Don’t Wait Until You Have All the Money in the World Before Starting a Family
Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa, Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), is a courageous, eloquent, sagacious and meticulous legal luminary. This human rights activist says he hates injustice and will sacrifice anything to ensure there is justice in the society. His sense of organisation was visible in the orderly manner he arranged his law books and seats within his moderately furnished Lagos office. Dressed in a blue suit and fiddling with his laptop when we announced our presence, he quickly stood up to welcome us in an elbow-like salutation and offered us sanitiser to disinfect our hands. With a friendly smile on his face, he tells Charles Ajunwa and Ugo Aliogo about his childhood, family, career and many more
What are your recollections of your childhood and teenage years?
Iwas born in a rural riverine setup in Ondo State, Ilaje Local Government Area, and my recollection is that of the normal village boy with no access to infrastructure or modern facilities like vehicles, motor transport and motorbikes. We were only using canoes as our means of transportation because the whole area was waterlogged. So it was just like a normal boy growing up. I followed my father to the farm, trekking long distances and coming back carrying farm produce. My father was also a founder of a local church (Cherubim and Seraphim). I also followed him for outreaches and retreats outside our domain while I was in primary school. Then I also go to the river for fishing because in my place, our major occupation was fishing. I learnt in my early years to fish. But I recollect clearly that my parents were interested in education and the reason was because my mother used to host the education inspectors whenever they visited my community.
Due to the position of my father as the founder of a local church, he was more like a local champion. Whenever these education inspectors come, they lodge in our house. My mother will ask me to go and sit by the table, so I could look at them; they are always looking radiant, well dressed. So, I admired them and she also admired them. She wanted me to get education at all cost.
At that point, my father also became interested in ensuring that I acquired some form of education. But unfortunately, my mother died when I was in primary school. I was very young, clearly under 10 or so. She died in the course of child birth. It was very painful because I had to leave my domain to go and stay with my grandmother and that disrupted the kind of peace I was enjoying because it was a polygamous house. My step mother took war against me and never wanted to see me because I was excelling within the family. She would accuse me wrongly, and nothing I could do would ever please her. So it became a hot place for me. I guess because of the love my father had for my mum, he decided to send me outside our community for my secondary education.
Then it was the Adekunle Ajasin Government that was in power and they had free education, so I was sent to Ilaje Grammar School far away at Atijere, so I could be living in the boarding house and run away from the persecution and hostility at home. But as a young man, just barely about 12 years old, my stepmother discouraged my father from visiting me or sending provisions.
I was abandoned, nobody cared. I had to go into some form of survival for myself. Most times, I would not be in school because I had to be looking for something to do to make a living. In my second year, I was asked to leave the boarding house. I actually was expelled from secondary school. Then I joined a local gin company, where we were transporting gin from community to the other with manual truck made with woods and tyres. I became very well versed in that business and doing the truck pushing.
That went on for about a whole year. In the course of pulling the truck, you had to taste some gin. I was involved in other juvenile activities and I forgot about schooling totally. It was about that somebody from my town, Mr. Ayetoro Awojinrin, who knew that my mum wanted me to have education, went back home and told my dad that his son was not in school, but was transporting gin. So my father came and took me back home to complete my education right under his watch. Now, I was grown up and I was in a position to wrestle with my step-mother. I completed my secondary education at home, but it was still war. At that point, I guess my dad didn’t want that war because a man would always side with his wife, so he sent me to Lagos to stay with his younger brother for my tertiary education.
When I got to Lagos, my uncle called me and said if I wanted to stay with him, I must join his business and along the line we can now be talking about education. So, I joined his timber business for five years. In the course of doing the business, because I love education, I was always going with books like S.M.E Aka. In the evening, after coming back from the timber forest, I will take out the lantern and read to update myself on subjects like Economics, Government and English. I had my books each time we were travelling because I didn’t want to die a timber man.
It got to a time, I was agitated and I told my uncle I wanted to go back to school. So I approached a friend, who gave me a loan of N22 to apply for GCE. Then I applied for JAMB while still involved in the timber business. When the JAMB result was out, I had a score of 264 and my uncle was very happy. When I told him, I wanted to study Law, he was very happy and he took me to Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. Unfortunately, the cut-off mark was very high. I needed four points to make the cut-off, we pleaded, but Prof. Fabunmi the Dean of Faculty of Law refused. I had to enroll for another JAMB the following year which I passed and I was offered admission to study Law in Ife on merit.
Who influenced you the most between your dad and your mum? What were the lessons you learnt from them?
Both parents influenced me, but my mum influenced me the most. My dad influenced me in the sense that he was a very hardworking person, very spartan. He was combining his pastoral work with farming. He had large expanse of farm land and was also involved in timber work. My father was well respected in our community and really admired for that. He was a man who would say something and stand by it and never tolerated injustice. So a lot of people come to him for reprieve and for assistance, because he was a pastor and founder of a church. In that regard, I saw him like a hero and role model because he was always talking about truth, justice even as an illiterate. I wanted to be like him. My mum was someone who loved education and I guessed that she influenced me in that regard. She would aways sit me down to say that she was not literate and wanted her children to become literate. But her major area of influence on me was that she didn’t like her children taking other people’s things. She was a moralist to the core. I remember very vividly that there was a time she just finished cooking and the portion she dished out for me was rather small and I took extra meat from her pot and she descended on me. She used a razor blade and cut my hands. I was bleeding and that was the first time I saw my dad fought her seriously. Those marks have remained and every time it’s always a reminder that you don’t take other people’s things or something you have not been authorised to take.
The other area of influence was the bonding, because I was her firstborn and a boy, she always took me everywhere she went. Another area where my father stood out for me, was when my mother was sick before she died, she was in labour for about two days. In our community, there was no hospital or health centre, you deliver by faith through the local midwives. She had a breach during labour, and all she needed was just a caesarian operation to bring out the baby. So my father was