On Saturday, August 1, 2026, in Lagos, the voice that narrated Ibadan and Yorubaland to two generations fell silent. Oloye AbdulRasheed Olalekan Alabi, the Abese Olubadan of Ibadanland, passed away at the age of seventy-six. News of his passing spread quickly across newsrooms, government houses, palace halls, and radio studios—spaces where he had long been an indispensable presence. Oloye Lekan Alabi did not merely practice journalism; he regarded it as a sacred calling and a vital tool for cultural preservation. Spanning over five decades, from his early days as a reporter at Sketch Newspapers in 1973 to his elevation as the Abese Olubadan, his distinguished career served as a vital bridge between the press, government, and traditional Yoruba royalty.
Ibadan, Ibadan and Isale-Osi, 1950-1973
Alabi was born on October 27, 1950, in Ibadan, the first grandchild of his paternal grandparents and the first child of both his mother and father. As the first child, Alabi grew up under the intense pressure of Yoruba expectations for the eldest — a responsibility fueled by a home life of rigorous discipline. He attended 7th-Day Adventist Primary School, Oke-Foko, Ibadan (1958 to 1963), where his leadership emerged early: he was class captain from Primary 2 to 4, the school mailboy in Primary 5, and a School Prefect by Primary 6. He proceeded to African Church Grammar School, Apata Ganga, Ibadan (1964 to 1969), where he cultivated a deep passion for reading, public speaking, the Yoruba language, and local history.
Beyond the classroom, the brilliance he displayed was a direct reflection of a disciplined home. He often traced the roots of his public distinction back to the quiet examples set within his childhood home:
“If you come from a family where your parents are known for dignity, neatness and good conduct, you naturally tend to emulate them. My father was an exceptionally handsome and very neat man — and I tried to imitate his style.”
This domestic discipline was matched by the political exposure of his paternal grandmother, a Women’s Leader for the NCNC. Her influence, combined with his own emerging social consciousness led him to engage in activism early; famously, as a 17-year-old Form 3 student in 1967, he wrote a letter to Nigeria’s Head of State. After a stint as a class teacher at St John’s Anglican Primary School, Akinajo (1971 to 1972), his path into professional letters when he became the first editorial assistant at Onibonoje Press Limited, Ibadan.
Sketch Newspapers, 1973 — Journalism by Destiny and Design
Alabi’s route into journalism began, as he told it, with a boy’s habit of reading his father’s copy of the Daily Times before anyone else in the house had woken. His father had once worked at Daily Times under Alhaji Babatunde Jose and, later, the Cameroonian-born Chief Laban Omowale Namme — a connection that, decades on, would bring Namme back into his life to chair the launch of his own book. That early exposure to newsprint hardened into intent: while still in secondary school, Alabi began correspondence courses with the African Correspondence School, and he wrote to Sketch Newspapers hoping to enter through the British-style apprenticeship system. The paper wrote back that it followed no such system and advised him to acquire formal qualifications first.
He did. In October 1973, he was hired at Sketch Publishing Company Limited, Ibadan, as a Reporter/Writer/Reader, placed on the Yoruba desk, ‘Gboungboun’. The following year, the Sunday Sketch editor, the late Philip Bamidele Adedeji, gave him a column and then a full page, making him, in his account, Nigeria’s first bilingual newspaper columnist — ‘Morifiri’ in Yoruba, ‘What’s Happening, by Lekan Alabi’ in English.
“I came into the noble profession of journalism by destiny and design.”
From Sketch, he travelled to London in 1976 to study at the famed College of Journalism on Fleet Street, graduating in 1978. He returned briefly to Sketch before resigning to join the Nigerian Television Authority, Ibadan, where he worked until 1982. That year, when the old Oyo State’s own broadcaster, then the Television Service of Oyo State, the forerunner of today’s Broadcasting Corporation of Oyo State, began transmission on October 30, 1982, Alabi was among its pioneer editorial staff, the first reporter to appear on the new channel, and the founding chairman of its chapter of the Nigeria Union of Journalists.
Old Oyo State, 1983–1989 — Voice of Four Governors
In February 1983, the civilian governor of the old Oyo State — comprising today’s Oyo and Osun States — the late Chief Bola Ige, ordered that Alabi be seconded to him as Press Secretary. Ige, whom Alabi always described as both boss and mentor, held the post until Chief Bola Ige handed over that September, after the Federal Electoral Commission declared his rival, Dr Omololu Olunloyo of the National Party of Nigeria, the winner of a bitterly contested election. Olunloyo’s new administration sacked many officials associated with Ige, Alabi among them. He refused to apologise in exchange for reinstatement, and for three months he was, in his words, deliberately unemployed.
Providence, or what he preferred to call destiny, intervened on December 31, 1983, when Generals Muhammadu Buhari and Tunde Idiagbo led a coup that toppled the civilian government. By January 1984, Lieutenant-Colonel Oladayo Popoola had been installed as military governor of the old Oyo State — and, within weeks, had ordered that Lekan Alabi be found and recalled as his Press Secretary.
“You know there are seven wonders, and I think my own was the eighth wonder.”
He went on to serve two further military administrators, Brigadier-General Adetunji Olurin and the late Brigadier-General Sasaeniyan Oresanya, before leaving government service on March 30, 1989 — a six-year run across one civilian and three military governments that he never described as anything he had sought.
“I served four governors — three military officers and one civilian — over six years. I never asked for the position; it was simply where destiny placed me.”
It was during this period, coordinating publicity and protocol for the rotating meetings of the Odu’a Investment Company Limited on behalf of the old Oyo State government, that Alabi first drew the attention of the conglomerate’s owner-state leadership — work he insisted for years he had performed without pay or formal appointment.
Odu’a Investment Company Limited, 1989–2006
When Odu’a’s owner-state governments moved their rotating meetings to Ibadan in the mid-1980s, organising publicity for the Ibadan leg fell informally to Alabi. His unpaid diligence eventually reached the Governor of Ondo State, who consulted his counterparts in Ogun and Oyo and pressed for Alabi’s formal engagement. On March 30, 1989, without any prior consultation with him, the Odu’a board announced his appointment as the conglomerate’s first Public Affairs Manager, on the very day he was travelling from Ibadan for that year’s Hajj.
“I didn’t beg for the position, neither did anyone lobby for me. It was just an announcement from the blue.”
Alabi assumed duty at Odu’a on August 7, 1989, and spent the next seventeen years building the conglomerate’s public affairs and corporate communications architecture largely from scratch, rising eventually to General Manager, Corporate Affairs. Those who trained under him at Odu’a , among them Victor Ayetoro, Soji Obalele and the journalist Remi Ladigbolu, who joined the group in 2003, later credited him with a distinctive method: he delegated responsibility ahead of experience, corrected drafts patiently rather than publicly, and treated every press statement as something that, once released, could never be recalled. He taught, as Ladigbolu would later put it, not merely how to write but how to think before writing.
When he voluntarily resigned in 2006, Odu’a’s management, then led by Dr. Adebayo Jimoh, initially declined to accept it, considering how deeply he had become woven into the institution he had helped build. Yet, his step down from corporate life merely opened the door to a fuller devotion to cultural leadership and traditional service.
Culture, Chieftaincy and the Abese Title
Even while building a corporate communications empire, Alabi was constructing a second, parallel institution: himself as custodian of Ibadan and Yoruba history. Beginning as Mogaji of his family’s Ile Ekerin Ajengbe compound, he rose steadily through the uniquely merit-based Olubadan civilian chieftaincy line — through Ekefa Olubadan and Parakoyi Olubadan, then Maye Olubadan, and finally, at the time of his death, Abese Olubadan of Ibadanland, one of the most senior civilian chieftaincy positions beneath the throne itself.
He was appointed Cultural Ambassador of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, based in Ile-Ife, and chaired or served as trustee of several cultural and family foundations, among them the Adegoke Adelabu (Penkelemesi) Foundation, which he chaired in tribute to the politician his grandmother had once served, the Yusufu Olatunji (Baba L’egba) Foundation, honouring the Sakara music legend his father had once engaged to play at his own naming ceremony, and trusteeships at the Adekunle Fajuyi Foundation, the D. O. Fagunwa Foundation and the Duro Ladipo Foundation. In 2013, Achievers University, Owo, conferred on him an honorary Doctor of Letters.
By 2018, his standing as a historian of Yorubaland had grown wide enough that DAWN Commission invited him as Guest Speaker at the ninth edition of its Yoruba Historical Conversations public lecture series, held on April 27 that year — one of many public platforms from which he argued that pride in one’s community was inseparable from the pursuit of excellence.
“Every citizen should be proud of his community. Ibadan occupies a unique place in Nigeria’s history — it has produced many firsts.”
For Alabi, culture and his Islamic faith were never in tension. He argued, in conversation and in writing, that religion shaped spiritual consciousness while culture preserved historical consciousness and that a people did not need to choose between the two. It was a conviction that let him remain a committed Muslim while becoming one of the country’s most quoted interpreters of Yoruba civilisation — equally at home discussing Ibadan’s founding history, the intrigues of the Olubadan-in-Council, or the poetry of Apala and Sakara music, of which he was a devoted, lifelong enthusiast.
The Later Years — A Public Intellectual on Air
Into his seventies, Alabi remained one of Yorubaland’s most consistent media voices, moving fluidly between radio, television and the video interviews that carried his commentary to a younger, online audience. He was a familiar presence on Agidigbo 88.7 FM and Space 90.1 FM in Ibadan, where his broadcasts on history and contemporary Nigerian affairs became, for a certain generation of listeners, appointment listening. His weekly Iwe Iranti radio commentaries in particular became known for treating history not as an academic engagement but as a living public resource, proof, as one of his mentees would later write, that he believed history was too important to be left to historians alone.
His published essays followed the same instinct. In lectures and newspaper columns, among them a widely cited address titled “Wanted! Youths Who Dream,” and another, characteristically wry piece titled “Move Close to Kabiyesi, Keep a Safe Distance from Kabiyesi, as Kings Consume the Haughty” — he used Yoruba proverb and precedent to speak directly to contemporary Nigerian leadership and to the country’s young people, insisting that neither ambition nor proximity to power excused a person from discipline.
Voices From Across the Southwest and Nigeria
Tributes poured in from every institution he had touched. President Bola Tinubu called him
“a consummate journalist and public relations expert who had a distinguished public service career.”
Governor Seyi Makinde praised his
“immense wisdom, integrity, and dedication,”
while the Olubadan of Ibadanland, who grew up with him in Isale-Osi, described his death as “devastating and heartbreaking.”
The NUJ Oyo State Council said he was “more than a journalist; he was an institution whose intellect enriched generations,” a sentiment echoed by the NIPR, which called it “a monumental loss to the PR profession.” The Aare Ona Kakanfo, Iba Gani Adams, mourned an “irreparable loss” to Yorubaland, while mentee Victor Ayetoro credited him with “laying the foundation” for Odu’a’s communications practice. Protégé Remi Ladigbolu put it simplest: Alabi taught him “how to think before writing” — a lesson, like the man, built to outlast him.