By Favour Nnabugwu

Mentally  challenged persons on the streets of  Abuja  are  becoming an eye sore.Many of them have to deal with being abandoned and treated as less than human by the society.The stigma  mental illnesses carry  has broken strong family bonds and made the most caring person to turn cruel.

Tajudeen Ishola Olasunkanmi Alarape Kaderee,

Marriages have ended, children have given up on parents, and many families have abandoned their sick ones to roam the streets because of the uncertainties that follow mental illnesses.

As if living a life of constant interruption from mental illness is not enough, insensitive words like ‘psycho’, ‘crazy’, ‘mad’ and ‘nuts’ have been used to describe mentally ill people irrespective of the  cause of their disorder. Mental illness is one of the most misunderstood sicknesses in the country as people with mental disorder are often portrayed as violent, aggressive and dangerous. That is not often this case.

Clad in a wheat brown babariga with a big brow envelops  in one hand, on the morning of Thursday, January 14, 2015, Tajudeen Ishola Olasunkanmi Alarape Kaderee, 50, and  from Ilu-Oba, Ibadan, Oyo State, roamed  Phases 1 and 2 of the Federal Secretariat, Abuja and the Eagle Square, as is his practice everyday.

Sunday Vanguard accosted him. He responded with a smile in Queen’s English garnished with Ghanian accent. He offered this correspondent a seat under a tree in Phase 1 and we got talking.

Civil servants from the Secretariat greeted him as they passed during the 15minutes Sunday Vanguard engaged him.

The following encounter ensued:

Who are you?

I was born in Kumasi, Ghana. I came from a family of 22 children. My mother was the second wife in the family and I happen to be the 12th child of my father. I left Kumasi at the age of five and came to Nigeria because my father and mother were separated. My mother was in Ghana and my father was in Nigeria, so I moved to Nigeria. I went to primary school in  Ibadan.

Is your mother a Ghanaian?

My father was from Ibadan while my mother was from Abeokuta. But business took them Ghana.  I  went to primary school in Ibadan, Progressive Day School, Aladurun and I also went to Arabic school. When I finished  primary school in Ibadan,   I moved to Lagos. While in Lagos, I worked for Okunola Brothers operating cold stores at the age of 10-11years. I left for the United States in 1970 after my secondary school. I got the US Green  Card two years later, after which I  left all the jobs  I was doing and formed my own  company called KadereeDicks in 1974.

What would you say is good about you?

There are lots of things which are good about me. One is my spiritual composition; two, the name I brought from heaven; three, my earthly purpose and activities and four, the sun was made by God as the glorious lamb among the cosmic objects.

By the grace of Almighty God, the father of all creation, He made me the glorious lamb of mankind and why I say that  is that the Bible says you will know them with signs and scripture, not wonders. Wonders can be magical and what is magical is not spiritualism. There are two things which make a man’s existence:  spiritualism and physicalism. Spiritualism is what you brought from heaven and physicalism is how you transform the possibilities into reality. And so every programme they are doing in the world  is mine.

Why is it that people call you  President?

I am not the President. I am the leader of the whole world.  I am the global leader. And you as a Christian and  a journalist, you see, not every journalist is well informed. Some are peripheral and some have depth.

You will know them with signs and scriptures. I am not only the leader of the whole world, I am also a prophet because a prophet is known by prophesy that comes to life.

Are you a pastor?

No. Jesus Christ never had a church. Mohammed never had a mosque and neither did Moses. I read the Bible and I also read the Quran. I was born a Muslim and I am still a Muslim. What makes a man a Muslim is the pillar of Islam but God enlightened  me recently that the five pillars of Islam do not make a person a Muslim; the only thing that makes a person a Muslim is, there is no god exception  God Almighty. But when they say Mohammed is a messenger and you must go to Mecca, you must do this, those are irrelevant. Look at what happened recently in Mecca, it was planned by the Saudis.

What about your wife and children?

I met  my wife when I came back from Denmark in 1976, then she was working at Federal Palace Hotel, Lagos. I was in Denmark, Sweden, Spain.

I took her to Europe and then to America. Our first boy was supposed to have been delivered in New York. But  a  week before delivery, I said ‘let’s go back home’ and, a week after we got to Nigeria,   she delivered in 1979.   My first daughter was born in 1982. Then in 1984 our second boy was born and we took him to America after  two weeks. My wife left me after five children.

What then happened  to you?

They poisoned me because they could not control me. They said: ‘The best thing is that this man we cannot control him, we cannot put him under out feet, he is not one of our boys, he refuses to join us, let’s fight him with poverty. Not only poverty, let’s kill him,  let’s poison him’ and they have tried it several times. But God said they may gather together but not by me, ‘no weapon fashioned against thee’ and the Bible also goes further to say ‘touch  not my anointed and do my prophet no harm’.

Investigation by Sunday Vanguard revealed  that Kaderee is widely traveled and has dined and wined with the high and mighty in and out  of Nigeria. He was said to be a comfortable man before  his illness. Though he was never  a civil servant,  he reportedly had dealings with some key ministries in the past which may not be unconnected  with  his popularity in the Secretariat.

Kaderee first caught the attention of Sunday Vanguard around Eagle Square late last year wearing  boxers that covered his near naked body and another day around Federal Secretariat parking lot where he stood by a  newsstand glancing through the dailies.

Sunday Vanguard was particularly stunned to find Kaderee calm and neatly clothed on the day of the interview after combing the entire Secretariat before this correspondent was directed to where he could be found at that time of the day. Further findings revealed  that Kaderee is passionate about current issues including politics and he is quite friendly.

A vendor told Sunday Vanguard that Kaderee could have been poisoned because he says things as it is without fear or favour.

According to him, “Madam, President (referring to Kaderee) is not a poor man o. He says things the way it is. If l tell where he lives, you will not believe it. I am sure he was poisoned.”

Kaderee  mentioned names of top government officials whom he had dealings before he was allegedly poisoned because they could not  control him.