CEO and publisher of Ovation International Magazine, Dele Momodu, has given an account of his flight from Nigeria during the Sani Abacha military era.
He described crossing into Cotonou on foot in the early hours of the morning and weeping twice, once leaving his infant son behind, and again upon arriving in Benin Republic with no certainty of survival.
Momodu spoke on Morayo Afolabi-Brown’s programme, the Morayo Show on Wednesday, reflecting on what the experience cost him and what it ultimately produced.
He said his first son was less than a year old and lying beside his wife when he left, and that the weight of the moment was almost unbearable.
“The morning I was leaving, my first son was less than one year old. He was just lying beside my wife and I was looking at this innocent child and I was crying,” Momodu said.
He said he then made his way across the border alone and on foot, with no guarantee of what awaited him.
“I travelled by foot through the Seme border into Cotonou very early in the morning,” he said.
The grief did not stop there. He said arriving in Cotonou brought a fresh wave of uncertainty rather than relief.
“When I got to Cotonou, I started crying again because I wasn’t sure, where am I going? When will I get there? Will I get there? When will I come back? Will I come alive?
“I had this stream of consciousness, as we put it in literature, and it was just going through my mind,” Momodu said.
He said the exile, which lasted from 1995 to 1998, had ultimately shaped everything that followed, including the founding of Ovation magazine and his decades of involvement in Nigerian public life.
“If I had not gone on that journey, there will be no Ovation today,” he said.
Momodu, who holds a bachelor’s degree in Yoruba and a master’s degree in English literature from Obafemi Awolowo University, said he drew on that period whenever people questioned his commitment to Nigeria’s democratic project.
He noted that he had shared the exile experience with Tinubu, the same man he now opposed in the political arena, but that the ordeal had not softened his conviction that Nigeria needed genuine opposition.
“I was in exile from 1995 to 1998 and I know what we went through. But I refused to join APC only for one reason, we must maintain that democracy which we suffered for,” he said.
Momodu added that hardship was not new to him, disclosing that he lost his father at 13 and began working odd jobs and teaching in his village before eventually rising to national prominence.
“That’s how I rose to where I am today,” he said.
Momodu had fled Nigeria on 22 July 1995, after his wife received a tip-off that security operatives were looking for him.
He had been accused of being one of the brains behind Radio Freedom, a pirate radio station that later became Radio Kudirat.
The accusation was tied to his open support for MKO Abiola, the presumed winner of the annulled June 12, 1993 presidential election, and his pro-democracy activities under the Abacha regime.
From Cotonou, he made his way through Togo and Ghana before eventually reaching the United Kingdom, where he remained for three years.
While in London, he collaborated with fellow NADECO exiles including Bola Tinubu, working to publicise the regime’s human rights abuses and advance the cause of restoring civilian rule. It was during this period, in April 1996, that he founded Ovation International.
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