By Dickson Omobola

Last week, we started  a two-part interview between the presidential candidate of the African Action Congress, AAC, in the 2023 polls, Omoyele Sowore, and Legendary Segun Odegbami. In the interview anchored by Odegbami on Eagle 7, FM, his sports radio, Sowore discussed sports politics and revealed how Odegbami was in the rearguard of the struggle for June 12 among other interesting issues. We conclude the interview today. 

Where did your relationship with sports start, and how far did it go?

My relationship with sports started from, actually, secondary school. But I was not very successful in secondary. I knew when I was in secondary school, when we were doing inter-house sports, that I could do sports, I could run long-distance races, but I was very little, because I finished secondary school at the age of 14. So I would fight with my sports teacher to let me run, and he would tell me that I was too small. One day, they gave me a 100-metre relay race, I sucked at it. And they never let me go near a pitch.

I pretty much became a supporter’s club. I am always cheering people up. I tried to play football, inspired by you, because every village knew your name when we were growing up. Everybody wanted to be Segun Odegbami. For me, I broke my leg at the age of 16, so I stopped playing.

(Cuts in) Sympathetic Apologies. I apologise on behalf of all of us…

The funny thing is that my father was happy that I broke my leg, because he hated football. It was the same month I was supposed to write the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board, JAMB exam. I think I was supposed to write the WAEC or something. We had an advantage in our area – Ilaje area of Ondo State. We have lakes and creeks all around us. We have water bodies, so many of us from that area started swimming very early in life.

My first quasi-professional attempt at sports after I broke my leg was swimming at the University of Lagos, UNILAG. I swam and was one of the best swimmers in my hall of residence, Henry Carr Hall. I was swimming at the UNILAG swimming pool. It was a good one in those days. I do not know if it is still there. It was a very professional space, very close to the lagoon. The university chose me to represent it at the Nigerian University Games Association, NUGA, Games in 1992.

Before we could say Jack Robinson and knowing who I am, we went and protested against Babangida in Babangida Must Go in 1992. So they just expelled all of us. That was how my career ended. When I arrived in the US, I picked up long-distance running, I think in 2013. I ended up doing about eight marathons including one Lagos marathon. I did New York under four hours. I did Philadelphia. I did Miami. I have done several other half marathons. My marathon streak also ended in 2019 when I was arrested and detained in Abuja for a good number of years. But I would go to the stadium because I was restricted to Abuja for three years. I usually go to the national stadium to just train and hang out and use that opportunity to meet a lot of the officials and runners there.

I also attempted to restart my swimming experience because the stadium has a great swimming pool as well, but it has been abandoned. The last time I went there, I couldn’t go near it because the sewage was seeping into the swimming pool. You can see, the gallery area is all broken. A lot needs to happen in Nigeria. But the important thing you mentioned about sports and politics, a lot of people don’t look at sports from the point of politics, but sports is big politics. And the reason is that any endeavour that brings human beings together, you have to manage humans and emotions because sports is very emotional. And when people go out to play sports, it is a big deal. There was a story, I don’t know how true it is, that the Biafran War was stopped for a day or two because a sports personality came to Nigeria. I don’t know whether it was Pele or Mohammed Ali.

(Cuts in) Yes, Pele in 1969…

So they paused the war. What is more political than that? If an international soccer player can come into a country, and because of him, hostility ceases at the war front, there is nothing more political than that. And then you look at how decisions for hosting sport competitions are made. You look at the decision on how sports and resources are managed, how when sports goes haywire, the whole world stops. Imagine the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, FIFA, scandals and how the US got involved and was going after everybody else because of the importance of sports in the life of human beings.

The most powerful political leaders in the world are also involved in the management of sports. That is on the political side. But there is also a sports economy that is unrivalled, where some of the best resources in terms of revenue generation come from sports. You know, that is why anywhere you go in the US, there is a basketball team, there is a baseball team, and they play the World Series in the US, even though the rest of the world doesn’t participate in it. Sports and politics are all interwoven. The decisions that are made for sports are done by politicians. It is very, very political. And the question about sports politics is even deeper than the politics we play at local levels. It is international-level, high-profile, high-wire sports, I mean politics, that determines what goes on in the sports arena that you see. Since I was in the US, there is no US president or politician that does not have some kind of sports connection or who does not attend sporting events, regardless of who they are.

You see Obama, Obama does not leave the basketball. All of them have a team. It is almost like an anomaly for a US president not to be part of a sporting team. If there is a World Series, if they win the World Cup, the first place they go to is the White House. You have to welcome them because these are central ambassadors playing the potential for their countries. And they care about them. The US can invade another country if their sportsmen are held up there. 

Little wonder that in recent days,  we ran into each other at the indoor sports hall of the National Stadium. However, two things: one, in one week, I saw you on social media, you know, fighting against  injustice and your eyes were fiery, your eyes were red and all of that. And then that same week, I saw you inside the indoor sports hall of the National Stadium in MKO Abiola, and you were as cool as a cucumber. Is that the effect sports has on politicians like you?

I am very big on sports, and I often wonder why a country like Nigeria does not pay more attention to sports than it does. If I had my way, every neighbourhood we have, not only football, like, a pitch where you can play football, volleyball, you know. Because out of these 200 million people that you have, of which they say almost 65 to 75 per cent of them are young people, that is your economy right there. If I were the president of Nigeria, I would be divesting from oil exploration and going into sports. Reason being that everybody who is a good sportsman in a year can bring over  billions to Nigeria, from winning prizes to endorsements to even turning Nigeria into a tourist place where you want to go and see a sports legend and all that.

When you enter a cab in North Africa, America, South America or Canada, the first thing people ask is not the name of your president. It is the name of the best footballer. Typically, JJ Okocha. Everybody knows him. They will be like, do you know JJ Okocha? And I will be like, yes, of course I know him. But at home, people probably walk past JJ Okocha and don’t even say hello to him. It is because we pay less attention to things that can bring about harmony. For a country that is so much in love with unity, sports is the go-to place to get not artificial unity, because we get artificial unity by changing the national anthem, but real unity because nothing I have seen in this world has united Nigerians more than sports.

Whenever that World Cup is coming, there is no Muslim, there is no Christian, there is no Igbo, there is no Yoruba. It is the National Football Club of Nigeria. That tells you that Nigeria honours, respects competence over and above ethnicity. Because there are some times, maybe until recently, because you can see the trend is changing, that everybody on the team will be Yoruba, if they are the best.  Nobody asked why Odegbami and Muda Lawal or why is everybody on the team from Abeokuta? Too many attackers from Abeokuta. Later on, it was the guys from the South-East, JJ Okocha, all of them.

As long as they played very well, they were on the team. There was a time when it was the guys from Edo State. I saw a lot of Edo State guys. Very great players. We did not care. If the proper players were not brought, everybody would start shouting at the National Stadium in those days, because we used to go from Union Lodge to go and watch football. We have a country that is always talking about unity, yet no-one is investing in what can bring natural, organic unity, which is sports. And then it can go from there to bringing a lot of revenue.

Everybody in Kenya who wins a million dollars from New York is taking the money back home. The one thing about Kenyans is that the day they win, they are leaving that day. They are not going to spend that money elsewhere. They are going to Kenya. The best marathon runner in the world, Kipchoge, is based in Kenya. I go to marathons with them. Before we arrive, those of us lazy people, they are on their way to the airport. And they go back and start training immediately in their own country. That money goes into their country. It is paid into their local account. You cannot ignore it. If you have played and won the World Cup, just once, it becomes part of your national history forever.
We are still talking about Pele. I do not know when Pele won the World Cup. I do not know the year, but I still talk about Pele. People are still naming their children after Pele. I met someone who was telling me that Pele was still alive. I said: ‘Pele died.’ He said: ‘It is a lie.’ Some people don’t even know if Pele is black or white. They just know the name because it signifies the importance of sports, how powerful and emotional people can be about sports.

Talking about what I was doing at the National Stadium when you saw me, I was there that night planning a protest for the next day. So, I thought you left. After you left, our friends were following me, the DSS guys, who were all over the place and surprised that I was alone. They thought I should be hiding because I wanted to protest, and I said, well, I am not. I think sports, for me, helps me to decompress and recalibrate. You have to do a lot of recalibration, and it gives me my own idea of human connection or connectivity, because the most important thing about we human beings is how we relate and how we connect on a daily basis. Our entire existence is about engagement. It is about connections, you know. We were created into this world to come and live life.

I was at the burial of a former teacher of mine where a preacher preached. And when it was my turn, I said: ‘Look, I appreciate how you Christians see the world, and you always want people to go to heaven, but don’t forget that the God that you preach to us created heaven and earth. He didn’t create the earth by accident. He didn’t create the earth and put grass there by accident. He knew that people would play football. He knew that people would swim in the river. He had made the provision for all these things, so why are you in a hurry to go to heaven?’ That is what the Yoruba call orun apanpa dodo (heaven that you rush people to). The earth is where you are supposed to be and live the longest, so why are you always preaching heaven, heaven, heaven, heaven, heaven?

Even God that created heaven, he doesn’t stay in heaven because he was staying somewhere before he created heaven anyway. Don’t let us digress because I don’t want to get you into trouble with pastors.

(Cuts in) No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you can’t, you know, we all have our faiths, our beliefs, our backgrounds and our understandings. Oprah Winfrey once asked Michael Jackson what he knows for sure. She asked him: ‘what do you know for sure in existence? What do you know for sure?’ And Michael Jackson went, thought about it for a minute and came back and humbly said: ‘nothing’. However, I want you to connect you and Fela and how it impacted you…

Well, I am one of the young people who believed in Fela. You know, I call myself a Felasopher as opposed to a philosopher. I followed his music since I was a little child in the village. By the time he released Zombie, I remember going to listen to the song in secret because in those days, my father had a JVC cassette player. There was a cassette, even though the music was banned, it was available in the village. Fela was scandalised. I don’t know how they campaigned against him. He was portrayed as this morally derelict person whereas he was a prophet.

When I arrived at the University of Lagos, naturally, I looked for Fela at the shrine a few times. Well, my most impressive encounter with him was about the time he came to kick off that student union. 

He was supposed to also play at the sports centre. And we went to his house in the morning, parked vehicles there because he said, I am coming with 27 women. We hung out with him. We did yabis in his living room at Gbemisola. And in the evening, when we were supposed to go and play, he said, well, I want to do a soundcheck. We thought soundcheck was not a big deal.

So we drove down with Fela to UNILAG. He got there, and we had not set up the stage as he wanted. We wanted to get a stage from Sunny Ade out there in Bariga. When they (it wasn’t Sunny that we met, but I think his people) discovered it was Fela that was meant to use it, they refused. So we started building a stage. We went and bought planks at Iwaya and tried to build a stage. When he (Fela) arrived, he just came and kicked the stage. He said: ‘No, I no dey play for this kind place o’. And then he started going back home, which got students really upset and they locked the gates. Fela could not leave. I knew that it could get ugly because he came with his guys and I knew people would be overpowered if the students were too many.

So I quickly went and opened the gates. We took some guys down to his house that night to go and plead with him because he had warned us that if he did not do soundcheck, he would never play. He told us the story of how he went to France to play on Independence Day. He said he wanted to do a soundcheck, and they asked if he thought it was Nigeria, and their sound was perfect. He said when it was time to play, he did not play in France. I think one of the places where he was most popular is France, his music. We ran back to his house, surrounded it, begged and begged. He came out. One of the guys who was helping us beg was one of his band members. He opened the door because there was so much noise in the compound, over a thousand students followed us to his house.

He opened the door and said: ‘I don tell you make you no come near my house.’ He just gave the guy a knock on the head and closed his door back. We went to Beko the next morning. I think that night we called Beko, who was his manager, who was also our friend, mentor and a co-collaborator in our struggle against military rule. So Beko asked if we didn’t look at the contract, and of course we never looked at the contract. There was a clause in the contract that said, even after fulfilling all conditions, Fela was not under any obligation to play. That was how Fela did not play that night. It was terrible for us because as union leaders we had boasted. And anybody who could bring Fela or Gani Fawehinmi to campus in those days was a big deal. That’s how he did not play.

As life evolved over time, I was in New York one day, and then they called my name, Ogugua Iwelu, who is also Fela’s protégé, called me in New York and asked if I could drive to Manhattan and there was an off-Broadway show going on. He said he wanted me to come and announce Fela there. I drove down in a Sahara Reporters t-shirt. I got in there and said they should paint my face like Fela’s, then I grabbed the mic and started talking. I spun the water, which was my favourite. So when we were done, they called me back and said: ‘Would you like to come back and perform Fela on this Broadway show?’ I had never heard about Broadway before. I said: ‘What does it mean?’

I went and started doing voice lessons because they gave me some of the raps that they wanted me to play. I think that was Scatter Scatter. So I did it, and I came for the audition in New York to play Fela on Broadway. After I did my audition, the guy said: ‘Well, you have the mannerism, but you do not know how to sing.’ And that was how I was in Fela on Broadway. Fela on Broadway eventually became huge. I did not get the job, but I was one of the small-time consultants in the media.

I brought Soyinka. I used to bring Nigerian personalities there. I saw Abike Dabiri there. I didn’t know you (Odegbami) came, but a lot of people came. It was supposed to be for a few weeks, but it lasted longer. it did not go away. It was a hit. Later on, I think D’Banj was also brought in to audition for it. He did not get the role, so it did not make me feel bad. If the D’Banj could not get it, who am I? In a nutshell, that is my history with Fela.

Your history is very rich. Every day, there is something new happening in your life. I know you have lived life to the fullest, but there are still a few things left for you to do. This is just a one-line answer that I want. Well, you were a former presidential candidate. Would you consider doing it again following your experiences of the democratic process?

In my view, this is actually the time for the kind of ideas we have. I would be happy to serve Nigeria in the best possible capacity.

Would you consider being a part of any government?

No, considering that I have not seen a government in my lifetime that I can be part of. I am searching my conscience very well. That was why I presented myself in such a way that I would be in a strategic position to make all the changes and put all the ideas that I have in place.

Why don’t you consider just making your own contributions? Bill Clinton once told me that as an individual, you cannot change the world, but you should always aspire to make a big difference. And even if you are president, you won’t be perfect…

You may not be able to change the world, but also do not let the world change you into what you are not.

Let’s go back to volleyball. That’s where we started from. What’s your impression about the African Volleyball Women’s Club Championship?

Anytime you see me at a public event, be it sports, protests, I am like a technical person. I am always looking at what is technical about it. You know, I am also clairvoyant about it as well. Like I am looking futuristically. One thing I found very interesting about it, you know, is the African teams, it is how those other African countries that came have got themselves well-roundedly organised in their participation and their focus. I looked at, you know, the Egyptians. I was there when the Tunisians played. I was there when the Rwandans played. You could tell that they don’t joke. They have a whole array of officials who they were dealing with.

For instance, the Zamalek girl, they had four or five coaches sitting on their coaching crew. And then they had people standing on both sides. Those were the ones who determined when there should be timeouts. They would do this to the coaches because they were watching the Nigerian side or whoever was the opponent. I realised that they recorded everything they did, meaning that when they were done, they probably took all their team members back and said, you must watch where you did well and where you sucked.

Another thing I realised, which is kind of political in my view, that is why I said I am always looking at different angles, is each time somebody served and didn’t serve well, the coach pulled the person out, especially the Zamalek. If you hit the ball and it didn’t go, that person is replaced. And that was, for me, very political and also a military strategy. They also do that in the state of Israel. Any general that can’t win the war, is pulled out. And I learnt a lot from that. I don’t want to make Nigeria the bottom of my prism all the time, but I think since they were there, they could learn a thing or two from how these guys take their job seriously. And how that made a difference in their winning streak. It was all about strategy, strategy, strategy, strategy, strategy, and it made all the difference.

What are your final thoughts for young people of Nigeria. It should be anything else but politics…

I sleep, wake and read politics. Discussions of any kind are important, whether they are political, whether they are about our health. But at the end of the day, we are all aspiring towards making our country a better place. Whenever I am arrested, I educate the guys who are supposed to interrogate me. I say: ‘Look, I know you were asked to do this, but wouldn’t it be better if we live in a country where we don’t hate ourselves? Where you do not have to grab me by my trousers in public to humiliate me simply because I have an opinion that is different from the man you are protecting. Why can’t you think of me as a person who you protect?’

For the young people out there, I deal with Nigerian young people in two ways. One is for them to understand that nobody is going to be young forever. The second aspect is to also increase their resilience because unlike our time where we have parents who care for us, who are on top of our businesses, Nigerian young people are taking care of themselves and taking care of their parents. Because if you have parents who went to work and did not get pension, you are the breadwinner of that parent.

The way the world is working, the way technology has taken over our lives also means that you have to teach your parents a lot of things they do not know. It used to be that our parents knew everything that doctors did. The burden on a Nigerian youth is a lot. They have to go to school to understand the world. It is just to say the world revolves around everybody, not only young people, and they must recognise that.

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