By Festus Adedayo
Last week, icon of the Nigerian media, Dele Momodu, celebrated his 65th birthday. One of the events hallmarking the celebration was the Dele Momodu Leadership Centre he constructed in Ibadan, the capital of Oyo State. Like a wayfarer, Momodu’s journey through the rough road of the Nigerian media has no doubt been very eventful.
He rose to celebrity status from a humble background in the city of Ile-Ife. This much was manifest last Tuesday as the Osun State governor, Ademola Adeleke, freely allowed tears to cascade from his brows as he recalled the day he entered where the man who would one day be a media icon lived as a youngster.
With a 1982 degree in Yoruba from the then University of Ife, Momodu proceeded to secure a Master’s degree in English Literature in 1988. This was after having taught at the Oyo State College of Arts and Science in Ile-Ife. From them on, Momodu took steady, challenging but measured steps down the aisle of journalism practice. While in May 1988, he secured his first journalism job as Staff Writer with the African Concord magazine, he later moved to the Weekend Concord where, as pioneer staff member in March, 1989, he penned the newspaper’s first cover story.
Momodu’s brilliance became known to people like us when, in September 1991, he became Editor of May Ellen Ezekiel’s Classique, a celebrity magazine. Bob Dee, as he is famously known, became the highest paid Nigerian newspaper editor with this appointment. Coupled with May’s engaging pieces, you could not but read Classique for, especially, Momodu’s racy pieces. I cannot forget May’s piece “Over Cognac” a narrative of her battle with childlessness and how her bosses made fun of her as they drained bottles of champagne.
After Classique, Momodu has been many other things: publisher, businessman, and motivational speaker and with the founding of Ovation International, became CEO and publisher of the celebrity magazine.
Momodu is a huge inspiration to people from humble backgrounds. He signposts the fact that no matter how challenged your beginning is, there is always a way where there is a will. One day in late 2019, he gave Wale Adebanwi, his journalism mentee, who eventually became his professor at the University of Oxford while he studied for his fellowship at the prestigious university, and me a dinner at Oxford’s Holiday Inn That night was a cherished moment of introspection. Be kind to those you meet on your way up. You will always meet them, even as you yourself go up and up. Sitting at table with the legend of celebrity journalism was a night to remember.
Last Tuesday, he took my friends, Lasisi Olagunju, Dupe Olubanjo, and me on a tour of his Ibadan Leadership Center. Olubanjo, a former deputy editor of the Sunday Tribune, now of Globacom, was incidentally, the one who handled Momodu’s Tribune columns decades ago. While touring the Ibadan centre, we gasped at the well-kept bound copies of Momodu’s works in the Tribune, Classique, Ovation and other Nigerian newspapers, which tell the story of his column-writing odyssey. The shelves house more than his works. They are a researcher’s treasure.
The Momodu story we saw was a classic case of an appreciative boy weaned from the backwaters of Ile-Ife, giving back to a society which forged him from the smithy of its rough road.
Happy birthday to you, Legend of the Written Words.
•Dr Adedayo is a lawyer, social critic and columnist.
