Connect with us

Featured

My Suicide Attempt in London

Published

on

By Mike Awoyinfa

My brother and friend Chief Dele Momodu, in an impromptu speech on Instagram and Facebook, uplifted a distraught lady whose world came crashing after she was denied a visa to Canada. Listening to Momodu’s homily, I was impressed enough to use it here as a piece of evangelism, as a motivational, newsworthy, mentorship speech for all our Japa-conscious youths in search of a better life abroad:
***

Being denied a Canadian visa is sad but it is not the end of the world. Every disappointment has taught me that there is a blessing if you look deeper. Don’t even lose faith. Just hold on to your God. Go to church tomorrow and dance more than ever. All shall be well. Trust me, trust me.

I wanted to be a teacher as a young man. I applied everywhere after my Master’s degree in 1988, and I got denied. I wanted to be a lawyer. I applied for law at the University of Ife. I got denied. My mum broke into tears. She thought the reason I was being denied everything was because I have a first degree in Yoruba. Everything I tried failed. At a time, I was the only jobless person in our house. Everybody would go to work in the morning and I would be the only one lying down on my mattress in our Boys’ Quarters. And my brother would enter, look at me, shake his head and slam the door. He would say: “It’s good to be jobless.”

And at a time, I thought maybe witches and wizards were after me. But I didn’t know God was preparing me for a life of a journalist. I never planned to be a journalist. I never went to journalism school. When I came to Lagos, I applied to work at The Guardian newspaper, I was rejected. I have been rejected in my life so many times. I failed School Cert, I wrote School Cert three times: 1976, 1977, 1978. I did university exams three times. So we became the first set of Jambites in 1978. Three times I failed. I am telling you the story of my life. I lost my father at the age of thirteen – I was thirteen when my father died in 1973. And I was left with a poor illiterate mother. Looking at you, you are not even a village girl. I was a village boy. So, I am begging you in the name of God, don’t think that Canada is the only place you can make it in life. People are making it in Nigeria. Aliko Dangote is not in Canada. He is in Nigeria. Mike Adenuga is in Nigeria. Abdul Samad Rabiu is in Nigeria. Femi Otedola is in Nigeria. We all went to school at different times in Nigeria. And we are doing our work.

I can live anywhere I want to live today. But I am living in Nigeria. Trust me. We will make it. When you make it and you have money, no country will dare reject you for visa. In fact, they would be begging you. The Ambassador would come and visit you at home.

I am prophesying into your life today. So, trust me. For every disappointment, there is a blessing somewhere. I told you I was rejected by The Guardian newspaper. And then, my friend suggested I should go to Concord and try my luck. But I said “No, I don’t like Concord. I hear MKO Abiola is a fanatic, is this, is that. Fela sang against him.” You see, that is why you should not hold any bias against anybody. You won’t believe what happened. I didn’t know Concord was where my life was going to turn around. MKO Abiola later became my adopted father. This is a man when I was going there, people were discouraging me, saying “Don’t go there, it’s a bad place, he is a bad man.” Look, the experience of my life has shown that there is God. Yes, as a human being, you will feel pain when you are rejected once in a while. But I am telling you, I am a good example and testimony to the greatness of God, to the awesomeness of God, that when it is God’s time, all these visas you are talking about would all be yours.

When I started Ovation magazine, at a point, I got totally broke. And I was ready to kill myself. So, don’t think that it’s an easy story or easy journey. I was ready to die. And then, I entered my car in London, I was driving, I didn’t know where I was going. I was telling God: “Just take me away. This shame will be too much. I have failed.”

From my experience, what makes people disappointed sometimes is the shame of failing. There is nothing wrong with failing. When you fail, you rise up again. And God will lead you to your destination. I was ready to die. And then, my godfather called. My phone rang. Chief Alex Duduyemi was on the line. Someone had told him that the way they are watching me, I would go and injure myself. And he called. And I reluctantly picked the call. He said: “Dele, where are you?” And I replied: “I don’t know, Daddy.”

“Why won’t you know where you are?”

“I just don’t know, Sir. I am just in the car driving.”

“Please, don’t injure yourself. Turn back wherever you are. Turn back and come to my office.”

And I went to his office and he lectured me that day. He told me: “What is not enough today would become so plenty it would be overflowing tomorrow.”

And that is what I am prophesying into your life. I don’t know why I am doing this today. I have not done this on Instagram in a long time: chatting with people and bringing them on my programme. So maybe God wanted me to speak to you. I left my food just to be able to talk to you, to encourage you and to tell you that don’t let the devil make you unhappy. The job of the devil is to make you unhappy. Don’t let anything in this life make you unhappy. Going to America or Canada or wherever, it’s not the end of the world. There is so much you can do. Even the money you are going to spend to buy a ticket to Canada would probably cost you three to four million naira. Trust me, and I am not just making mouth, three or four million naira will take you far in Nigeria today. You can set up a business that would turn you into a billionaire in Nigeria today, if you think of something original.

When we started Ovation, we didn’t have all the money we needed. We needed one hundred and fifty thousand pounds when we did our business plan. We were able to raise only twenty thousand pounds. And that twenty thousand pounds was what we sowed. Against all odds, we were just trying this and that. And we turned it into a multibillion naira business. So in life, I am telling you, nothing is impossible, if you don’t give up. Only if you give up. So, that money for your ticket, if you already have it in a bank, keep it very well. And go and tell experts what your passion is. If it is food, if it is cooking, if it is trading, whatever it is, they would do a business plan for you and with that four million naira, you will become a billionaire by the grace of Almighty God. God doesn’t want you to go and burn money, maybe to go and be washing plates or whatever. It doesn’t mean you won’t get a better job abroad but I am telling you, maybe God has a better plan for you. So don’t close your eyes, don’t close your heart, don’t close you mind to what God wants to do for you. God will be with you.

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Featured

UBA Reinforces Commitment to Rewarding Customer-Loyalty with N400m Bonus

Published

on

By

UBA Rewards Customer Loyalty with Over ₦400 Million Bumper Account Anniversary Bonus
…Reinforces commitment to rewarding customers for consistent savings
Africa’s Global Bank, United Bank for Africa (UBA) Plc, has rewarded thousands of customers with over ₦400 million in anniversary bonuses under its flagship UBA Bumper Account, reaffirming the Bank’s unwavering commitment to rewarding customer loyalty and promoting a strong savings culture.

The payout, one of the largest loyalty rewards under the Bumper Account initiative since its launch, saw qualifying customers receive anniversary bonuses directly into their accounts, demonstrating UBA’s resolve to create lasting value for customers who consistently save with the Bank.

The UBA Bumper Account is a unique savings product that rewards customers simply for maintaining and growing their savings. Every year an eligible account reaches its anniversary, customers receive a cash bonus, making disciplined saving both rewarding and beneficial over time.
Speaking on the milestone, UBA’s Head, Retail Products, Tomiwa Sotiloye, said the Bank remains committed to ensuring that customers benefit directly from their relationship with UBA.

“At UBA, we believe customer loyalty deserves meaningful recognition. Every bonus paid is our way of saying ‘thank you’ to customers who continue to trust us with their financial aspirations. Surpassing the ₦400 million milestone reflects our commitment to creating products that not only help customers save but also reward them in tangible ways. It is another demonstration that when our customers grow, we grow with them.”

He added that both new and existing customers can open a UBA Bumper Account seamlessly through https://on.ubagroup.com/bumper-tc, any any UBA branch, the UBA Mobile Banking App, by dialing *919#, or online, positioning themselves to qualify for future anniversary rewards.

Also speaking, UBA’s Group Head, Brands, Marketing and Corporate Communications, Alero Ladipo, said the Bank’s customer-centric philosophy continues to shape its product offerings.

“The UBA Bumper Account reflects our unwavering commitment to putting customers first. We deliberately design products that reward responsible financial behaviour while delivering real value. Crediting over ₦400 million directly into customers’ accounts is not just a payout; it is evidence of our promise to make banking more rewarding and to continually appreciate the confidence our customers repose in us.”

The UBA Bumper Account remains one of the Bank’s flagship retail savings products, combining competitive savings benefits, digital convenience and attractive loyalty rewards. It forms part of UBA’s broader strategy to deepen financial inclusion by encouraging sustainable savings habits while delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Continue Reading

Featured

Dele Momodu Leadership Centre Hosts Media Scholar, Prof Abiodun Adeniyi

Published

on

By

By Anjorin Fehintola Stella

We often measure leadership by the institutions people build or the positions they occupy. Yet, during his visit to the Dele Momodu Leadership Centre, Professor Abiodun Adeniyi repeatedly returned to something less visible but perhaps more enduring; the responsibility of documenting one’s life and thoughts. He spoke as someone who understands, at a personal level, what is lost when experience is left unrecorded. His emphasis on documentation was not stylistic advice for writers. It was an argument about memory itself, about how societies retain or lose the wisdom of the people who pass through them.

Ideas disappear when they are undocumented because memory, at the collective level, is fragile and selective. A society does not remember everything that happens within it, it remembers what is written down, repeated, taught, or institutionalised. An undocumented thought, however brilliant, dies with the person who held it, or worse, drifts into vague anecdote, stripped of its original precision. This is why oral cultures, for all their richness, often struggle to transmit complex ideas across generations with fidelity. Professor Adeniyi’s point, then, was not simply about personal record-keeping. History remembers people largely through what they leave behind, not through what they intended to leave behind. Intention without artefact disappears.

When he spoke about travelling, it would be easy to reduce his words to a fondness for movement or exposure. But the deeper claim runs further than that. Travel disrupts familiarity. It exposes individuals to different ways of living, thinking, governing and imagining society. Professor Adeniyi suggested that travelling remains one of the simplest yet most profound forms of education because it broadens not only knowledge but perspective. A person confined to one environment mistakes the local for the universal. Movement across geographies forces a confrontation with alternative logics, alternative arrangements of power, family, and meaning, and that confrontation is often where genuine learning begins.

Perhaps the strongest advice he gave concerned the pursuit of a doctorate. When Aare Dele Momodu spoke of his desire to pursue a PhD, Professor Adeniyi’s response challenged a growing culture in which academic qualifications are sometimes pursued as symbols of prestige rather than vehicles of inquiry. A PhD earned for the title that follows a name produces a credential without a contribution. A PhD earned out of genuine curiosity produces new knowledge and, more importantly, sustains the kind of intellectual restlessness that defines a thinking life. Professor Adeniyi’s counsel was that one should choose a field that strikes them professionally and personally, something that connects to lived purpose rather than social signalling, because the value of advanced study lies in the questions it forces a person to keep asking long after the degree is conferred.

Professor Abiodun did not reserve his counsel for matters of scholarship alone. Turning to the younger staff in the room, Professor Adeniyi offered something closer to reassurance than instruction, that everything they are currently going through, the uncertainty, the striving, the sense of being far from where they hope to be, is a phase both he and Aare Dele Momodu have lived through themselves. It was a reminder that ambition rarely moves on a straight or visible timeline. The goals and dreams that feel distant now are not denied, only delayed, and what stands between the present moment and their fulfilment is simply time and dedication, applied without pause.

 

Underneath all these threads, travel, documentation, the meaning of scholarship, was a single, unifying idea about legacy. Legacy isn’t what people say about you. It’s what remains after you leave. This distinction matters because praise is temporary and circumstantial, shaped by mood, politics, and memory’s natural decay. What remains, however, is structural. It is the book on a shelf, the institution still running, the idea still being taught.

This is where the conversation returned, inevitably, to the Centre itself. The library. The scholars’ rooms. The conversations. The institution. Professor Adeniyi appeared genuinely moved by what he encountered, not by the scale of the buildings, but by what the buildings were designed to hold. Perhaps that is why Professor Adeniyi appeared genuinely moved by the Centre. It was never merely about architecture. It was about permanence. Buildings become legacy only when they preserve ideas.

Every visit leaves footprints. Some are physical. Others are intellectual. Professor Abiodun Adeniyi’s visit left the latter.

Continue Reading

Featured

Lagos Govt Sues for Calm As Flood Ravages City, Okays Dredging of 28 Channels

Published

on

By

The Lagos State Government has appealed for calm following persistent rainfall and flash floods across many parts of the State over the past two weeks, announcing the immediate dredging of 28 additional primary drainage channels to improve flood control.

Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu approved the emergency dredging intervention as part of efforts to strengthen the state’s drainage network.

The Commissioner for Environment and Water Resources, Tokunbo Wahab, said the recent downpours are an extreme weather event that produced an unusually large volume of rainfall within a short period, overwhelming drainage systems in some locations and causing temporary flooding in parts of Victoria Island, Lekki, Ikeja, Gbagada, Mushin, Mafoloku and other communities.

According to him, the situation was not peculiar to Lagos; several African countries and parts of North America also experienced heavy rainfall and flooding during the same period.

Wahab, however, said Lagos presents a more complex hydrological challenge because of its extensive network of lagoons, rivers, creeks and tidal water bodies, coupled with its high rainfall intensity.

He explained that the interaction between the Atlantic Ocean, Lagos Lagoon and inland waterways, especially during high tide, naturally slows the discharge of storm-water into the sea, leading to temporary flooding in low-lying areas during exceptionally heavy rainfall.

The commissioner assured residents that the government was closely monitoring drainage infrastructure, flood-prone areas and major channels across the State.

He added that emergency response agencies have been deployed to affected areas to facilitate the quick recession of floodwaters and provide necessary support to residents.

Wahab said the government would continue to invest in drainage construction, channelisation, desilting, and other flood-control infrastructure, but stressed that residents also have a responsibility to support these efforts.

He urged residents to stop dumping refuse into drains, canals and waterways, warning that blocked drainage channels and illegal reclamation of wetlands contribute significantly to flooding.

He also cautioned against building on drainage alignments and engaging in activities that could obstruct the free flow of storm-water.

The commissioner said the increasing frequency of extreme rainfall events across coastal cities is a clear indication of the impact of climate change.

“Lagos is not exempt from these realities. However, the State Government remains steadfast in its commitment to building a flood-resilient city through sustained infrastructure development, environmental enforcement and active collaboration with residents,” he said.

Wahab described flood management as a shared responsibility, urging residents to keep drainage channels free of debris and to report any activities that could obstruct storm-water flow.

He also advised motorists to avoid driving through flooded roads during heavy rainfall and urged residents, particularly those in flood-prone communities, to comply with weather advisories and safety instructions issued by relevant government agencies.

He reaffirmed the government’s commitment to protecting lives and property through proactive flood management measures and called for continued public cooperation in building a cleaner, safer and more resilient Lagos.

Continue Reading

Trending