FACTFILE with Lanre Alfred
Yes, one can understand why a man under siege would talk too much. Pressure has a way of loosening the tongue; sometimes, in the desperate search for vindication, a man begins to spend not only his own secrets but other people’s discretion.
That, I fear, is the curious mistake Prophet Itunu Onadeko made while attempting to explain himself amid the controversy surrounding the death of his late fiancée, actress Temitope Osoba.
His revelation that Globacom Chairman, Dr. Mike Adenuga, had offered the late actress a cheque while she battled cancer did little to clarify the questions surrounding her final days. Instead, it enlarged the conversation, supplying another tantalising detail for entertainers, gossip merchants and social media commentators to obsess over.
The questions surrounding Tope Osoba’s final days are already uncomfortable enough. There have been claims and counterclaims about money raised for her cancer treatment, questions over who controlled what, rumours about what happened shortly before her death, and Onadeko’s extraordinary account that he learnt, around midnight, from an unidentified caller that his fiancée had died at a police station in Ikorodu, Lagos.
Onadeko says he subsequently went to a nearby police station to report himself. He has also rejected suggestions that she died from cancer complications, that she was poisoned or that she was maltreated. All of that is combustible enough. Then, somewhere in the middle of trying to put out the fire, the prophet reached for the name of Mike Adenuga.
Why?That is the part I find difficult to understand.Onadeko was answering allegations about himself. He was defending himself against claims concerning money raised for Tope’s treatment. He was explaining the church, its finances and the chronology of its construction. He was insisting that money raised for the actress’s surgery was not paid into his account.
All perfectly legitimate territory for a man defending his reputation. But then he volunteered that “people gave her money including Mike Adenuga who offered her a cheque.”
And there it was.A name that had no reason to enter the room was suddenly sitting at the table.
If you know anything about the way Dr. Adenuga has traditionally conducted himself, you begin to wonder whether Onadeko understood the peculiar weight of what he had just disclosed.
Adenuga is not one of those Nigerian billionaires who appears to require every act of kindness to be converted into a ceremonial photograph. There is an entire culture among the wealthy in which philanthropy increasingly resembles an extension of public relations: the cheque, beneficiary, photographer and caption all arriving together, as though generosity itself requires a press kit.
Give somebody a scholarship and there must be a photograph. Build something for a community and there must be a plaque large enough to identify the donor from a moving vehicle. Pay somebody’s medical bill and, somehow, the story eventually finds its way onto social media.
Adenuga has generally operated with considerably less noise.His businesses are enormous enough to make him permanently newsworthy. His wealth has acquired its own mythology. His footprints in telecommunications, oil and other sectors are substantial enough that his name does not require a charity photograph to establish its significance.
He can afford that increasingly rare luxury: doing something good without standing beside it while the public applauds.Indeed, there are wealthy men who might be offended if you forgot to mention their donation.Adenuga does not belong to that school. Read that again!
His name carries sufficient weight without somebody having to remind us that he once offered a cheque to an actress battling cancer.
In fact, the more interesting thing about the reported gesture is precisely its apparent lack of publicity.That is what makes it human.
And that is precisely why I believe his name should have been left out of this quarrel.
If Adenuga helped Tope, he helped Tope. The beauty of such an intervention lies partly in the fact that it apparently required no audience.
A cheque offered to somebody fighting cancer is an intimate act of human concern. Once it is dragged into an argument involving allegations, rumours and reputational damage, however, the nature of the gesture changes.
Suddenly, questions begin to multiply. How much was the cheque? When was it offered? Who received it? Was it paid directly to Tope? Was it connected to the money raised publicly? Was it cashed? What became of it?
Questions that may never have arisen suddenly become irresistible because somebody has opened a door that perhaps ought to have remained closed. A private act of assistance, which might otherwise have remained between benefactor and beneficiary, becomes another parcel of public speculation.
For what? To strengthen a defence that could have been made without it?
That is what does not sit comfortably with me.
If the allegation is that Onadeko had access to treatment funds, the answer lies in financial records. If someone alleges that money raised for Tope was diverted, produce the accounts. If the claim is that church construction was funded from her treatment money, establish when the church was built, roofed and painted, and identify the sources of funding. If people are asking what happened during Tope’s final hours, provide the clearest possible chronology supported by credible evidence.
Those are answers. Mike Adenuga’s name is not an answer to any of them. It is simply a name—and, in this particular argument, an unnecessary one.Perhaps the episode reflects something larger: that strange Nigerian hunger to announce other people’s kindness. We have become slightly vulgar about generosity. We have developed an appetite for broadcasting the good deeds of wealthy people almost as enthusiastically as we broadcast their scandals.
Everybody wants to know who gave what to whom. Everybody wants to know the amount. Everybody wants the photograph, the handshake and the benefactor’s name somewhere in the frame.There is almost a social expectation that charity must be witnessed before it can be believed.But there is another school of giving, and it has always existed among people secure enough in themselves not to require applause.
You help because somebody needs help.
You do not particularly care whether the newspapers know. You do not require the beneficiary to become a walking billboard for your benevolence. You do not need strangers on Instagram to certify that you possess a heart.
That is the old-fashioned dignity of private philanthropy. And Adenuga, despite all the mythology surrounding his wealth and business empire, has long maintained a comparatively low public profile.
He is hardly the Nigerian billionaire who wakes up every morning wondering how to become more visible.That makes Onadeko’s disclosure even more curious.Imagine possessing the means to help quietly, doing precisely that, and then discovering that your name has been introduced into a public quarrel because somebody needed another example to establish that financial assistance had reached a woman battling a terrible illness.
It is an odd kind of publicity. The benefactor apparently did not seek it. Yet here we are.
There is a lesson here for anyone caught in controversy: desperation can make people indiscreet. When pressure rises, the temptation is to empty the cupboard. Names, conversations, telephone calls, private gestures, favours and confidences begin tumbling out, each one offered in the hope that something—anything—will rescue the speaker from the accusation presently standing at his door.
But even a man defending himself has a responsibility to distinguish between information that belongs to him and information entrusted to circumstance.Not every good deed requires witnesses. Not every benefactor needs to be summoned into the public square for applause.
Adenuga’s name, in this particular affair, should therefore have remained where it apparently began: outside the noise.
There are already enough questions surrounding Tope Osoba’s death, enough competing accounts of her final days and enough controversy around money reportedly raised during her illness. Those questions deserve facts, records and credible testimony. They do not need an unnecessary subplot because a private act of generosity was volunteered during somebody else’s defence.
If Onadeko wants to clear his name, he should clear it with evidence. If he wants to establish that Tope received assistance from several people, he can say so without turning individual benefactors into characters in his defence.
And if he wants to tell the story of the woman he loved, he should remember that there is a difference between telling her story and revealing everything that happened around her. Adenuga’s reported kindness was his gesture, made to Tope at an exceptionally vulnerable moment. Whatever satisfaction, prayer or blessing accompanied it deserved to remain untouched by the quarrel that followed her death.
Onadeko could simply have said that several people supported Tope. He might even have said prominent Nigerians came to her aid.
Why name Adenuga?Once you name a man like Adenuga, you do more than establish that he was generous. You place him inside the narrative. You make him a character in a story he may never have agreed to join. And the tragedy is that Tope Osoba’s own story is compelling enough without borrowing the aura of a billionaire.
She publicly confronted breast cancer, underwent treatment and surgery, and later spoke about returning to public life, presenting the experience as part of a journey of healing and personal transformation.
Then she died at 40, and accounts surrounding her final hours became contested. That story requires sensitivity, clarity and, above all, truth.
Amid all of this, however, the question of who privately helped Tope financially should not become another playground for indiscriminate disclosure—particularly where a benefactor apparently chose to assist without making a spectacle of it.That, ultimately, is what troubles me about the Adenuga revelation.
Already, some may wonder whether such disclosures could make wealthy benefactors more guarded the next time a genuine case of hardship reaches them. That would be an unfortunate aftertaste to an otherwise compassionate gesture.
But Adenuga is unlikely to be so easily discouraged. He has been around long enough, and has reportedly helped enough people in his own way, for one indiscreet disclosure to alter whatever instinct has guided his philanthropy through the years. Helping appears, in his case, less a performance than a habit of character—something done because that is how he has chosen to move through the world.
There is a profound difference between those two things. A man who gives only when cameras are present is purchasing publicity. A man who can give when nobody is watching is operating from somewhere deeper.
Adenuga’s public reputation for philanthropy has long carried the impression of the latter. One awkward disclosure is unlikely to rewrite that instinct.If anything useful can emerge from this episode, perhaps it is a renewed appreciation of the privilege that accompanies quiet assistance. When someone helps without demanding that his name be engraved upon the gesture, the proper response is not to make his kindness pay the price for somebody else’s controversy.
Some gifts come with plaques. Some arrive with photographers.Some are announced from podiums beneath giant banners bearing the donor’s face.And then there are those acts of kindness that enter quietly through the back door of another human being’s suffering, do what they can, and leave without asking the world to notice.Perhaps those are the ones we should protect most fiercely.
Adenuga, I suspect, will carry on as he always has. Somewhere, there will be another medical bill larger than a frightened family can afford; another young person whose future requires a helping hand; another worthy cause that quietly finds its way to his attention. He will help where he wishes to help—perhaps quietly, perhaps substantially, and without requiring the public to clap.
Yes, but there is something the rest of us might learn from this episode.Generosity has its dignity.
So does silence. And sometimes, the greatest respect we can pay another person’s kindness is simply to know when not to mention his name.
Which brings me back to the question with which all of this began: Why drag Mike Adenuga into this?