The words he would like to hear now are …”To Joyful Life Shall I Awaken”. This is the prayer of every cross bearer who is leaving the earthly mud body for the next plane of existence. I cannot vividly recall when I met Pa Olajide Shoboyede, who left us on Sunday, July 17, and whose earthly remains were interred five days later on July 22, 2022 in The Garden Arden of Remembrance on Grailland, Iju Hills. But I remember his daughter, Mrs. Bolaji Adenle, of blessed memory, some years before him, inviting me to her father’s 60th or so birthday. I obliged. She was what we call my “downline” in multi-level marketing business (MLM). In the 1990s, I was a pioneer newspaper writer and advocate on this form of business in Nigeria. As the one who introduced Bolaji to this world of marketing, I was her upline and she was my “downline” in any MLM business I introduced her to. One of her sisters, Mrs. Sade Olusesi, was working at The Comet newspaper where I was the editorial director/editor-in-chief, and I did not know. Perhaps because of Mrs. Olusesi, Pa Shoboyede took interest in this newspaper, as he did in The Guardian newspaper where I held similar positions, and he had been following my writings on alternative medicine and MLM. Thus, when Bolaji told him she was interested in alternative medicine and MLM, he gave her my telephone number.
The first network I remember I took Bolaji into was Katine Communications. It was owned by a young woman who partnered with some of her friends in a church to transform her telephone and recharge card business into an MLM company which distributed Nigerian products. For me, that was exciting. Before Katine, MLM had been criticised in Nigeria as opening up the country to become a dumping ground for foreign plant medicines. Few people appreciated the benefits of it. One of these, by today’s account, is that more than one million of Nigeria’s 200 million population are gainfully employed and it’s full time or deriving Plan B or Plan C income from the business. Besides, it was quickening business pace for many companies, generating income for governments, bringing foreign capital into the country and helping to prevent the death of traditional medicine against the backdrop of government unwillingness to protect and develop it. Not many Nigerians know that their country is a signatory to a United Nations Treaty which requires that member nations to develop their traditional medicines to the status of orthodox medicine by 2010. That meant, for example, that there should be tertiary medical institutions which train and certify the competence of Nigerian traditional medicine practitioners. The illiterate and semi literate men and women who sell herbs in the markets are to be taken along. The United Nations recognised that these were the persons who attended to the needs of about 60 percent of the population in many poor or struggling nations. In addition to their being taken along, there were to be traditional medicine hospitals, research institutions and a governing council for the trade. South Africa and Ghana took the lead in Africa. In Ghana, the proprietary secrets of traditional medicine are not stolen by civil servants or researchers. The government set up research centres. Once a medicine was found to be potent and had no side effects, it was accepted for Mass production by the government and the owners of the intellectual property paid royalties from sales. The sales were guaranteed because the products were listed in the essential medicines list and approved for doctor prescription. Dr Ampofu, now of blessed memory, put Ghana on the map with his herbal antimalarial. He visited the practices of several malaria treating herbal medicine practitioners and formulated their common indices into a product which became a national anti-malarial medicine in the hospitals and pharmacies. South Africa gained international recognition and marketing for its Roibos tea as an anti-oxidant. Commission Q, Germany’s equivalent of Nigeria’s NAFDAC, took away from South Western Nigeria a potent anti inflammatory herb called devil’s claw, properly researched it and then put it on the world market as a plant medicine for inflammation and related health conditions. It is with selfless and unceasing hard work that Mr Olajuwon Okubena was able to place his Jobelyn on the world map. Today, official involvement in the training of traditional medicine practitioners is still scanty. The bill for their registration has been unattended to since the days of the presidency of Olusegun Obasanjo, and Nigeria is hardly able to bring money home from the world market which is projected to hit 178.4 billion U.S dollars by 2026. Last year, United States accounted for 22.8 billion U.S Dollars or 18.4 percent of world trade. Nigeria is lagging behind although its forests are among the world’s most blessed forests in terms of healing plants.
You may begin to get a picture of why I said I found the coming of Katine Communications into MLM business to be an exciting one. It was Nigerian. My advocacy for foreign MLMs was premised on the belief that they would “open the eyes” of Nigerians to new possibilities. Truly, it did! It took me four whole days of standing on queue which formed from as early as 5am to register as a distributor of their products. The queues were formed on kodeso street, between Obafemi Awolowo round about and Julie Pharmacy Stores and stretched almost a kilometer away to the offices of Ikeja Local Government Area. If you left the queue to have a meal or a snack, you could miss your place on it on your return, or the people behind you who excused you out could claim they had never seen you on this earth! That was my travail for four days until I was lucky one of Katine’s directors was walking by. I remember him as Barrister Ayo.
He screamed:” Mr Kusa, what are you doing here?”
I was embarrassed my identity could be known in that crowd. With the down trodden in Nigeria , the rank of which was swelling, I was jostling to eke out a living from my second passion after journalism. Barrister Ayo had known me from my days at The Guardian when he was a fresh law graduate. In fact, he had sent one of his cousins to The Guardian to seek employment. Being unsuccessful in the editorial department he had found his feet in the marketing department. Barrister Ayo pulled me out of the crowd with profound apologies almost every minute, irrespective of the anger of the crowd that I was being helped to jump the queue.
What was Katine selling? Why all this trouble? An Ibo gentleman had a factory in Isheri, Lagos where he produced a wide array of skin and beauty products he called Carrot. My original assumption was that they were made from carrot juice or the extracts. Oh , no. Far from it. They were made from a type of soil which many people from the South east, Delta and South-south regions ate for health reasons in its unpurified forms, thereby risking the ingestion of microforms. The Igbos call it Nzu. In Akwa Ibom, it is known by different names, including Ndom in Ibibio language. I suspect that is what the Europeans purify into a full grade product they call diatom or diatomaceous earth. The cream easily healed any skin injury. There was an adapted form for pedicure and manicure. There were many others I cannot remember now. In about two months, the sale outgrow Lagos bounds to as far as Sokoto or Maiduguri. But, alas, Katine could not manage the success. Distributors and the staff in the stores connived to steal the products, the company could not easily make remittances and order to meet demand. The business went down, and the owners of the business took it over, but could not manage it either.
Bolaji and I were in this business and several others. Her father was happy and had himself begun to show interest in MLM. Some of the networks in which I would later become his upline were
1)Edmark
2)Kasly
3)Greenworld
4)Dynapharm
5)Chymall
6)Wellness water produced by Ogechi at 39 Emina Cresent, off Toyin Street, Ikeja, Lagos
7) When I discovered Bell before it came to Nigeria, Pa Soboyede did the runs for me and became my supplier. But when Bell opened shop in Lagos, he showed no interest, and I went in without him. In compensation, I informed him about Nature’s gift for life (NG4) when it arrived, and he became my upline and I his downline. We were not together in many MLMs, including Friends of Nature. Had he the health for it when I sent out invitations about early this year, I am sure he would have come along. Where he was not in those days, Bolaji was present.
BIRTHDAY
As I said earlier, Bolaji invited me to Pa Shoboyede’s birthday and that strengthened my relationship with him. He was about 12 years older than me but never carried himself as such before me or before any member of my household young enough to be his great grand child. A week hardly passed without his dropping in to see us, even if I could not return those visits on account of my vision. I saw a flaming, adroit spirit in him when three members of his family passed within one year. Bolaji was the first to go. Financially and otherwise, he struggled to fill her position among her children. Then, another daughter passed. Finally, his wife also departed.
These events are enough to devastate any man. Except one is not human would one not be rocked. The difference between men is that, while some bow and cave in under pressure, others ride the storm over and become stronger persons. I cannot tell from his outward nature what toll the passages may have had on Pa Shoboyede’s spirit and bodily health. For he always spoke of them all, as he did of other earthly events, from spiritual perspectives. When I mention the spiritual, I do not refer, as I always say, to the “religions”. Religion examines life from bottom up, groping in the dark as it were, whereas the spiritual describes it from the top to bottom, in clear sightedness. In the spiritual perspective, one does not cling to family or anyone or anything else, but to the Almighty Creator of the seven universes which the Book of Revelation describes as The Seven Churches of Asia, Asia being the spiritual name of the physical portions of creation. This creation, shall we say “subsequent creation”, is not the original creation in which human spirits are made “in our own image” but shadows of it. To these shadows have unconscious spirit seed germs descended to literally germinate, flower and fruit until they become mature enough to return home to their own paradise in the lower lying regions of the imperishable parts of creation. Thus, every parent and child and family is on his or her own journey for spiritual self fulfillment willed by the Creator. No one can hold another from moving on when the time is ripe to move on, unless they have become attached or bonded. It is a spiritual crime to be bonded. Let us imagine one person bonded to hundred persons and each of these hundred persons bonded to hundred or more persons. In no time, there will be a clump or masses of bonded souls. Under the law of motion which compels everything and everyone to perpetually be on the move or perish, including our earth, the air,our lungs etc, these human masses would be like blood clots in the blood circulation system which may cause heart attacks and strokes. The danger for such human souls caught in such clusters is that the individuals which form them may be unable to free themselves and return home to the safety of paradise before the disintegration of the perishable world in The Final Judgement. Even among close family members, no one is owned or owns another. So, there is no basis for such attachment to anyone from which one cannot or should not free one self. Unresolved questions and quarrels may cause attachments. Thus, knowing persons deliberately remove themselves from malevolent equations even if in doing so they are seen by unknowing persons to be weak or simpletons. From what I observed about Pa Shoboyede, he took these spiritual admonitions very seriously . What may be shocking to many persons is that husbands and their wives may never meet in all eternity after they leave the earth. Children and parents, too, may never meet in eternity. That is why it is profitable for all to make the best of opportunities of their associations on earth. For only in the love that envelopes them lies the opportunity for reunion.
Pa Shoboyede took these events we call “sad” in their strides. He was a formidable family man for his extended family. In that ebbing age, he could drive himself to Abeokuta for family meetings. He never forgot the children of his departed friends and neighbours and siblings who now live in foreign lands. Always , he called out to them to not forget about Nigeria or be lost abroad. He gave himself to everyone who came into his world, and did not bother if they treated him with less respect and love than he showered on them.
Sunset years
What many persons call the “sunset” years of life were no sunset years for Pa Shoboyede. He rose early enough to move out of his home by about 5am. If he was not on Grailland, on Iju hills, for Grail funerals, he was there on Saturdays for cleaning work in preparation for worship on Sundays or he was in a canoe ride across Ogun river to buy fresh fish which he roasted and sold. In his seventies, Pa Shoboyede learned from the Federal Institute of Industrial Research (FIIRO), Lagos, how to grow mushroom and to roast fresh fish. I was glad to be one of his customers. He could also be found very early in Lagos Island where he bought such products as coconut milk powder for his customers and mine who were giving up cow milk for plant and fruit milk. He will not be easily forgotten as well by those his customers who bought alkaline wellness water from him and those who depended on him for the medicinal products of Pax Herbal Centre of Catholic Rev. Father Anslem Adodo. There was hardly any PAX seminar anywhere in Nigeria Pa Shoboyede did not attend.
Suddenly…
Pa Shoboyede was not a man who left events to chance. While some persons are reluctant to think about their passages someday, he gave serious thought to his by making all the necessary financial arrangements for the internment of his earthly remains in THE GARDEN OF REMEMBRANCE on GRAILLAND. That, for you was a hallmark of a man who never intended to be a burden to anyone or to be bonded to anyone.
Nevertheless, I always asked him about his experiences with his body, recognising that 85 years is no mean age. When I discovered he needed company at home, I appealed to a young man to live with him. Papa was happy.
TOBI OLUPONA
That’s the young man. Wherever he is, pa Shoboyede would not be happy if I leave him out of this narration. Tobi is an aluminium Mason. He, like his brother,Damilola, are among those few fellows of the young generation who are not disconnected from African life. He went to live with Pa Shoboyede, cleaned the house, made his meals and helped him with fish smoking. He is multi talented, makes shoes and is a painter, besides. He turned out a huge blessing in Pa Shoboyede’s last days when he had to be helped out of bed and taken to the hospital for medical attention. Even when Tobi got married and had a baby, I appealed to him to stay with Papa.The house was fuller and richer with human voices, especially a baby’s and this may have helped to prolong his life. Our experiences are wonderful teachers to us and to those connected with us or who behold us from a distance. Would Pa Shoboyede have known in his hey days that this would be the family who would share with him his last days and who would be privileged to announce his passage?
Funeral
The earthly remains of Pa Shoboyede were interred July 22, five days after his passage, in the Gardern of Remembrance after a funeral service at the Temple of The Lord on Grailland. Goodbye, Pa Shoboyede. May you be accompanied by our loving prayers that you find help all the way to the luminous gardens
