Adegoke Adelabu

Adegoke Adelabu was born at Oke Oluokun, Kudeti Area of Ibadan, Oyo on 3rd September, 1915. He attended St David’s CMS, Kudeti, Ibadan from 1925 to 1929; CMS Central School, Mapo area, Ibadan in 1930, the Government College Ibadan 1931 to 1935 and Higher College, Yaba, Lagos in the year 1936 Adelabu earned accelerated (double) promotions on three occasions at Elementary, Primary and Secondary School levels, yet he never came second in any examination, but first at all times. He was extremely brilliant!

He was the first African manager of the United Africa Company (UAC) at age 21 in 1936, Nigeria’s first federal minister of social services and natural resources at age 39 in 1954, first chairman the old of Ibadan district council (now comprising II LGAS) in 1954, former first national vice, later the president of the now defunct NCNC political party, former leader of opposition in the old Western Region house of assembly and leader of the NCNC western delegation to the 1957 constitutional conference in London, UK.

A proud Ibadan indigene who flaunted his Ibadan tribal mark and dressed Yoruba. Man of the people he was, when he became the minister of labour, he immediately drove his official car, an American limousine all the way to Ibadan and asked all his teeming supporters to share the car with him. He boldly announced to them that the car belonged to them and not him

Similarly, when he was provided with a government house as his official residence in Ikoyi, the most exclusive part of Lagos, he turned up with drummers from Ibadan much to the discomfiture of the largely expatriate residents of Ikoyi. They protested vigorously about the noise but Adelabu would not relent. He called a press conference and stoutly declared: “If they do not like noise and drumming, they are free to go back to their own country.”

If Chief Adelabu Adegoke were still with us, the government would have neither peace nor slumber. He was an unrepentant activist and brilliant orator rolled into one and when he famously declared publicly that the government of Western Nigeria was in “a peculiar mess” over the management of its affairs, the audience, who were not all endowed with fluency of the English language, went wild with their own version of what they had heard. They translated it as “penkelemess”. That is how “peculiar mess” was supplanted by “penkelemess” which has since become synonymous with not only the name of Adelabu but also a short hand, abbreviation or acronym for any government that is considered grossly incompetent or outrageously corrupt.

Chief Adegoke sadly died in a fatal car accident in March 1958, at the old Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. He was only 43.