Dotun Oladipo: Beyond death’s bloody fangs

Before I encountered one of Nigeria’s funniest and roundest fabulists, Gbenga Adeboye, aka Funwontan, I had long encountered a miniature fabulist in Nurudeen Awolaru, my classmate at St Paul’s Anglican Primary School, Idi-Oro, Lagos State.

Nuru’s brilliance didn’t shine through the pages of notebooks; it emitted through his thin-lipped mouth. Though I never set my eyes on Nuru since about 1977, his memory is forever etched in the blackboard of my mind.

How can I forget Nurudeen – kinky black hair, light skin, a flat nose which he calls pointed, and a ‘wealthy’ family?

While I dominated the classroom, Nuru was the undisputed dominator outside it. He was inconspicuous within the four walls of the classroom; outside those walls, however, Nuru was the sun.

He had an explanation for everything.

Nuru was the priest; I was the worshipper. He was the wise; I was the fool. He was the government; I was the citizen.

You could never catch Nuru and his mouth off guard.

One day, Nuru led me by the nose and took me into the mines of wisdom to unearth life’s secrets. We were in primary two or three. Sometimes after school, I walked with Nuru to their house along a dusty market road in the heart of Mushin. There, I stopped over to eat some nuggets of knowledge from the Wise One before heading homeward, as my head oscillated with the Sugar Candy tales he had told me.

One afternoon, Nuru asked me if I knew that the spider could kill an elephant.

“How?” I asked, my eyes blinking like Christmas lights.

Nuru was never in a hurry with his tale. He wouldn’t look you in the eye, but would speak clearly, loudly and intentionally within your hearing range.

“People think the elephant is the strongest animal,” he began, in his sweet voice, “but the elephant is not, in reality.”

“Is it the lion?” I asked, eagerly.

“No,” Nuru said, as we sat in the ‘passage’ of the house where he daily waited for his father’s driver to come and pick him and his siblings home. As he struggled into his house-wear, he continued his lecture, “People think the elephant, tiger, lion, and hippopotamus are the strongest animals. Uhmm! But do you know that the spider can kill the elephant?”

“Ha, Nuru! How can the spider kill the elephant?” I asked, not in mockery or suspicion, but in eagerness to learn from Nuru’s profound wisdom.

“It is true that the spider is very small,” he went ahead with his tale, “it is true that the elephant is very big and powerful, but if the spider manages to get into the elephant’s trunk, that is the end of the elephant!”

“How?” I asked.

The Wise One continued, “If the spider finds its way into the elephant’s trunk, it would block it with so many cobwebs, and the elephant would not be able to breathe, and it would die. That’s why the elephant fears the spider so much. That’s why the elephant always lifts his trunk above his head.”

I believed Nuru.

So, the elephant was just big for nothing, I thought.

Nuru also told me the tale about his father’s mansion that houses a zoo and all types of domesticated and wild animals.

“Really?” I asked sheepishly

“Yes! Our monkeys wear clothes. Our dogs, too. We send our monkeys, male and female, to the market to buy groceries for us. They go hand-in-hand, husband and wife.”

Nuru was not done.

“My father has many cars. No car runs faster than my father’s car. If your father’s car wants to outrun my father’s car, my father will hit your father’s car off the road.”

And I believed Nuru.

When I was done drinking from Nuru’s fountain of knowledge, I would head home, thinking about how wealthy Nuru’s family was. I wished I could see his father or mother one day. I wished I was there when his father came around to pick him up and take him home every evening.

But I never did see his father or mother.

Every schoolday, Nuru returned to that filthy two-storey building, changed into house wear, took his gari and groundnuts or bought fried cocoyam and akara downstairs, while he waited for his father to come and take him and his siblings home later in the evening – after I was gone.

He said the filthy house he stayed temporarily after school hours was where his father’s troublesome younger brother lived.

While I drank from the depth of Nuru’s well, I believed everything he said. I never thought he was lying. It was long after I finished at St Paul’s Anglican Primary School, Idi-Oro, that the scales fell off my eyes. For everything Nuru did not know, he had an answer. There was nothing beyond him except real knowledge and true wisdom.

But Nuru was not really wicked. He was only human.

Within the limitations of his little window on the world, he interpreted what he saw, what he feared and what he desired. He saw in me a bookworm between 8 am and 2 pm; when school closed, he took over from the bookworm, pumping gallons of lies into my brain, probably to prove that comparing the bookworm’s knowledge and his own knowledge was like comparing sleep with death.

In my naivety, I did not see class distinction between Nuru’s family and mine. Perhaps he saw it and attempted to move his family higher on the social ladder. So, he built a mansion with his mouth for his family.

Nuru had an answer for everything, like the archetypal man, who explains the things he sees and the things he doesn’t; the things he knows and the things he doesn’t.

I reckon that death, in relation to the human condition, is an intricate juncture of cessation and transition, which man only has imaginary knowledge about, but on which he has written volumes of literature: life, reincarnation, resurrection, hereafter, judgment, heaven and hell. But, taló ti kú rí? Who has gone to heaven and come back? Yet, everyone says death itself would die someday.

For anything Nuru did not know, he had a profound explanation. Man has never seen death, though he feels it. But does cessation of breath equate to the transition of life? Which precedes the other: cessation or transition? Is the expiration of the human exoskeleton the continuation of the soul in another realm? Where do the dead go? What is death if the soul continues to exist after breath stops? Is death a longer sleep than sleep, or an eternal sleep?

Up until now, I had thought death was a debt owed by all mortals. I had thought death was the end of earthly existence. But for how long would man continue to talk about a subject he knows absolutely nothing about? For how long would man, like Nuru, continue to proffer explanations to a phenomenon that has defied comprehension? The majority of man’s belief and knowledge of death rests on dogma. No modern man has died and risen.

I have never pondered so deeply on death until my dear friend, Dotun OIadipo, suddenly stopped breathing on Tuesday, August 25, 2026. When my only sister, Florence, was on her deathbed, we were praying for a miracle to shame cancer. My mother’s death came through the hands of a drunken driver; it was sudden and nasty: she was coming from church early in the morning, bang, and she was gone, in a pool of blood.

A jittery phone call alerted me as my father bestrode the threshold of life and death. “Ha, Uncle Tunde! A mo bi daddy se n feel o. He just sat down. He’s not responsive,” the voice on the phone wailed. “Take him to the hospital! I’m not the person he should see; it’s the doctor!” I barked into the phone on Sunday afternoon. Quickly, he was gone. Baba Tunde ti lo.

When Dotun, my friend and former colleague, died, I was in shock for days. I read tonnes of tributes, but I never reacted to any. I thought Dotun was going to stir awake in the morgue, so I could tell him, “Dotun, you see, I knew you were not dead; I knew you would rise from the dead. See, I didn’t respond to any of the tributes made in your honour. I knew you could never go like that. I knew God would never allow you to die so early. I knew you were too good, too kind, too considerate, too helpful, too young to die.”

But it’s 17 days now since the elephant has fallen, since the iroko has shed its leaves in noonday, and the eagle has left its nest without returning online or offline.

Many market days have passed since the great writer of stories became the breaking story at midday. Dotun, your publisher chair is still warm but empty; your laptop is silent and waiting for your fingers to push the ON button and begin work. Your office is gaping, blinking, and confused, waiting to see you walk through the door and hear your sweet, reassuring voice greet the young and the old with affection and respect. Your 15 staff are forlorn and lost, like sheep without shepherd.

Let me not talk about Ayaba, your wife. How and where would she restart life? You never went anywhere without her, except on your last trip. Ayaba’s first name is Taiwo because she is a twin. Upon marrying you, however, you became her Kehinde, going everywhere together like the snail and its shell. Your three beautiful daughters are still in shock, looking at the door hopefully each time someone knocks.

Let me not talk about your 88-year-old mother and retired lecturer, Mama Florence Oladipo, who lost her husband, Elder D.A.S Oladipo, when he was the Abia State police commissioner in the early 2000s. Dotun, the land is still sodden with tears and grief. Ilesa is in agony. Lagos is ashen. Tears everywhere. Even President Bola Tinubu knew a star had fallen, and he mourned your passing.

D-O-T, when people see you as the centre of everything, as the livewire, the engine room, little did they know that God ordained it so, placing you in the middle of six siblings with two elders and three younger ones. Now, who will comfort your siblings?

What about the unending line of sympathisers queuing up to write tributes on your condolence register? Or the outpouring of grief and anguish online. The overwhelming verdict was: Death took the wrong angel. I’ll come back to the uncommon and exemplary life you lived. Let me speak to death once again, please.

Yes, death.

Death is humanity’s greatest certainty and greatest uncertainty at once. Its paradox is immense; nobody knows death from the standpoint of the dead, yet everyone talks about death with authority. Or are we talking about something we can only feel but is far more profound for our understanding?

It would be premature intellectual ejaculation to dismiss the positions of Christianity, Islam, traditional African cosmology, Buddhism, reincarnation, heaven, hell, science and other interpretations on death.

But the frightening vastness of the globe, the interrelatedness of its galaxies and the limitation of human intelligence put a huge question mark on man’s ability to comprehend some phenomena, death inclusive.

The universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old. The Solar System is about 4.6 billion years old. Though life has existed on Earth for billions of years, modern humans have existed only for a few hundred thousand years. NASA makes the point beautifully: the universe has existed roughly 56,000 times longer than the human species has existed.

Imaginatively speaking, if the entire history of the universe was compressed into one calendar year, human civilisation would appear faintly on December 31.

Can we then say we know what happens after death?

I ask: How much of the world’s secrets does man know? Let’s consider the ocean. It covers 70 per cent of Earth’s surface. As of April 2026, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says only 28.7 per cent of the global seafloor has been mapped using modern high-resolution technology. And mapping isn’t the same as exploring. NOAA, in an article on its website, “How much of the ocean has been explored?”, estimates that humans have visually explored less than 0.001% of the deep-ocean seafloor.

Does life exist on other planets? I don’t know. Science has not found any. But Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to Earth’s Sun, is about 4.24 light-years away. That is roughly 40 trillion kilometres, says NASA Science in a publication, “Voyager 1: What is a Light-Day,” published on August 18, 2026.

Who knows where the dead go?

Man has never sent a spacecraft to another star, NASA observes in a publication, “What is the Universe?”, revealing that man has not yet sent a probe to even the nearest of the billions upon billions of other stars in our galaxy.

Everywhere man looks – beneath the oceans, inside the Earth, across the Solar System and beyond, man sees vast territories of ignorance, and like Nuru, he covers them up with assumptions, explanations and predictions.

I do not know where the dead go. I do not know where Dotun is. I will not make assumptions. I will not make predictions. But I know that anywhere Dotun is, he would remain the highest grade of purity.

Fate availed me the opportunity of coming across Dotun when he joined PUNCH three years after I was employed. By the time he joined the newspaper, I was PUNCH’s Ondo State correspondent. So, our interactions were mainly on the phone and on occasions when outstation correspondents were summoned to the headquarters for the almighty examination called staff assessment. That was the period the editorial staff moved closest to God, increased their tithes, offerings, sàárà, and visited mountains, alfas and babalawos.

On the phone, Dotun’s voice was warm and reassuring. When I was transferred back to Lagos, I encountered the glory of Dotun. He was never under tension, never in a panic. I sometimes wondered if he ever fought in school or used strong language on anyone. Oh, I missed the opportunity to ask him if he ever spanked his children. Ha, Dotun! Iku o to si e o. You’re not deserving to bite death’s apple.

Why would death take you and leave terrorists? Can death not see the bandits troubling Nigeria’s peace? What about all the bad, bad, bad people in high places, in government, in corporate organisations, private enterprises, everywhere? Can death not pick one or two or 20 or 100 of those stealing the nation dry and replace them with Dotun? Whack them with your fatal baton on the heads to give Nigeria’s bowels a breathing space.

D-O-T was the nickname I fondly called you, Baba Ẹwà. You called me Baba T, in return. You did not bear your middle name, Samson, for the fun of it; you bore the name with the courage it underlined. By the time you rose to the post of politics editor, I was already in Osun as state correspondent. But we remained in touch.

While I remained at PUNCH for about 20 years, you had the courage to dare; you left for Tribune, Sun, and edited Sunday Compass before you took another leap of courage and faith by founding Eagle Online newspaper. I remember you came to PUNCH from Newswatch.

Over the years, we remained in touch. Last year, when I read your Facebook post narrating how you, your wife and daughter escaped death at your mechanic’s shop by a whisker, I called you immediately.

After thanking God for the close shave, I said, “Wo, Dotun, mi o le fun e low o. Big boy ni wo. Jo, ba mi send account omo e.” You said, “Se o need sha, Baba mi?” I insisted. And you grudgingly sent me the account.

Everyone has one good encounter or the other of you to share. I have plenty.

Some days before your death, I called to ask if you could help secure an IT place in a PR firm for a Mass Communication student. In your reassuring manner, you said yes. I supplied you with the student’s info, and you promised to call me back in two days. After two days, you called and said, “Shebi, you know Bamidele Johnson?” “Yes, I do.” “Bamidele and Jenkins floated a PR firm called SOL PR. I’ve told him. He said your niece could start on September 1. I thanked you profusely.

Dotun, before I told you about my niece, I had already told Rasheed Bolarinwa, our former colleague in PUNCH, who is now the Group Head, Brand Management and Corporate Communication, Polaris Bank, to help me fix my niece.

While waiting for September 1 resumption, one of the firms Bolarinwa had contacted, Dimension Africa, called my niece to resume the next day. For a poor girl eager to work in a corporate environment, September 1 seemed like a year away. So, she accepted the opportunity offered by Dimension Africa.

On Monday evening, August 24, 2026, I called you and explained the new development. In your characteristic manner, you went philosophical and said, “We should be thankful that the young lady is eager to work. Many of her mates don’t want to do anything.”

Dotun, you died on Tuesday, August 25, 2026.

It is my eternal regret that I never told you how much I admired your maturity, calmness and sense of fairness. I often wonder what could get you offended, Baba Jeje.

Many times, when I made a joke of your gentleness, you reminded me that you were raised in the barracks. You never boasted for once that your father was a police commissioner; I learnt that from someone else.

Your friend and classmate at a former Ogun State Polytechnic, now Moshood Abiola Polytechnic, Ojere, Siji Oyesile, had so much to say about you. He cried his eyes out. He said you were the rallying point of the school’s old students’ association. Oyesile said, “Dotun, our mainframe is broken. Dotun would spend his money for the cause of the association without asking for a refund. He was the one who drove us anywhere, even Abuja. You cannot know Dotun without knowing his wife because they went everywhere together.

“In school, he was into photography, so we called him “Olùyà”, and he called us “Ẹni Ìyà,” in return.

“Olùyà” means a photographer. It also means a worthless fellow. I’m sure Siji and his mischievous classmates chose the latter. There is no ambiguity in the meaning of “Ẹni Ìyà”. It means a despicable fellow. So, Dotun served his “mockers” full measure of the energy they served.

Oyesile continued, “When Dotun’s mechanic died in the fatal incident which Dotun escaped last year, he took over the upkeep of his mechanic’s family, sending his children to school. Dotun joined us from The Polytechnic, Ibadan, where he had obtained his OND. We got our HND and graduated in 1992.

A classmate of Dotun at The Polytechnic, Ibadan, Femi Adefila, recalled that Dotun was always at the forefront when any member of the school’s old students’ association was in need. Adefila, the Chief Executive Officer of RAVE FM, Osogbo, and Western Spring Television, Osogbo, recalled how Dotun spearheaded a fundraiser for a classmate who had cancer.

“The classmate survived. Dotun led former classmates to the burial of my mother in Oke-Ila for two days. He also led them to the marriage of my daughter in Osogbo. He drove all of them down in a bus,” Adefila said in a trembling voice.

“I remember another good deed of Dotun; they are just too numerous,” Adefila said. “Mr Bayo Oloyede taught Dotun at Ibadan Poly. The man has now become a professor. During his inaugural at Redeemer’s University, Ede, Dotun drove all the way from Lagos to attend it. Dotun made my media job for former Minister of Defence Erelu Olusola Obada very easy by publishing my press releases. One of our class members fainted upon hearing about Dotun’s death.”

Editor of Saturday Tribune, Lasis Olagunju, told me of a chance encounter he had with Dotun. “We met at an event in Lagos. After the event, I was heading to the D.A.M.E Awards. As I was driving out of the event, I stopped to ask the gatemen the way to the D.A.M.E event. Dotun was driving behind me. He overheard me talking to the gatemen, pulled up beside me and told me to follow him. He drove in front, and my car came behind.

“When we got to the venue of the D.A.M.E event, Dotun began to pull out. I asked him why. He said he only took me to the venue. That was someone who could have pretended not to hear what I was discussing with the gatemen,” Olagunju said.

Dotun’s right-hand man, Yemi Adebowale, said he was one of a kind. “Dotun seeks the success of anyone associated with him. When someone is in need, Dotun would be racking his brain about how to solicit funds or find employment or pay house rent or school fees for the person, without the person even knowing,” Adebowale said.

Explaining that, going by his good deeds, Dotun was not supposed to die so young, Adebowale, however, took the philosophical path, saying everything about his death pointed to fate. “Dotun had more than 10 staff members; any of them could have rushed him to the hospital had he collapsed in their presence, but he did not. His wife had gone out to help a relocating family; otherwise, she would have been around to drive him to the hospital. Her fashion house was on the top of Dotun’s office.

“There were many hospitals in Ogbo, but he chose to go to his family doctor in Agege. He could have driven into any hospital along the way if he knew death was knocking, but he did not. It was when he could no longer drive himself because of the pain in his chest that he parked by the roadside and gave his phone to an okada man to help call his doctor. It was the okada who described where Dotun was to the doctor.”

The okada man thought Dotun was merely resting his head on the steering wheel, but he was gone even before the doctor arrived.

Death, who hath thou?