Eagle7: Segun Odegbami Tell the Story of His Revolutionary Sports Radio Station
You are into many things including sports, education and consultancy, to mention a few. How do you muster the energy to engage in so many ventures?
I have to do things to survive. I have to work to eat. I have to live. I have to be engaged. And the only thing I can do to engage gainfully is to do the things I know about, the things I’m passionate about, so that I don’t get fed up. The things you have listed are just part and parcel of my life. They are the things that make me survive. I earn a living writing sports. I fulfill my obligation to humanity by running the school, and now I’m embarking on a project that I wanted to do many years ago but never happened until now. It is just part and parcel of daily life for me. I don’t need to get energy from anywhere; it is just part of my daily routine.
What really brought about the idea of your new project: a radio station?
It was the opportunity 20 years ago when the federal government liberalised the ownership of broadcast houses and advertised that those who were interested should secure radio and television licenses. That was when I did. I applied for the radio licence. My friend, Danladi Bako, was in charge. He was the Director- General of the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), so I went to him in Abuja. I was supposed to be part of the second batch of licencees. I told him that I had applied and he told me clearly that it was not possible for me to get a licence because I was seeking the licence for Lagos. There was no frequency for Lagos at the time. There was no way I could get a licence. He made it clear.
And after that, I had the other chairmen of the NBC. Bolarinwa, who was my school mate, when he became the chairman, I went there again thinking that these were my friends. He was also categorical that they were not giving anybody licence in Lagos. Despite all my protestations, it never happened throughout the time he was there. So, that was what I faced.
I was angry deep down because people were getting licences everywhere but they never gave me one. I just accepted it as part of my fate till another friend, Kawu Moddibo, again became the director-general, and I pressured him. He too was looking for licence before he became the DG. So, when he became the chairman, I thought it was going to be automatic, but I found that it was not going to be. Until the tail end of his tenure, I still kept in touch with him.
I almost blackmailed him when there was a big conference of broadcasters in Abuja and I was invited to come there. I saw all my friends in broadcasting, including Ambassador Yusuff Mamman. I complained to everybody: ‘How could you people treat me like this? It is me now. All I want is a radio licence.’ For 18 years, they couldn’t give me.
He couldn’t believe it. Danladi Bako, Bolarinwa, all the people who didn’t approve it were all there. I think he must have thought about it that it was unfair. I even told him that I was willing if the station could be changed to Abeokuta, if Lagos was the problem. There was
only one sports radio station in the whole country then. He was the one that influenced it.
I got the licence after 18 years of waiting. I got it less than two years ago. Since then, I have been working to actualise it to set up the radio station. I’m not a financially rich person. I can’t afford tens or hundreds of millions of naira one needed to set up a radio station from the scratch, so I had to get some few friends to join hands with me so that we do it together. That is it.
What next now that you have the licence?
We are on an adventure to take radio station to where it has never been before. We want to make this radio station do what any radio station has never done before. There is new technology. With the technology you can achieve what you have never dreamt about before. We are on that trajectory right now. I don’t know where it will take us.
Definitely, we are exploring all new areas in digital broadcasting. We are getting the best production equipment, best broadcast equipment and now we want to add best broadcast content so that people would hear a radio station that they can also visualise.
In one year’s time, the world will know about Eagles 7 Sports Radio that is different, that is fantastic, that is the global radio station only located in Abeokuta which is the new emerging rural urban city.
You said you don’t have the money to procure equipment. One would think that with your personality, you could get things done more easily, particularly with your closeness to people like Otunba Mike Adenuga, the owner of Globacom…
Most people know me. I also know a lot of people. We had interacted in the course of life. Like Otunba Adenuga, he is my brother. We know each other. But we haven’t spoken to each other for some years because nothing has actually brought us together either socially or politically. I don’t have access to just call him and just speak with him.
When I worked for him for about a year, we were almost on a daily basis having conversations. That was work as a consultant. These people who have money and resources don’t just take their money and invest in another person’s ideas or businesses. They are running their own businesses. He is into telecoms, oil and banking.
They wouldn’t invest in my business. My business is too small. What I need to run a radio station is change money; the money he uses as change every day. Me I have to work and work, look for friends, do like ten different jobs to earn small, small monies. Nobody gives away their money, no matter how rich they are. Dangote will not just come and say, ‘Segun, because you are a nice guy, take, go and do your business.’ Even though they know me, we are not in that kind of relationship.
A few friends that have come to join me, I have invited them to see what I want to do, and I want them to be part of building this, because it is going to be profit making and they are going to benefit from it too in small small ways. It is not big money. As a matter of fact, one who is a shareholder, the moment he heard that I had got the licence and I put it on one of my write-ups, he just got in touch with me immediately and said, ‘Oh Segun, this is wonderful. I’m giving you for free five million naira for you to take and support what you are doing.’ I couldn’t believe it.
We had only ever met once in the home of the Sultan of Sokoto when he came to Lagos. He is a well known Nigerian. He just said I will give you five million; just tell me where to pay. I shed tears because that was the first person that would ever do such a thing for me. I didn’t ask for anything. He just saw that I had a licence and he was giving me five million naira to support it. Nobody else has done that but he did it. I said okay sir, thank you very much. But for whatever it was worth, I said let’s covert this five million naira into some shares in the company I’m going to set up. He said no, I said no sir. I said don’t even do it because five million naira is nothing to you. I said you have even given me an idea, put it in the name of one of your children. It won’t be long I will go. We pray for long life, the business will go on. Let our children benefit from it because it is not a now project alone; it is going to go on for so many years. Let our children be the ones to inherit this.
He said Segun, that is beautiful. I now went, brought a business consultant to fashion out for me an ownership plan where I would involve a few of my friends in the business so that they could also bring in their children, because the money to invest is so small that if we put their big, big names there…it is better we put our children. They agreed. A few people that have joined me and they have made contributions. I didn’t want a lot of money that would become a burden to anybody. I have been managing using a lot of goodwill.
I managed and we have managed, with the help of friends, to put this together. So this model radio and TV, because part of this innovation is that it is not just audio you will be hearing in your car, you are watching on your phone and very soon we are going to get terrestrial TV licence. That makes it exciting.
There are things we want to achieve with this. I got help from so many people and I must mention Baba Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. He has been of immense help. He was God sent. I’m not talking about money. At times there are so many things people do that money cannot buy. He is my father here in Abeokuta. I didn’t know he would go to such extent just to make sure that my dream of modern radio station comes into being.
What were the initial challenges you faced at the beginning of this project?
COVID-19. I got a licence in March 2020. That was the month COVID-19 struck, and we are still not out of it. I have not been working. I lost all my consultancies. I was a consultant to some organisations. These organisations were going through economic problems because of Covid.
For the past two years, I have not been working and I have not had the resources to do much, but I have just been managing. This was my biggest challenge. But rather than see it as a hindrance, I had to think outside the box and work with the challenge COVID-19 brought with it to still solve problems that came with it. I couldn’t wait till after COVID-19. You would wait forever.
Even with COVID-19, I was still doing things. But it slowed things down a great deal. The radio station could have started a year ago, but COVID-19 slowed it down. COVID-19, coupled with the fact that I wanted to use a mast that was in my village, because the location of the radio station was supposed to be in my Wasinmi village. I wanted to put the mast, which would have been the biggest structure in Wasinmi, but I found that there was an existing mast in Wasinmi. I said, ‘Ah, this is God-sent. I went to find out the ownership of the mast and I found that it is owned by the Ogun State Government. It is an abandoned old technology mast. Nobody uses that mast anymore. I got some engineers to help me look at the integrity of the mast; they said it had height but we would still need to do a lot of work.
It is in my village. The place had been abandoned for 40 years. The inside was the home of reptiles. The small structure there had been interwoven with trees. It was terrible, but it was in my village. If it is something we can fix, it becomes one of the vehicles for social development; for social engagement. I was excited. It has taken almost two years, for some reasons I don’t know, my government would not give it to me, would not lease it to me and it is dragging and dragging. I felt maybe there is something there I did not know, because it is abandoned and they will never use it. I said I better seek my fortune somewhere else. That was another challenge. But it was just a challenge. I know they must have their reasons.
We give God all the glory because I have seen another mast, and in the next one month, our radio station will be on air. The station is not a local station. The content is not local; it is a global sports station. It will be located in Abeokuta. Its focus will be Afrocentric. We are not going to have a word of politics. We are not going to promote religion.
I have known you since I was a little boy, and only a few things have changed about your appearance. What is the secret?
I see myself in the mirror. Yes, life has been good to me. I don’t know why; maybe it is just in my genes and the grace of God that I’m physically active and mentally active also. I am always doing what I like. I do my sports, my writings, I read a lot, I engage in different activities that I’m passionate about.
I don’t know what you see, but the bones are creaky, the pains are there. I have all manners of small, small illness, but it is all good. It is all part of life. I’m enjoying my life. Nothing is disturbing me. I’m grateful to God. Without the grace of God who am I? I’m not different from other people. Somehow, I have responded to the universe giving me opportunities and I have made use of opportunities to the best of my ability.
Thrice you tried to be NFA chairman, thrice it didn’t come through. What went wrong?
I don’t know. I just did not succeed. One of the few things in my life I tried and I never succeeded. It is not an area I’m good at because it is politics. To become the president or chairman of NFF is politics, not merit. It is not because you are good. You may have the qualification, you can do it, it has nothing to do with it. It is all politics. And it is not small politics, it is big time politics; it involves people from all over the country. These are people who are passionate about football. They may not necessarily need to be footballers, and you have to convince them, you have to bribe some of them, you have to cajole some of them. That is a totally different world where I did not succeed.
It is not that I failed; I did not succeed because I’m not good at it. If I was good at it, maybe I would have wangled my way through. What it takes to become the president of NFA in Nigeria is not about you know it or you have the qualifications, etc; it is about other unseen considerations and factors I have no control over. I don’t have money to bribe anybody. I don’t have money to spend like that. Everybody knows what I do. I don’t have the godfather behind me to take up the case. That is not a problem for me at all. My life is going on. I wish I had been so that at least I had a good vision for what I would have done for the Nigerian football, coaches, administrators, the youths, the grassroots. I’m not sure I would have been able to do them; I don’t know. But I had a clear vision. That would have been exciting to take the Nigerian football to the highest height.
You also tried to govern your home state but you didn’t get it. What happened?
When I wanted to be the governor of the state, it wasn’t that I thought I would win the election. I didn’t win the election to become the FA chairman; I now think I would win election to be governor when I knew what was required to become the chairman or president of FA. I‘m living and working in Abeokuta, the capital of Ogun State, which is the source of knowledge, the source of culture, the source of black civilisation. I saw all of those in this place and this place can be the take-off point for the rest of Nigeria. Make the state the model of development in education, health, sports, industry, literature, because this place is so rich of people. The human capacity, it is unbelievable.
I came to the realization what is going on? Why can’t we tap into these resources and change our environment. We have leaders who should have taken that to another level. Why are they not doing it? I wanted to go into it to see, to explore what is it in politics that people are running into? That was the good intention for me to go in there and see what was there. I knew you don’t go into election without having money. I had petrol money in my pocket to run the election. I lost all of that. But the experience I gained, you can never buy it with money. When I went to visit Baba Obasanjo after the election, the man laughed and laughed. He said, ‘Segun, you are a brave man, you went and did this. But it is an invaluable experience for you.’ He said he was just watching me and he was interested in what I was doing. Not because anybody thought I would win, but as I was doing it, I was also reporting it. I had a diary, I was writing in my diary. I knew I was not going to win. Who would vote for me?
There were 5,000 polling booths, and for you to win, you must man all the 5,000 polling booths, and you don’t put just one agent in a polling booth because you have to protect your vote and you have to protect the people coming to vote for you. You have to pay each of them to do the thing they have to do. You cannot monitor them, you cannot enforce anything. You give them all the money and they would do something else because somebody else will give them more. It was an impossible situation. There was no way I could monitor everything. I didn’t have the resources yet I had in all 5000 polling booths with my representatives. It was not that they were going to get people to vote for me. It was not that they were going to do anything. They were just to tell me what was going on in all the 5,000 polling booths.
As I sit here, I have a reservoir of information or data. If I had the resources, I would unleash the biggest political force ever seen in Ogun State. And I’m not boasting, because I understand it now and the army is there now. I can identify them: angry people, hopeless people; they are disengaged completely from the governance. That was the motivation: to go and see and learn more. I have seen, I have learned more to be governor of Ogun State.
People who win election don’t win by votes. Democracy is a big failure in this part of the world; it cannot work as it is stated, one man, one vote. We must create and domesticate our own solution. I don’t know what it is. It is like what Chief Obafemi Awolowo said; the situation is irredeemable.
Does that mean there is no hope for this country?
Me, I don’t see it. That is the truth. If I see that some things are happening correctly now I can start to have some hope. Nothing is happening. What is happening that gives you hope that we are going to have a country where things would work? There is no hope.
Celebrities, important people always have bad press. How have you managed to stay without scandals?
That is not true. I have had my own scandals in the past, if that is what you are saying. ‘He is going out with one celebrity woman’, one newspaper reported. ‘He had six children from four women.’
That is not scandal for me. I’m not a thief. I don’t steal money. I don’t do crooked things. I don’t do illegal things.
I’m just a hard working person, and everything I do, I try to do it correctly. I’m not a celebrity. I admit that I have lived a kind of life in the past, but not scandalous like that. Because when you say something is scandalous, by whose standards? I’m a Yorubaman. I come from Abeokuta.
Do you believe in polygamy?
It is not belief; it is an integral part of the life of an Egbaman. When I came here, I saw it, even though I didn’t live here. My father told me before he died that you this man, how can you be living alone in your house? This is unhealthy. Meanwhile, my family, my wife were abroad. He said this is unhealthy; you either bring the woman back or you get married again. I’m just giving you as an example. Here, you find out that it is everywhere. The management of relationship, the Yorubaman got it perfect. The Yorubaman knows how to manage religion better than any tribe, any race in the world. Religion, the relationship between man and woman, marriages, we manage it better than anywhere in the world.
The Yorubaman man, our history is too deep, our culture is too deep, our language is too deep, our knowledge base is too deep, our understanding of the world, our spirituality, you can’t match it. So also is our customs, of which the marriage institution is one. The Yorubaman mastered it. Our colonial masters brought their own and they now told us that our own was bad and so we now started embracing their own, and what we did and handled well, we abandoned it and we now followed their own. See where it has led us to. Now the things that worked for us and kept the society peaceful, we have abandoned because somebody said they are crude.
They brought their own ways to us when our ways were better. That is it. You were talking about scandal; there is nothing like scandal. Everybody makes mistakes in their lives, and it will be wrong for people to judge you. Now I know better. I can handle things differently now in my life. I can do things freely without feeling guilty or carry the burden on my head. I could have fixed my life better but because I was a product of indoctrination by outsiders so don’t judge me by their own doctrines which are not working for them.
Any regrets?
Not in the classic sense of it. The past is gone. When you are talking of regrets, that means you are x-raying the past, saying I wished I had done certain things. The past is gone. Regret is a burden you carry. Life is too short for you to live with any regret because you have done it and it is gone. Everything that has happened in my life followed eternal order; the way I’m built in the universe.
May 7ven was doing very well, then suddenly she vanished from the public space. What is happening to her?
She is doing well. She is not active as a singer or an entertainer for now. For a brief period, she came and sold her genre of music and all that, but she now retired to do other things. She started to manage artistes. She started to manage shows. She bought her own franchise. She owns the Afrobeats trade mark. She is coming back. She is doing well.
I thought she should have done more for music in Nigeria. Because she spent most of her life in the UK, she was influenced too much by western music. She wasn’t influenced much by our own African, though she was doing afrobeats. She has gone to research some Nigerian artistes from the past who did music properly. Because she left early and she couldn’t speak the language well, she couldn’t sing in local language. All of that is over now. She tells me she is coming back. This time, she thinks she will go to another level
