By First Decade – The personality framing stage
Born and raised in Mushin to the Alhaji and Alhaja Adegbite Mustapha nucleus of the Bashorun Mustapha Family of Olowogbowo, Lagos Island. I can say the my family background constituted the core of values growing up.
Just like every other kid, I cannot completely take responsibility for everything I did has a kid but what I can do is give reason as to why I did them.
I am the first son and also the first child, so you should understand where my calmness came from. I was brought up with so much love. As a kid, I got everything I needed and it was always fun.
I remember how we used to frequent the house of my late aunty Alhaja Odunyemi Akinde in ikeja enroute Ibadan to celebrate our long holiday. It was also an unforgettable memory for my sister and I.
The fact that I attended Premier Day nursery and primary school, Palm avenue, Mushin laid the perfect foundation for my tolerance of other religion. I come from a Muslim background but I was made to attend a school owned by a pastor.
Pastor J.O Martins the founder of the ach will make us watch interesting christian movies as part of the programme for our end of the year party which we were always looking forward to.
My love for sport also began as early as the first Decade. My school didn’t go for many football competition, our sport teacher Mr. Patrick favoured athletes and I was one of the fastest sprinters in my school them. At a time only Uche Bruno was faster than me in the entire school.
My dad played football in his school days and also earned the nickname “Tailor” because of his nutmeging ability as comfirmed by the APC State chairman, Mr Tunde Balogun and Mr Yori Folarin who were his contemporaries.
As a kid my dad will work me in the middle of the night to watch serie A highlights and also ensure that I sitted next to him to watch nigeria’s games even the ones being played in the wee hours of the night. I saw how passionate he was about the game and I did follow suit unconsciously.
I lost my patrilineal grandma in my first Decade on earth. As little as was I know she was a bridge builder and I still feel a part of her in me as we speak.
The first Decade on earth was about family, inheritance of the atmosphere of calmness already inhabitanted in the family, formation of the love for peace and sports and consequently the making of a gentleman.
Second Decade – When the key choices were made (Active Football or University Education)
Secondary education started at the turn of the second Decade. My parents had decided to enroll me at one of the popular model Colleges in the state. Lagos State Model College, Kankon, Badagry was the exact one of precision is still on the item of this nugget.
I had just dropped out of Arabic class because of an incident that involved my sister and the ustaz.
Because you start getting the wrong notion the ustaz mistaking hit my sister in her eyes why trying to correct her and my mum would not have that. So classes stopped.
I only did CRS in primary school and I didn’t know much about my Deen. As a matter of fact, for the whole of my JSS1 I passed through the school mosque to my guardians place thinking the building was a loo.
As Almighty Allah will have it my mum went to Hajj and on holiday she began to take us to the masjid for subhur prayers early in the morning. I guess it was at that point that my awareness of my Deen started of take shape.
Then when I got back to school, I located the school mosque and continued the practice. I ended up being tagged among the “Muslim brothers” in Kankon.
Of course, my love for sports had become evident too. My pace as an athlete was needed on the flanks of the football pitch.
Journalism started as a direct response to love for football. On every visiting day my dad will come to Badagry with complete sports newspaper of all the days I have been in school for me to read and be informed of the developments in the world of sports. After reading up, I will begin to cut out the pictures of the players in the story and profiling them in a book. I titled the book “Azeco Football book” .
It became so popular in school that most of my friends don’t ask for food when they see my parents on visiting day but football book.
My first football boot was a gift from my great aunt late Alhaja Yewande Talabi, she also added money for jerseys when I said I was in line to make my house team for the inter house sports. My mum gave the money to my uncle, who had been staying with us since I can remember.
The year was 2004, I was already a Chelsea fan, so he bought a Gud johnson jersey and we still had money, so he asked for my second team and I said Real Madrid, so we got another Zidane jersey. That was my first football kit.
After my SSCE result came out bad, I had to have a long conversation with uncle and mentor Alhaji Motolani Mustapha, who was at the time the faculty Officer of the faculty of Law, Lagos State University.
The crux of the conversation bothered on me deciding if I was going to further my education of they should just enrol me into an Academy to further push my football career. All this was because I appeared as an average student and I had just failed SSCE too.
After all consideration I decided that I’ll futher my education while staying active in the game in whatever school I would be admitted.
I wrote my first jamb while I was in Ss3, I scored 155 and was unable to get admitted to the university straight from school. It later turns out to be a blessing in disguise because I was a commercial student and they felt accounting should be my calling.
However, I loved government and literature more than any other course as was always active in political discussion. It was then a family friend of ours, Mr.Olumide Coker encouraged me to study Law or Political Science.
I opted for polical science because I had issues with the morale compass guiding law as a profession.
At the age of 17, I gained admission into the prestigious Lagos State University to study the course of my choosing political science.
To be continued…
