At the threshold of my crossover from the junior class after completing my JSS 3 examination which the new generation would simply describe now as “Junior WAEC”, my mind was made up for the science class. I didn’t wait to resume into the SSS 1 when curiosity led me to search for notes of my seniors for reading. My senior prefect then, Tade Omosehin (another endlessly brainy fellow like that) became my ready mentor in my impatient scholarly curiosity and he loaded me with his used notes for the senior class and before resumption into SS1 I had completed reading the syllabus of physics, chemistry and biology in particular, save for the practicals. I iswas pushed on a mission to follow some travks. I have heard stories about certain mythical character,Olusola Adeyelu, who in his time was the senior prefect of Manuwa Memorial Grammar School Iju-Odo, who cracked physics, chemistry and biology like a school girl cracked peanut. His name always came up for fascinating mentioning in my academic pet talk with Boda Tade (Tade Omosehin) who always challenged me I could raise the bar higher and would talk beautifully of Olusola Adeyelu (known as Aristotle in his trenches days at UNILORIN) as a rare brain.
Years passed. I left secondary school a science student and kept my eyes closely following Aristotle’s journey. He was admitted to study medicine in UNILORIN. I was not surprised. In his year 3 at UNILORIN college of medicine, he ran into head collision with the authorities and was one of the 12 courageous students, who were later in history recorded as the UNILORIN 12, who were rusticated for championing the students’ cause. He was recalled after two years and shortly after his recall, another students’ protest rocked the university and he was again rusticated alongside 3 others, who were known and described as the UNILORIN 4.
Not to tell a short story long, how I left my first love, the sciences, to study law was all not without his forceful and prophetic assurances that I would excel in the strange land of law as a career which made me take the risky dive to become a lawyer and my old mentor had been one of my most litigious clients for about a decade now, his most recent case where I represented him being Dr. Olusola Adeyelu vs Medical and Dental Council and Nigerian Medical Association, where he successfully moved the Court to declare NMA membership voluntary.
This revolutionary physician ranks with Che Guevara, the Argentine Marxist revolutionary physician turned Cuban guerrilla fighter, in following the postulation that not all diseases can be cured medically, poverty as a case study and any disease that cannot be cured medically, must be treated politically.
This revolutionary physician, genius, orator and humanist has clocked 50!
Happy birthday egbon!