A veteran journalist and public affairs analyst, Prince Bayo Osiyemi has disclosed that although former President Olusegun Obasanjo is his elder and more prominent in national life, he is senior to the ex-President in terms of the time spent in the womb.
Reacting to a media publication in which Obasanjo disclosed that he spent 12 months in his mother’s womb before he was born, Osiyemi said he holds a higher record, having stayed in his mother’s womb for much longer.
“I was told that I stayed in my mother’s womb for three years and four months before I was delivered seventy-four and a half years ago,” Osiyemi, a former chief press secretary to the first civilian governor of Lagos State, Alhaji Lateef Jakande and special Adviser on chieftaincy matters to Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos State, said.
Obasanjo reportedly made the disclosure about his long stay in mother’s womb at a cultural event in Abeokuta which featured a drama in honour of the mother of the former commander- in-chief of the Nigerian armed forces.
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Prodded at a chance meeting in the French capital, Paris, yesterday, Osiyemi said he knew from the way his life has shaped out that he has distinctive and uncommon characteristics, apparently linked to how he was born by a cocoa trader mother and a goldsmith father.
He listed some of them as becoming a prisoner of conscience of the Yakubu Gowon junta in 1972 at the age of 22; getting married in 1976 at the age of 26; becoming the youngest ever press secretary to a state governor at 29, and returning to government after 40 years in 2019 to become a governor’s special adviser on chieftaincy matters.
Beyond these and more, which he said will be unveiled in his coming book, he said he has enjoyed uncommon grace of God that keeps confounding his friends and foes in journalism and politics.
“I cannot be luckier,” he said.