Divinely and dutifully, the Doyen goes home

August 10, 2025 by Tatalo Alamu

She was the perfect embodiment of steeliness and stateliness. Her slight frame belies the iron infrastructure. She did not suffer fools gladly and fools gladly avoided her. Political correctness if only for the sake of avoiding conflict was not her forte. Let conflict avoid her. The lady was not for turning. But on Tuesday evening, five months into her eighty second year on earth, the lady finally turned to meet her maker in a gesture of steely compliance. There goes our dear friend and doyen of intellectual journalism in Nigeria, Doyinsola Abiola, wife of the late business mogul and martyred president of Nigeria, Mashood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola.

 Snooper mourns a personal friend and a friend of the column. She was a rugged pioneer in the field of intellectual journalism, a remarkable phase which as the name implies moved journalism away from being a recruiting den of deadwood and the flotsam and jetsam of the society to a glittering parade of the best and the brightest of the profession. Fiercely determined, strong-willed and impressively credentialed, nothing could have stopped the young woman from reaching the top of her chosen profession. Educated in the best schools both at home and abroad, there was something reassuring and refreshing about her self-confidence and the lucidity of writing and self-expression. In her prime and up till the point she succumbed to frailty of health, she was always bubbling with ideas and fresh projects. Little wonder that she shot through the ranks of the profession like a meteor, becoming a much sought after Features Editor and later a full editor of a newspaper, arguably the first in the profession, and later as the Managing Director of the whole publishing conglomerate. In all this, she excelled in her capacity for brilliant innovation, for dutiful mentoring of the younger generation and for technical trail-blazing the like of which had not been seen in the country before. More importantly, she led from the front in times of danger and dark scheming like a first class warrior and granddaughter of an illustrious generalissimo of the redoubtable Egba people, Balogun Aboaba.

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   Despite her professional accomplishments and glittering reputation as a newspaper administrator and first class editorialist and features writer, it was perhaps on the home front that this remarkable woman recorded her greatest achievement, as devoted and dutiful wife of MKO Abiola and as an unfailing intellectual consort to the man who would be president at arguably at the most turbulent period of Nigeria’s post civil war history. Home was a front indeed. Coming from a Christian and monogamous background, and from the cloistered ambience of doting parents, nothing could have prepared the young lady for the chaotic disorder of Abiola’s freewheeling liaisons and relentless pursuits of fresh game. But she bore it all often with a calm bemusement and sometimes with a vexed irritability which cut no ice with the games master. Abiola once famously noted of Margaret Thatcher that for every iron lady, there is an iron bender somewhere. The Gbagura chief was also a man of monumental fortitude and gutsiness which provided a perfect foil for her sophisticated sniffing and upper class nitpicking.

   The collaboration worked very well, providing a cerebral armature for Abiola’s worldly pursuits particularly his assault on the Nigerian military presidency. While providing intellectual cover for the Egba magnate, his more cerebral wife sought to impose some order on the life style of a man who was more intelligent than intellectual. Sometimes, it worked but most times it was the politically savvy sorties of the street smart merchant that prevailed. Doyin once told the columnist that each time she berated Abiola for the unwholesomeness of some of his associations and his tendency to parley with criminal-minded ruffians and ragamuffin, —awon asinwin ati asinde—he would retort that you must be ready to spend a lot on lies before you can buy some truths. It was a friendship of two endowed but temperamentally dissimilar people made in heaven. May Hamidat Doyinsola rest in perfect peace.