear of knives of envy being driven into their backs.
We enjoy the ‘rebellion’ of Adenuga’s Glo; it serves our individual and national interests. There is something about that model in the Forbes interview I cited earlier: Howard Wolk said “entrepreneurship is a rebellious act” and that the United States is great because its political and judicial systems encourage that rebellion while spurring the rebellious to rise and seize new opportunities. His claim is correct. The more unconventional a business is, the more it fires up a country’s creative energy. Globacom did this when it came in 2003 and ruptured the tendons of predatory competition it met on the turf. Nigerians enjoyed that patriotic recalcitrance from Glo. They still enjoy it. That is why millions of them are wedded to that network as a duty to Nigeria. And they will remain so even if the house is on fire and robbers may be on the prowl (Bí ilé ńjó, b’olè ńjà).
