Segun Odegbami

Was Rashidi Yekini Murdered by Family Members?

/ Adeola / Leave a comment

This article with original title RAHIDI YEKINI-WHY THE POLICE MUST STEP IN was written by Segun Odegbami and it is available at this link

(http://mathematical7.com/rashidi-yekini-why-the-police-must-step-in-today)

RASHIDI YEKINI-WHY THE POLICE MUST STEP IN TODAY

WRITTEN BY SEGUN ODEGBAMI

This is one of the most difficult articles I have ever written.

I now believe that the universe sought me out some months ago for an assignment, to bear witness and to testify in the unfolding events surrounding the life and death of Rashidi Yekini! But why me?

Within the football circle I believe I am one of a very few persons that Rashidi Yekini was comfortable with. Secondly, in the past three months I have had the closest interaction with the man up till the time I received the shocking information that he had died. I could not relate the news with the circumstances of his life during this period. Some things simply did not fit the picture being painted. And someone needed to testify, clarify and debunk the ugly and false stories being peddled around to justify Rashidi’s death.

Since I received a call from him three months ago, I have learnt a great deal more about him, the things that happened to him, why he lived his life the way he did, that he was not physically or mentally unstable, that he ran into some misfortune and that he needed support and help to get back on his feet. I have known Rashidi since our days together in the Shooting Stars FC team in Ibadan, when as twin strikers in the 1984 African Club championship we had terrorised defenders all over Africa, freely banging in goals on our way to that year’s finals where we lost! That was to be my last year with Shooting Stars and indeed with football. It was his first year!

Beyond that we had kept a good relationship from a distance. Through the years I had tried to understand his choices of the kind of life he lived without criticising or even counselling him. His decision to join Abiola Babes FC of Abeokuta, his choice of going to play in Cote D’Ivoire, moving to Europe, making the Chairman of Africa Sports FC of Abidjan, an Ivorien, his agent and manager throughout his career, all were totally of his own independent making. This clearly defined his character, that in spite of his obvious limitation in terms of academic capacity from the onset, he left no one in doubt that he was his own man and would choose his own path. He was very fiercely independent minded, never getting involved in the agitations, the politics, the power-play and the intrigues between officials and players, and even amongst the players themselves. All he cared about was to get on the field where he was extremely competitive and play football. He loved scoring goals and hardly ever exuberantly celebrated his goals. Thats why his first goal in the World Cup of 1994, against Bulgaria, and the manner he celebrated it remained the most memorable picture of that years’ championship.

As a player Rashidi was as reclusive as could possibly be. In camp players, that players had to share rooms in pairs, was the reason he lived with anyone. He was that kind of person. He would have preferred to be alone and enjoyed the solitude of his chosen way of life. Football gave him the only outlet to the rest of the world. Otherwise, you would find him sleeping, or saying his prayers, or playing pranks and cracking jokes with the players that visited his room.

Beyond football, Rashidi did not want anyone coming too close to him, to know too much and to meddle in his business. He kept his activities very close to his chest. So, even as we interacted as often as certain events brought us together I noticed his cautiousness. He was a very sensitive person. he tried never to hurt anyone, preferring to cut off any relationships that threatened his regimented sequestered lifestyle. One thing I was very sure of about him was that he never asked anything from anyone, and never wanted to depend on anyone for anything.

Football for him had provided all his needs. In short, for Rashidi Yekini, football was everything and the only thing in his life. It offered him the opportunity to escape from the pangs of poverty and he decided that the safest and best way to secure his future was not to fall victim to any smart Alecs, or scammers, or fraudsters, or business persons with sweet tongues that could talk him into parting with his hard-earned money. He did not want to be used or confused. So he built an impregnable wall around his existence, trusting only very few (he felt safer amongst the Hausa community, and did most of his very few business dealings with them). He worst fear was to lose his money. Thats why his celebrated one and only marriage crumbled after 3 months. He did not trust the motive of his wife for marrying him. So, he left the marriage before it even started. The same attitude underlined his relationship even with his family members. He took care of them, and provided for them, but from a safe distance.

It was a dangerous mixture – to be rich and famous and to be reclusive. Stories were bound to regale such an existence and with Rashidi they came in torrents. Yet, I fully I respected his choice of life and how he chose to live it, even though my every instinct wanted to support and guide him through the turbulences that I knew he would have to face managing unprecedented fame and fortune for a young man coming from his background.

No one knew this whole scenario would become the apparatus for his tragic end.

Rashidi’s death now raises many questions with no answers. The stories about his state of mind have clouded the circumstances of his death that should have been thoroughly investigated to show how, where, why he died the way he did.

I know a mad man when I see one. I can testify unequivocally along with some others that knew Rashidi from close-up that there was nothing wrong with him at the time he was abducted and died. Indeed, he was hale and hearty. Rashidi was not ill. He was fit and sound of mind and body. He even trained on the day he was forcefully taken away by people that have not come out to tell the world why they took him, where they took him, what happened there, who treated him for what ailment, what he died of, and so on. I can also testify that it was the misfortune that befell him a few years ago, that caused him great distress to the extent that he almost lost his life and his mind when his partner was killed and he lost most of his investment in their joint venture. That period was what some of his family members are saying to justify their wicked action in forcefully leading him to his death.

Rashidi was very so much into himself. He had very few close friends and kept even them in the dark about his plight and pains, preferring to deal with the issues himself. So, he did some ‘irrational’ things. So what?. Who would not do irrational things if they lost almost their entire fortune in one fell swoop? It took Rashidi a while to get over it (some two years or so). Playing his football daily, watching movies at his closest friend’s video shop, seeking some spiritual help, avoiding the public and public places, and bearing his own grief alone gradually eased the pain.
Thats where his life was when from out of the blues he rang me up. Rashidi had never done that in all our relationship. I was the one who always did the initial contacting. But some three months ago, he called me himself, and so started a new relationship that was going to bring Rashidi Yekini back to the game he loved with uncommon passion. I had assured him, after he had assured me he would fully cooperate, that he would never be far away from the game again. I assured him that the game could still help restore his lost fortunes. That he had to play it differently this time with kids as his instruments of change. He would help to nurture them, by showing and teaching them how to do the things he did best – position himself at the right place at the right time, evade tackles, and shoot accurately and powerfully with both feet, and score goals on the field of play. He was excited and raring to go. We had started discussing with companies and organisations in Lagos that would provide funds and logistical support.

Then everything came to a shuddering halt. The light of our great dreams was extinguished last week. The news came that a hale and hearty Rashidi, who finished training one evening, and had driven himself home, had been abducted by some family members, taken to an unknown destination for medical purposes, kept there for weeks without anyone’s knowledge but the perpetrators of the act, had died under circumstances that no one has been able to explain to the public.

Again let me emphasise: Rashidi was not sick at the time he was abducted. Rashidi was never mad. He could have had periods of some depression but those were in the distant past. The Rashidi that I saw, drove in his car, sat with for over one hour planning for the future, that called me up several times after that, that met with my emissaries after that, that kept in touch even with my office, that I wrote about in my column some 5 weeks ago, was not sick, or ill, or suffering illusions, or delusions, or hallucinations.

I am here testifying that Rashidi must have been ‘killed’ either ignorantly, deliberately or even inadvertently by those that did not understand what was going on with him, that had their own motivation for doing what they did by forcefully taking him away to an unknown destination for some kind of unclear, unauthorised spiritual or medical intervention that eventually killed him. That neighbours even witnessed the abduction and described it in gory detail requires that the law enforcement agencies should take up the matter immediately, to investigate what exactly happened and why Nigeria’s national hero and treasure, an African football legend in the true sense, should die the way he did.

Rashidi will not rest properly until justice is done.

Rashidi’s death must not be swept under the carpet. He died under circumstances that reek of conspiracy and murder!

Thats why the police must step in..today!

BY SEGUN ODEGBAMI

Reposted on this blog by Adeola Aderounmu

Segun Odegbami on Nigerian U-17 Age Cheats (a must read by FIFA and NFF)

/ Adeola / Leave a comment

Written By Segun Odegbami

It is Wednesday night. I am sitting and wondering what to write about this week. The eye of the world is riveted on the World Cup Draws event. I may be there for the show and shall report my experiences on this page.

From next week those of us in the business of football analysis will have a field day peering into our crystal balls and predicting how games will go, how players will play, and how far Nigeria can get from the opposing teams that will be thrown up by the draws. Until that happens I am checking my mailbox for anything interesting.

I open my box and find one amongst tons of letters that attracts my full attention. It accuses me of complicity in the matter of the recently-concluded under-17 FIFA championship and wonders why I have not commented since the conclusion of the event either about the ‘successful’ organisation of the event or the exhilarating performances of the Golden Eaglets, a performance that seems to have soothed the nerves of Nigerians and lifted their spirit in contrast to the Super Eagles’ World Cup qualifying matches that kept people’s blood-pressure soaring high through most of the months of the campaign.

The writer wonders if Adokie Amiasimaka has not now been vindicated by the silence that has now followed his explosive revelation during the championship that the Nigerian captain is a twenty-something year old man and not the teenager he claims to be.

The majority point of view is that even if Adokie had the evidence his timing was wrong and that he should have waited until the end of the championship, allowed the visitors to go, and then raised the matter! Well, it has been weeks since the championship ended. Nothing has happened. No one is saying or doing anything. Is the issue raised by Adokie not of significance any more? Has time diminished the relevance of inquiry and verification of the issue? Has the matter been overtaken by events? Should it be forgotten and swept under the carpet?

I am thinking. Obviously my silence has not escaped the attention of some observant public. I owe it to my readers to express an opinion one way or the other. My first reaction is a reminder of an article I wrote ahead of the championship. In that piece I promised I shall only celebrate Nigeria’s victory or performance if it is achieved with integrity.

The greatest gift I give myself all the time is the right to choose who I want to be and how I want my every action and word to reflect the greatest version of myself. I’d rather be silent than embrace standards and values that diminish who I am. It has been with great difficulty that I have resisted the temptation to ventilate my feelings on the under-17 championship and damn the consequences. But common sense has held me back, and, so, my deafening silence.

I guess I am waiting, like many others, for the ‘appropriate’ time, when no one shall be accused of being unpatriotic; when no one shall be accused of taking cheap shots at those in NFF today because they want to discredit them so as to remove them and take over their positions; when the international community will not be around and no one can be accused of washing dirty linens in public; when my words would not be seen as a stain on my country’s image and reputation; and when it will not be considered ‘sinful’ to keep silent in the face of tyranny!

Unfortunately, the more I think of it the more it dawns on me how bad our situation really is. Such time will never come! As far as most Nigerians are concerned the Under-17 championship has come and gone; Adokie’s ‘wrong’ is making his allegation during the championship; the FIFA President has made his own pronouncement on the matter and insisted indirectly that it was not FIFA’s business to question the integrity of a country’s documentation to determine the age of its players; and the matter is dead and buried and over! Next chapter!

Unfortunately for some of us the fundamental issues in the matter cannot be swept under the carpet because they impact on the future of our children, on the development of our cherished game, on the image and reputation of our country and on our individual and collective values as Nigerians. When, therefore, will be the ‘right’ time to speak up and do something?

For the sake of the reader whose mail has precipitated my present thought process permit me to reproduce excerpts from an article I wrote a few weeks before the championship. It provides the answer for my present silence and why I did not join in celebrating the Eaglets.

The Golden Eaglets Must Win With Integrity!

In 1988, after the 1987 World Youth championship, in my naivety and with the purest of intentions I did not have to do more than a cursory logical computation, peeling the skin from the information that was in the public domain, to scream out loud that some of the players we used in the championship could not be the ages they claimed.

Those who were in charge of Nigerian football at the time were enraged. It was such a ‘heinous’ crime that I became victim of unwritten ostracisation from football administration for many years after that. It was such a serious charge, with potentials for massive international scandal that, were there no elements of some truth, I would have been sued for treason!

The shock is that there was not even a whimper from the football authorities. Against a lack of evidence to ‘convict’ anyone it became a matter of time before everyone went silent and became part of the complicity!

The most annoying defence put up by some people is that other countries (mostly from Africa) must be guilty of the same offence. A few years after the 1987 incident the country was caught in a documentation malpractice and was suspended by FIFA for a few years suffering international humiliation.

After that, rather than create better ways of verifying documents, the country ‘invested’ in perfecting documents submitted on the players to FIFA.

So, the initial cancer ate deeper into the fabric! The rewards for success at that level became too alluring that many Nigerians joined in the racket. It became such a lucrative business that hordes of academies sprung up all over the country marketing supposedly young players and as a result parents and agents in the country would do almost anything to get their wards into the under-17 category of the national team!

Cheating became an acceptable practice with parents and some football institutions as willing agents. Sports greatest values were abandoned on the altar of lucre. Hard work, morals, discipline, and fair play lost their place as the means to success!

Everyone in sport knew what was going on but was helpless against the practise, silenced by the overwhelming celebrations of ‘successes’ that left a hollow feeling in the pits! It was great to be part of a national celebration of ‘success’ but it was such a moral burden that many people had to live with, accepting unashamedly that cheating was okay for as long as others were probably also doing it. (I then wrote about a Nigerian lad who played at the NUGA games two years ago, was in 300 level when he did, had left the country for two years after NUGA and was a member of the under-17 team in camp!)

The arithmetic is easy to work out! No matter the computation one comes up with, no matter the allowances one makes up for early schooling, ingenuity and academic excellence, no matter the parameters used in measuring rapid acceleration through the classes, there is no way such a player that left secondary school 7 years ago would be less than 17 years old by October 2009!

There would have been many Nigerians that know this young man, starting from his parents, his teachers in primary and secondary school, his mates in the neighbourhood he grew up in, his class and school mates through Primary, secondary and university.

In October 2009, we all would have sat and watched this young man outplay children 7 or 8 years his junior, ‘excelled’ and brought ‘victory’ to Nigeria. We would have feted him, celebrated him and made him a hero. We would have rewarded him with gifts and honours along with his co-conspirators in this racket, made him a model for the next generation and perpetuated falsehood and cheating!

Yet, we would have known all the time that this is a moral baggage; that the victory, the glory, the honours, the accolades, all was fraudulently achieved and undeserved.

This country is in darkness. Even in sport that brings us so much joy, and draws from us the best in our talent and potentials as human beings so abundantly blessed by God, knowing fully well that we can win cleanly, with dignity and integrity, we choose instead the short cut and selling our souls in the end!

Nigeria does not have to win the FIFA under-17 championship by all means. But who says the country cannot win it with its best students under-17? Even if they don’t NOW the country would have started the process of developing authentic talents, the ones that represent the values we want to stand for as a nation that would go ahead into the future with experiences and exposure from the 2009 event to become winners of bigger trophies in the years to come! That I can truly celebrate!

So that’s it. That’s why I did not celebrate. Let me take the argument one step further than Adokie. Let me put my foot in it properly, after all there can be no more international sanctions following confirmation by the FIFA President himself that all the players that took part in the championship were of the correct age. So, that’s settled. I have no problem with one player being over-aged in the Nigerian team. What I actually have problem with is the challenge of identifying just one in the entire team that is actually under-17.

Just as the lord told his prophet that if he finds only one person righteous in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah he would spare both cities from destruction, so am I thinking that if I can find just one player in the entire Golden Eaglets team, still in secondary school, and below the age of 17 at the time of the last tournament I shall never write a line about cheating again in Nigerian football and shall apologise to all Nigerians. It is that bad!

segunodegbami@hotmail.com

(Culled from the Nigerian Guardian Newspaper 5th dec 2009)