The wife of the late spokesman of Afenifere, Yinka Odumakin, Joe Okei-Odumakin, on Tuesday disclosed that her husband died on Friday and not Saturday.
Okei-Odumakin in a tribute made available to the News Agency of Nigeria, said it is important to out put the record straight in the spirit of truth that Odumakin stood for.
The tribute is entitled: “Yinka: Basking in the shadow that you cast”.
She wrote, “Now that I am in possession of your death certificate, I can see you passed on at exactly 10.40 p.m. on Good Friday (April 2, 2021) and not in the morning of Saturday, (April 3, 2021) as initially communicated.”
“The medics said his oxygen level was running low but my husband was reaching out for his tab to type out his column.”
“Since no one is permitted in the Critical Care Unit, we had committed you to the care of the best qualified medics at LASUTH and the hand of God, hoping to see you next morning.”
“The medics said they could not fathom how to immediately relay the message of your passage to me directly.”
The activist while speaking on the time his husband spent while alive said her husband was never frugal in spending that “oxygen on his Yoruba earth, his beloved and his Nigeria, his truly beloved”.
She said that if breath was the currency of life and its legal tender, then her husband spent his breath on causes.
“My memories are rousing through chains of pains; a sea surge of a romance which sprouted in General Sani Abacha’s detention.
“My husband was not a criminal, neither was I.”
” Our `crime’ was standing strong for others as we always have been. We will return to the dingy detention cell in our reminiscences later,” she said.
Recalling, she questioned: “Who meets and marries from detention at Alagbon? Only Yinka would ask, and only I would say, YES.“We were introduced to each other by the most qualified, the most preeminent, and the most decorated of inmate, Chief Gani Fawehinmi (SAN).
“Chief said: Yinka, she’s a man’. Yinka married both the man and the woman in me.
“It was our truest solemnisation of activist matrimony by a revered High Priest of the struggle…with the trench as our altar and the good of our people as our ultimate goal.
“Yinka, it cannot be goodbye; it is goodnight and see you later on the other side with God.
“I will bask with reckless abandon in the shadow of your cast. You came, you saw and you conquered,” She added.
She vowed to continue where her husband stopped.
According to her, Nigeria will be saved.
“Nigeria will be changed and it will become a great nation.
“Nigeria will work in my lifetime and even in yours as you live on in me, our children and generation yet unborn,’’ the rights activist affirmed.
