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Celebrated radio broadcaster, Mr. Smollett Adetoyese Shittu Alamu turned 70 in December. The ace broadcast journalist, who retired from Osun State Broadcasting Corporation (OSBC) radio as a Director of News and Current Affairs, is also an author. In this tribute by his daughter, TEMILOLUWA SHITTU-ALAMU, who is also a creative writer based in the United Kingdom, she writes that her father was dedicated to his calling.

I’ve been wondering about what comes next when you reach a certain age that everyone hopes for and then what comes next.

What it must feel like to begin losing your friends to minor illnesses that “old age” cannot seem to handle.

To have the usual order of things reversed as your grown children begin to issue semi unswerving commands at you because all of a sudden, a cold is a major illness and the world is going through a pandemic and you belong to the group labelled vulnerable.

Don’t receive any guests.

Don’t go to church.

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Why do you still drive far?

What are you doing in Ilesha?

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But inside you, you feel fine physically, your eyesight is great, you only need to move your bible to bright light, you can still drive miles. You are only just turning 70. There’s still a while to go, everyone’s just fussing for nothing. Nothing has changed, especially not your Ghanaian accent even after 40 years of going home.

“He talks like a Ghanaian and even greets like them” Bola Ige said of you once. How would you know that the Yoruba don’t shake hands but prostrate when you had never been home?

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I would grow up being asked, why does your daddy say Paster, perhaps, church etc. Its still so funny till this day.

Baba jeje, no wahala, greets his sons-in-law with fist bumps because old age is the new cool, asks his daughters “Shey ori bobo yi pe, ka tete mo.”

Work ethic on 100% even at the peak of his career would ask to be picked up at 4am on many days because some studio announcer hadn’t shown up and come rain or shine the news at dawn must be read.

Integrity on 100% “I have nothing but this name,” he would say to me, to all of us. And so I went through school all the way to university with no choice but to protect the name, because as soon as I sat in any class, the teacher/lecturer recognised the name.

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I have been thinking about the sacrifices too, what it means to lose a wife, what it means to put children (yours and others) through school, what it must have cost him to bring me clean water every other week in two 25kg kegs because “Tope janjala yi lo ma fa konga?”

To find me a doctor to speak to when my mind was playing pranks on me and he didn’t understand it. To read my work and say fantastic my girl, next time, improve it by telling us so, so, so and so.

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And to yield to the ‘power’ that his children now seem to have. We didn’t like the first set of photos he took so we organised another photographer even while knowing it would stress him out. In the end, after back and forth, he resigned and said “fine, tell the fellow to come at 9am, so I can get a haircut at 8.”

His voice on radio and TV was a highlight of my childhood. The baritone was unmissable, still is. And I’m thankful that after a bout of illness and the grief over loss of family he has experienced in the last month or so, when I spoke to him at midnight, the baritone was still there, rich in range and heavy with excitement.

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Happy birthday, Baba Dee.

Temiloluwa Shittu-Alamuwho is also a creative writer based in the United Kingdom, writes her father was dedicated to his calling.

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