By BAMIDELE JOHNSON
While having a lazy Sunday morning four years ago, I got a call from Onoruwo ibn Ambali of Okeliwo AKA Wale Adedayo. He sounded urgent. Very urgent. “Ogbologbo, nibo lo wa?” he asked. Home. In bed. “Ipata, o kuku ni lo si church,” he said, mocking my well-established church avoidance. The levity lowered my guard. I had thought something serious had happened.
“Are you calling from the pulpit?” I asked, returning levity for levity. He wanted me in Ojota in an hour. He had sent garri from Ijebu through a bus driver and needed me to pick it up. Driving was not an aspiration that morning, so I told him to have the driver take it to his Lagos home in Olowoora. I would pick it up at my convenience. “Send your home address,” he said. I did.
About two and a half hours later, the security man at the entrance of my close called. Someone was asking for me. It was a driver Onoruwo had sent with the garri. Half a bag of premium-grade Ijebu garri. Almost snow-white. Not a fleck of dirt. It also had, very importantly, that aggressive tang that blossoms best in very cold water. I am a garri connoisseur. I know the good stuff when I see it. I called to thank him, but told him it was too much. We had just bought garri the previous week. I do not have a brood. I do not have a parallel family. I do not have multiple wives. I am not like Ado Doguwa of the House of Reps with four wives and 28 children (as at 2022). I ended up giving much of the garri out.
The white substance trafficking would continue. Na garri o before you go think say na cocaine. Less than a month later, another Sunday morning, he called again to ask where I was. He should know by now. Home. About three hours later, a man called to say he was at gate of my close with something from “Shairman” in Ijebu. I knew who Shairman was. Oruwo was the Chairman of Ijebu East LGA at the time. I call him My Shiar, Onoruwo, the gap-toothed journalist for his toll gate-wide diastema or Ewele of Onitsha.
I asked the driver to hand the phone to the security man so he could be let in. To my astonishment, it was a full bag of a substance suspected to be garri, as the police would say. I had been expecting fish from Epe, which he had promised more than a dozen times. I called him immediately, not to thank him. I asked, quite muscularly, if he was nuts. “Am I setting up a ‘food is ready’ business or why am I getting a full bag of garri weeks after half a bag?” I added that he had no sense of proportion. He did not care. He simply changed the subject.
Classic Onoruwo, a living, breathing plot twist. In a world of curated personalities, he is gloriously unscripted. You never quite know what he will say or do next, but it will arrive with conviction (even if loopy), confidence and just enough mischief to keep life interesting.
Each time he has visited me at home has been at a notice shorter than an olosho’s skirt. He would call to ask if I was home, ask again for the address and in a little over half an hour, show up, sat at the owner’s corner of an okada and wearing jalabiya, a sartorial identity of his faith before he was seized by Ayelala.
Another time, he video-called me from Okeliwo, in the company of Olusiji Oyesile, AKA Ologbo Ijeun, who had travelled from Lagos. On his return, Ologbo came bearing a bag of garri from Onoruwo. I did not thank him. I accused him of attempting to build a cenotaph with garri. At some point, we should have renamed him Garri Lineker, Garrincha or Garri Kasparov. He was prolific.
In 2011, when he was in the UK, I asked him to buy me the CD of Millie Jackson’s Caught Up/Still Caught Up. Of course, he had no idea who she was. I doubt he has a musical taste, the cave man. He said he would buy it. He returned without it, but assured me he had ordered it and it would arrive in 10 days. It did, delivered to my office. I was delighted.
Still, if you need a man you can rely on to be unreliable, Oruwo is your man. The archives are thick. For a starter pack, consult Mojeed Jamiu, Sanya Onayoade and Olumide Iyanda. They could produce a three-volume anthology of the flexibility of his promise-keeping, opening with a party that never was. Ologbo Ijeun was also a victim, in a different way. He trusted Oruwo too much. Once, as narrated by ibn Ambali himself and corroborated by the victim, Ologbo was invited to breakfast at a gutterside mama put, the kind that gets Tokunbo Wahab fizzing with ire. I mean the type with benches beside a gutter clogged to a standstill by plastic bottles of Orijin, Action Bitters, sachets of Fenu Ja and pure water. A housefly paradise, let us say.
They ate, astonishingly without revulsion. Afterwards, Oruwo stood gidigba like First Bank. His intestines are forged from iron filings. Ologbo, meanwhile, spent three days and three nights in a hospital for explosive dysentery. By ibn Ambali’s account, his cheeks had collapsed like the empty IV bags hanging off his arms. Trust Oruwo at your own peril.
But even then, at 60, Onoruwo has achieved what many only aspire to. He has become a fully certified, uncompromisingly original human being. He is not eccentric. That is too tame a word. He is a full loony system upgrade; a top-tier nutcase. A man who has spent six decades perfecting the art of doing things his own way, whether or not the rest of us approve. That art includes making promises that go unfulfilled quicker than a G-string falls off a stripper.
Oruwo is just different; the kinda guy who starts an argument at point A and, with athletic ease, lands somewhere around Q without acknowledging the alphabets in between. At 60, most people slow down. Oruwo will not. He cannot. He is unable, unwilling and unready. He will not rebrand. He will not adjust. He will not suddenly discover age-appropriate behaviour.
What a gift that is.
So, I celebrate his 60 years of singularity. He did not think he would live this long. His father died before 50. But here he is, a man who, at age five, travelled from Idi Oro to Obalende unaccompanied. Omo Esu tokan tokan, Ajilarinrin of Okeliwo, emi e a se pupo l’ola Ejiogbe, l’ola kum faya kum ati l’ola Jesu. Coming at you from multiple spiritual angles feels the most appropriate thing to do. You are, after all, a religious transvestite.
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Good habits are not accidental
