Odegbami releases rare evergreen footage on Nigerian sports

By Olu Akosile

Football maestro, Segun Odegbami has released rare pictures of Nigerian footbal events dating back to three decades. The Epic also included special interview with Chief MKO Abiola granted around 1991.

In a piece obtained by Irohinoodua, Odegbami said he had to release the intellectual property once kept in his archive for posterity sake.

Odegbami wrote "Yesterday, I sat in my studio previewing some recovered film footages from my diminished archives. Diminished because I found, unfortunately, that a lot of my film materials, still untransferred digitally, have become corrupted and may not be recoverable again.

That means lost history.

I needed to have kept the invaluable materials in a permanently cool environment in the past 28 years that I have been recording, acquiring and keeping them.

In Nigeria, that has been an almost impossible task with the no-power situation in the country and the astronomical cost of providing independent power.

Anyway, I have managed to rescue some and one of them that I saw is an exclusive interview I had with Chief MKO Abiola in either 1991 or 1992 shot by Tunde Kelani, in MKO's residence in Ikeja.

It was almost immediately after he was honoured with the Pillar of Sports in Africa award in Dakar, Senegal. He was 54 at the time, had dreshly disbanded his Abiola Babes Football Club, and was still undecided whether to contest for political office or not.

I was mesmerized by the prophetic words expressed in that conversation, particularly at the very end, after the official interview had ended, and TK had kept his camera rolling.

In one unguarded minute, MKO candidly summed up his thoughts about politics, the future and the country.

It was vintage MKO, garnishing his responses on sports, business and politics with idioms and original proverbs.

I have decided to upload the entire interview, all 24 minutes of it, but broken into 4 parts of between 4 and 6 minutes each, onto my new website.

By the way, the site is interestingly growing bigger by the day as I browse through tons of materials that I think would inform, entertain and enlighten readers of my humble writings. I shall be doing a lot of uploading from today.

I am supposed to start my daily diary on AFCON 2019 today. Unfortunately, I am still stuck in Nigeria. My international passport, sent 2 days before the drop-box system was suspended by the US embassy on May 10, is still with the embassy. I wanted to renew my US visa on May 8th, something that used to take about one week. Now, it's almost 6 weeks and there has been no word from the embassy.
Without it I have been unable to process my trip to Egypt. So, fingers crossed I may still join the Nations Cup train and publish a daily diary on the championship.

I am contemplating using technology to still attempt to do the AFCON daily diary. We shall see.

At the same time, I am aware many people are still waiting for the conclusion of my political diary series, the closing chapter of my political oddysey.

Yesterday also, inspired by MKO Biola's words, I have started writing the final chapter.

All these things will be uploaded onto my new web site.

If you have not been to the site, or even if you have, create the time to go and check it out. A lot of videos are now being uploaded.

These are unbelievable pictures of almost 30 years of Nigerian sports, people, events and places.

I am done now.