Six icons who died at the verge of victory

Death, they say, is inevitable; but when it
happens before sunset, it is always very sad.
some Nigerians
who died just before/after winning a course.

To some, the death of Audu Abubakar, the All
Progressives Congress’ gubernatorial
candidate in Kogi is still some sort of a
dream. Quite a lot of people cannot still
figure out how a man will die just at the
verge of his victory; thus, making his crowd
of supporters wail instead of dancing to the
song of victory with him.


68-year-old Audu had thrice tried to go back
to the government house in his hometown
after occupying it twice. He was relentless
and determined to go back to the coveted
position. This made him jump in when the
need came during primaries which he
emerged the winner in his party.
But the inevitable came, just on the day of
his victory! While some relatives claimed he
was poisoned, some said he had a heart
attack. May his soul rest in perfect peace!



The popular Yoruba aristocrat was the
people’s choice in the 1993 Nigerian
presidential election which was tagged
inconclusive. He was the presumed winner
but the election results were annulled by
Ibrahim Babangida (the then military
president).
When Abiola decided to take the bull by the
horn by announcing himself the winner of the
election in 1994, he was arrested and jailed
till 1998. However, luck crawled up to his
side when the then military president, General
Sani Abacha died. But the luck and joyous
celebration got cut short when Abiola died on
July 7, 1998, the day he was supposed to be
released from the prison and probably be the
president of Nigeria.
The official autopsy stated that Abiola died
of natural causes but Abacha’s chief security
officer, Al-Mustapha said he was beaten to
death. He was 61 years of age at his death.



Also, called ‘the gentleman of Lagos’, Funso
Williams died a very pathetic death. After
losing the 2003 Lagos guber election to Bola
Tinubu, he decided to try again by picking up
the PDP GUBER card for year 2007. Hopes
were high that the 58-year-old will finally
push Tinubu out of office but sadly, he didn’t
live to witness the election. He was murdered in a gruesome way on July
27, 2006 with his body tied up, stabbed and
strangled in his Ikoyi home. His campaign
manager and Kingsley Adeseye Ogunlewe
(who was hoping to be the PDP guber
candidate) were arrested in connection to his
death.


Tella, a former lecturer at the National
Institute for Sports in Lagos, had been
diagnosed with cancer of the lungs when he
led his team to a pre-World Cup eight-nation
tournament in South Korea in June 2007. A month before his death, he was awarded
the Member of the Order of the Federal
Republic medal – an important honour – for
his achievement, by the then Nigerian
president Umaru Yar’Adua. Tella spent the
last two weeks of his life at the Lagos State
Teaching Hospital. He died on 20 October
2007, few weeks after his team won the
Under 17 World Cup game. He was 56 at his
death.

James Ajibola Idowu Ige, SAN was a Nigerian
lawyer and politician. He became Federal
Minister of Justice for Nigeria. He was
murdered December 23, 2001, at his Ibadan
home in Oyo state. There were issues within
the Alliance for Democracy party in Osun
State, which he was entangled withfor

Bola Ige ought to resume at the International
Court of Justice before his death. Although
various people were arrested and tried for
involvement in the murder, including Iyiola
Omisore, all were acquitted. As of November
2010 the killers had not been found.[16] He
was buried in Ibadan.[17] In a speech at his
funeral, he was quoted as saying that he
was sure that Nigeria was worth living for
but he was not so sure that it was worth
dying for
Nigerian writer and environmental activist,
Ken Saro Wiwa, was born in Bori, in the Niger
Delta area of Nigeria. He was a member of
the Ogoni people, an ethnic minority in
Nigeria whose homeland, Ogoniland, in the
Niger Delta has been targeted for crude oil
extraction since the 1950s. The area suffered
extreme environmental damage from decades
of indiscriminate petroleum waste dumping.
Saro-Wiwa led a nonviolent campaign against
environmental degradation of the land and
waters of Ogoniland by the operations of the
multinational petroleum industry, especially
the Royal Dutch Shell company. He was also
an outspoken critic of the Nigerian
government, which he viewed as reluctant to
enforce environmental regulations on the
foreign petroleum companies operating in the
area.
At the peak of his non-violent campaign, he
was tried by a special military tribunal for
allegedly masterminding the gruesome
murder of Ogoni chiefs at a pro-government
meeting, and hanged in 1995 by the military
dictatorship of General Sani Abacha. His
execution provoked international outrage and
resulted in Nigeria’s suspension from the
Commonwealth of Nations for over three
years.