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he precarious state of the country’s security was yet again underscored when, last Sunday, February 9, one of our country’s sports icons, ex-international football star, my friend ‘the Mathematical’ Segun Odegbami, was shot at by suspected armed robbers on the Abeokuta-Lagos dual carriageway. That he escaped the barrage of shots from close range is a ‘miracle’.
It was a deadly experience in all its horrifying bloodcurdling detail. ‘Big Seg’, as he is fondly called, was heading out from Abeokuta to his International (Sports) Academy in Wasimi village en-route for Lagos. Time was about 3pm on the Sunday afternoon, with traffic yet relatively light. He was alone, driving at leisurely speed in his big SUV, with thoughts of the start of a new week – the challenges and plans – on his mind. He was some 8 kilometres to Wasimi, 70 to Lagos.
Then, suddenly, a car with four or five occupants came beside his jeep and slowly overtook him. The next thing Odegbami knew, one of the men in the car now ahead stuck his head out of the rear window threateningly brandishing a gun. At that moment, reality dawned on Segun that he was facing death. On the spur of the moment he accelerated his SUV to manoeuvre between the concrete median and their vehicle and race past them. In the process, one of his front wheels hit the concrete so hard it burst loudly, his SUV hitting the bandits’ car as it careened past.
Thereupon the bandits opened fire as they chased after him. Bullets flew everywhere hitting his car many times and shattering the window glasses, side and back. Odegbami kept on knowing he was perhaps on his last minutes on earth and mindless of the wobbling of his car from the damaged wheel but praying for a gap in the stretch. One soon appeared, and in a split-second he swung his car in a U-turn, “mathematically” gauging, but barely being missed by, oncoming vehicles from the opposite direction. It caught the bandits too unexpectedly as they sped past.
It was a shivering wreck Odegbami who thence carried on until he found a side-road he could pull in to; he knew his bullet-riddled car had obliged so far and no more. He staggered back to the highway to wave down anyone for a rescue lift to the nearest police station. Soon enough, God sent someone, some “Good Samaritan”.
“These are bullet holes from an AK-47,” said the police when they saw Segun’s SUV. “Go get yourself drunk, or bury yourself in a church,” they told him. “It’s a miracle you are alive.” An anti-robbery squad officer said that corridor of the road – about Obasanjo Farm, Akinale, Osuposi villages – was becoming notorious for car snatching by cross-boarder highway robbers.
What thoughts have occupied Chief SegunOdegbami’s mind since the near-death encounter is anyone’s guess. He could be dead now and that would have been it: his life; his school; his sundry philanthropic gestures to needy people; his unflinching faith in and contribution to Nigeria; his friends of whom I number one; his family, including his aged mother; et cetera, et cetera.
That would have been it; a country that kills his young and brightest would have killed Chief Segun Odegbami. The crying state of insecurity in the land would have claimed “the Mathematical.” We are grateful he his alive to tell the story and carry on with his good works in what is left of his borrowed time. What a country!
Courtesy Tunde Fagbenle column in Punch
