YEKINI: How Abacha, team-mates contributed to Yekini’s demise

Hello Friends!

 

Not many know about the humble beginning of the naïve boy from Ira in Kwara State of Nigeria. Some versions have it that he was just a car spray painter while another version says he was a corner street vulcaniser, helping to repair punctured tyres of vehicles in Kaduna.

What most later found out was that he played in the Nigerian league for United Nigeria Textile Limited, UNTL Football Club of Kaduna between 1981 and 1982 from where he joined Shooting Stars of Ibadan. It may have been at Shooting Stars, fondly called Up sootin by its fans, that Yekini was spotted by Chief Adegboye Onigbinde who drafted him into the then Green Eagles squad preparaing for the 1984 Africa Nations Cup in Cote d’Ivoire.

He did not feature prominently in that squad which lost 1-3 to Cameroon in the final. He was again in the Eagles squad for the Maroc ’88 edition but like in ’84, Yekini was still learning the ropes from his more senior colleagues and did not ‘shine’ much.

His climb to glory began in a fast pace at the 1990 and 1992 editions of the Nations Cup in Algeria and Senegal where the Eagles bagged silver and bronze respectively, of course courtesy of Yekini’s goalscoring prowess which had blossomed.

Nigeria had never qualified for the World Cup but Super Eagles coach, Clemens Westerhof who came in after the 1990 ticket loss to Cameroon saw the potential in Yekini and thus built his team around the six footer who fans gave the sobriquet, ‘gangling’.

On the way to qualifying for the 1994 World Cup, the Eagles had a crucial match against rivals, Cote d’Ivoire in 1993 at their popular Houephet Boigny Stadium in Abidjan and Westerhof banked on a win or at most a draw from the encounter.

Early in that match, the Eagles had a begging chance with Yekini positioned to finish up the Eagles’ build-up but a ‘selfish’ Samson Siasia turned away from Yekini, prefering to go solo and in the process blew the chance even after the Ivorian players had given up on an imminent Nigerian goal. Westerhof was furious and was almost leaving out Siasia from his squad.

The setback did not deter Yekini nor the entire team as they fought doggedly to qualify for their first World Cup in front of the Algerian fans in the last match of the qualifiers.

The entire team were eulogised but Yekini, through whom most of the vital goals came, was the real hero and his name played on the lips of all, young and old, men and women, including the kids.

So it was also at the 1994 Africa Nations in Tunisia. The Eagles were considered favourites alongside host Tunisia, following their form in the World Cup qualifiers. Names like Sunday Oliseh, Finidi George, Daniel Amokachi and of course Yekini played on the lips of Tunisians, more than their own players.

This is because they feared that the Eagles were the real dangers who could prevent them from joining the winners of the diadem which they have never won before then, even as host in 1965.

The Tunisians didn’t meet the Eagles before they were sent packing after the first round of matches. From then their loyalty shifted to the Eagles and the chants from them either in taxis, from their home balconies or walking on the streets were, ‘Nigeria, coupe de Afrique’, which those of us sports journalists covering the competition later found out meant, ‘Nigeria for the Cup or Champions of Africa’.

Everywhere we went, Tunisians wanted to pose for photographs with us. At a shop, one Tunisian even mistook one of us, Kola Bakare, who was with the Herald of Ilorin then, for Yekini.

They even believed more because Kola was a Muslim like Yekini and responded well to their Arabic greetings. The shoe seller who later found out that Kola was not Yekini, told us to askYekini to visit his shop to take as many shoes as he wanted as his own package for him for his football prowess.

While all thess lasted and the competition wore on, not many knew the pains Yekini was going through from the behaviour of his team-mates which he thought could derail their set objective in Tunisia, that is, be the first set of Eagles to win the Nations Cup on away soil.

Yekini came into the competition as a hero, after just being crowned African Footballer of the year 1993. He wanted to put an icing on his cake by winning the Nations Cup too. He believed in his team-mates to deliver just like he wanted to do and so felt that total concentration would help their cause.

Among his team-mates, the Ira-born enigma had so much respect for and trust in three, Finidi George, Sunday Oliseh and Emmanuel Amuneke. George for his dribble runs on the wings and almost near perfect crosses into the middle for him to finish up. Oliseh for his long range passes from the middle to wherever he (Yekini) was upfront to chest down and volley into the net.

Amuneke’s asset was his ability to waltz through defenders from the left into the 18 metre box and whenever he hits the brick wall, lays a through pass to Yekini between opponents swarm of legs. He was never selfish like Siasia, Yekini may have thought.

Finidi did it so well in most matches, especially in the 6-0 demolition of Burkina Faso at the National Stadium in Lagos when the Nigeria Football Association, NFA then, had to cut their track suit trousers after an oficial forgot their jerseys at their Obasanjo Farms camp in Otta.

He even perfected it in Tunisia and for this earned a pat on the back from Yekini with the greeting, Omo daadaa, a Yoruba word for good boy.

Like I said earlier, in Tunisia Yekini was not happy with the behaviour of some of his team-mates. The team was divided along three lines, the party freaks, the smoking group and the timid set which some of them believed Yekini led.

The party freaks among them always found a way of sneaking out of camp at night to visit Night clubs to unwind after a day’s hard training sessions which Johannes Bonfrere handled well to the admiration of Westerhof. The smoking group in the company of some sports journalists and Nigerian officials discovered joints where they went to allegedly smoke some raps of cannabis. Yekini, we got to know later allegedly confronted some of them on these, but he was rebuffed.

The team didn’t really have the full control of their skipper, Stephen Keshi, alias Big Boss, who was more or less a non-playing captain nor stand-in captain, Austin Eguavoen, always not wanting to hurt a fly. A group which later turned out a mafia dictated the tune then.

That the Eagles won the Cup after an initial scare from a youthful Zambian side led by Kalusha Bwalya, who missed being killed along his generation of players in an air crash off the coast of Gabon a few months earlier, was by divine providence.

This cold affection among the Eagles was transferred to the USA ’94 World Cup. The camaradarie in the team ended after the first match which the Eagles won 3-0 against Bulgaria. As usual, Finidi was at his best from the wings and predictably Yekini finished up for what turned out a history making performance for the team.

Like it or not, many of his team-mates were shocked that rather than run to his colleagues to celebrate the goal, Yekini ran into the net to celebrate before the camera which showed him around the world.

That was how the conspiracy theory was hatched. The players allegedly decided that Yekini was taking the glory alone for scoring and therefore other players should be placed in vantage positions to score too. Other problems like agitation for upfront match bonuses cropped up and the team was torn apart after they blew their chance to qualify for the quarter finals against the Arigo Sachhi-tutored Italian side.

The team were recalled for their title defence in 1996 after the 1994 World Cup fiasco but Westerhof was no longer in-charge after his 1994 experience of a near players revolt. Keshi had retired and Eguavoen too had been dropped with goalkeeper Peter Rufai assuming captainship of the ‘new’ team.

Yekini had scored a total of 13 Nations Cup goals, one short of the African record of 14 held by Cote d’Ivoire’s Laurent Pokou. As champions, the Eagles looked forward to defend the title in South Africa and Yekini had a mission, to equal and possibly topple Pokou as the all time top scorer in the Africa Nations Cup history.

That was the era of Nigeria’s maximum ruler, late General Sani Abacha who against all good advice hanged world acclaimed writer and social critic, Ken Saro Wiwa along with eight of his kinsmen. Nelson Mandela, then president of the new South Africa, kicked and led the world in condemning the gruesome murder.

This, Abacha would not take and saw the boycott of Nigeria from the Nations Cup in South Africa as the best way to hit back at Mandela. He knew what to do. He invited then Sports Minister, Chief Jim Nwobodo and top shots of the NFA. A handful of Eagles players, among them, the group now fondly referred to as the mafia who had access to Abacha’s Chief Security Officer, Major Hamza Al-Mustafa. Yekini was left out, it was gathered.

To the astonishment of the entire football lovers in the country and Yekini himself, Abacha ordered the Eagles out of the Nations Cup, offering to pay the Eagles what they could have earned as bonuses if the had participated.

Like the Ooni of Ife, Oba Sijuade Okunade said after a meeting of tradional rulers with Abacha over the clamour for MKO Abiola’s electoral mandate in 1993 that the dark-spectacled dictator was “talking sense”, Rufai as Eagles skipper was asked to explain to his colleagues the Head of State’s position on the competition and he told them there was sense in what Abacha wanted them to do, boycott the Nations Cup.

Yekini was crest fallen as his long time dream of making history was dashed on the altar of selfishness and fear on the part of his colleagues and administrators respectively. He was not growing younger and the fact that CAF had also handed Nigeria a two-year ban, meant that he would also miss the 1998 edition scheduled for Burkina Faso.

His participation at the 1998 World Cup was not better as the mafia had gathered more powers from Al-Mustafa who offered them the presidential jet to junket around the country while their mates sweated out at training sessions. They even strolled into the Eagles camp in Morschach, a serene village about 47 km from Zurich in Switzerland and then coach, Bora Milutinovic could not sanction them for fear that he too could be thrown out of the team.

The training they had in Switzerland could best be described as a retreat by fun-seeking spoil-brats because rather than concentrate on their training, the same party group in Tunisia with the Abacha boys found time to play around with girls imported into their camp by a Europe-based Nigerian musician who played a decour on the camp commandant, whose name I’ll keep out of print, by claiming the girls were his band girls.

The effect of this distraction in camp was exposed in the friendly in Amsterdam where the Patrick Kluivert inspired-Dutch team tore the Eagles apart at the Amsterdam Arena, home of Ajax Amsterdam. The defeat not withstanding, some of the players trooped out to town in hired Limousines to party to the chagrin of Nigerian fans, some of whom came all the way from London.

I write all these because I witnessed the mess right from Morschach to Amsterdam and I remember one of the furious fans from London that day who confronted the players at their hotel is a Nigerian football management consultant, Rotmi Pedro.

Though another Nigerian African Footballer of the year, Victor Ikpeba came out to speak on the conspiracy theory in the Eagles camp against Yekini on Supersport the other day, claiming there was nothing of such, he indirectly averred to its existence when he affirmed that some players felt Yekini took all the glory of his scoring prowess alone to himself.

I make bold to say that prior to the World Cup in France as the Eagles departed Amsterdam for Paris, Ikpeba almost created a scene at the Schipol airport, complaining to then NFA chairman, Col Abdulmumuni Aminu that there were some favoured players in the team who broke camp rules and even arrived late to camp and weren’t sanctioned, stressing that it was going to count against the team at the World Cup. And it did count as the Eagles were bundled out after a disasterous 4-0 spanking in the hands of Denmark. That result poured cold water on their scintillating 3-2 defeat of Spain in their first match.

Yekini witnessed all these and as a conservative among them was pained inwardly even though he couldn’t voice his anger like Ikpeba did. And so by the time Nigeria served out her ban and co-hosted the Nations Cup with Ghana in 2000, Yekini had lost his spark and potency in front of goal and in fact was no longer part of the Eagles squad.

He then withdrew into his cocoon and had little to do with the Nigerian system or his team-mates, except of course goalkeeper Ike Shorounmu, who like Yekini was level headed, a teetotaler as well as a neighbour in Ibadan.

For those who said Yekini’s team-mates never ganged up against him because of the claim that he took all the glory, one time Super Eagles goalkeeper trainer, Amusa Adisa confirms that Yekini told his friends and associates it was true.

According to Adisa, even when the late footballer told them his feelings, they tried to disabuse his mind from the thoughts which they felt could kill his morale, he stood his ground, stressing that, “he doesn’t want to have anything to do with Nigerian football for the fact that his team-mates and some other people were envious of him and were not happy about his success in the team.

Scoring goals was the bane as they ganged-up against him saying he was having the glory alone. Since then, he refused to come close to football activities. We tried as much as we could to bring him back during the (2010) World Cup but he refused. Then, we were trying to disabuse his mind from these thoughts but he was not getting along with us and that was where the problem started.”

Agreed Yekini didn’t have a stable marriage, was allegedly duped by a business associate, the fact that he felt betrayed by some of his team-mates and was ignored by even those who are supposedly in-charge of football in the country, made him withdraw from the public.

The lonely life he led could have affected him mentally, a situation that eventually degenerated until the worst happened on Friday, May, 4, 2011. Yekini was ignored by all, like the Speaker of the Lagos State House of Assembly, Adeyemi Ikuforiji said during the week.

May be if the country, the football authorities, his team-mates and friends were there for him, involving him in activities, may be he would have been alive today. If the country had celebrated him while he was alive, may be the worst wouldn’t have happened.

Despite his educational shortcomings, Yekini could express himself. He was a bigger football ambassador and could have been welcomed around the world helping to promote Nigerian football.

Culled from The Vanguard.

xoxo

Simply Cheska...