You better believe it – Rashidi Yekini is back!

I doubt if there is any African with any interest in African football that will not be familiar with that name. He is that footballer that scored Nigeria’s first ever World Cup goal and tore at the net behind the Bulgarian goalkeeper in a scream that reverberated around the world.
Only Lauren Pokou before him (with 14 goals) and Samuel Eto (with 15 goals) after him, have scored more goals than him (with 12 goals) at the African Cup of Nations. So good was Rashidi Yekini that he became the first Nigerian to be awarded CAF’s African Player of the Year in 1994.

With such an awesome reputation in football it is not understood why since he retired from the game almost 10 years ago, very little has been heard about him or seen of him. Interestingly, it is entirely his choice that he remained as he had been, shunning all social events, never granting interviews, and avoiding any interactions that could bring him in contact with the public outside the football field.

Many major media houses around the world had, at one time or the other, sought to work with him, or document him, or even just showcase him. Many business organisations would do anything to get him to be their face. He was, perhaps, Africa’s most sought-after football figure until time took its toll and he started to recede in the minds of the public, to be replaced by newer but not bigger stars. All Rashidi needed to do was cough loudly and the football media would come scrambling to cover it. He never did! This has created a mystique around him, plus all manner of speculation about his life, his state of mind and his activities in recent years, some of which have been worrisome enough for even respected Nigerian journalist and Sunday Tribune columnist, Uncle Fabio Lanipekun, to raise a public alarm some time ago. Yet, the mystery deepened with Rashidi choosing to maintain a stoic silence and to continue to live his life in the quietude of his own narrow interest.

To say that he is an enigma is an understatement. Only a handful of people have access to him, so only fewer still can penetrate his cocooned existence. For those of us that knew him from the very beginning none of this sounds or looks too strange. Outside of the football field he had always been that way – elusive, reclusive, timid and innocent! For some reason he respected and trusted me to the extent that we maintained a relationship of occasional communication through the years. We also did one or two things together like his return to club football at Gateway Football Club several years after his official retirement from football. Only I could have convinced him to make such a ‘come back’ and he did without hesitation or even negotiation. Part of his wages remain in the treasury of the Ogun State government till this day waiting for when he would come, ask for it and collect it. It may remain there forever. That is Rashidi. He sees the world only through his own unusual prism.

The impact of his return to domestic football was never exploited by those at the helm of Nigerian football to illuminate the path to tread in developing followership of the league and a return to the culture of weekend football as a family recreational pastime. Rashidi Yekini’s presence in the league, in that one season that he played (2006) packed stadia across the country everywhere it was reported he was going to play.

Rashidi and I relate well because we have some things in common that have cemented our relationship through the years.
He joined me in Shooting Stars FC of Ibadan in what was to become the last season of my football career. He was very comfortable with me because we both spoke the Hausa language (which was his first language having been born and bred in Northern Nigeria like me). Like me he started his football in the north and was influenced by it. Like me he played and not necessarily for the money but for his deep love for the game. Rashidi’s life was totally and completely wrapped around a foot ball. He was in his full element and expressiveness only on the field of play with a ball at his feet. All he wanted was to do was play all day long. He did not understand player-politics. He just loved football too much. The training ground was his world. On it he came alive and shone like the mid-day sun. Outside it he almost did not exist. He would retreat into his own world, a narrow impregnable world shut to all except the two friends he had (Akinsola and Aina) who had come to Shooting Stars FC with him from his Kaduna Club. He was never comfortable with the Ibadan people, the media or even supporters. Very few people knew him, understood him or could even penetrate his social shield. Thats why his family life and his business are completely shielded by him and unknown by all but one or two people.

Rashidi came to Ibadan very humble. He was coming to join a start-studded team that he could only compliment, not dominate, which was what he was doing in the little-known UNTL FC team he was coming from. In Kaduna even as a young 22 year old, he was worshipped. In Ibadan he needed to join a long queue of mega-stars including Best Ogedegbe, Mudashiru Lawal, Tunde Bamidele, Felix Owolabi, Wakilu Oyenuga, Olumide Banjo, (all national team players) and so on.

So, in coming down south to Ibadan his greatest challenge would have been me and I am not sure he knew it too, because I was his hero and he was only too delighted to be playing side by side with me in the same team. Any striker, any goalscorer coming to join Shooting Stars FC or even the national team at that time in the early 1980s would have to contend with the humble records I had set in the space of 8 years for both club and country. Rashidi walked straight into that challenge and in a few short years had surpassed them all. In the innocence of his heart and mine at the time we met neither competition nor rivalry existed in our relationship. I was a friend willing to help his game, to show him a few tricks, to supply him the crosses and passes he fed on in front of goal and to make him a master on the field – confident, focussed, comfortable and deadly. I became his unofficial, on-the-field tag-team partner in the destruction of opposing teams.
Rashidi Yekini and I, in 1984, during the African Club championship campaign, became goalscoring machines. We were unstoppable until a knee injury crippled me during the first leg semi-final match against Sekode of Togo and blunted the Shooting Stars attack. The team never recovered from my injury and Rashidi also lost that essential edge. We eventually lost in the final match to the great Zamalek of Egypt in what was to be my worst and last match for club and country. He never quite understood it himself at the time but Rashidi soon regained his cutting edge again and the rest of his career almost turned out to be that of chasing the records in Nigerian football that I had set.

Before his emergence on the scene, I had held most of the major Nigerian and African domestic records – winner of FA Cup and National league trophies, highest goalscorer in the national league for two seasons, highest goalscorer in the African Cup of Nations (6 goals in two competitions), highest goalscorer for the national team in the history of Nigerian football, first winner of a continental club competition (the Africa Cup – winners Cup), and the only Nigerian football player to have come closest to be named (there was no voting at the time) Africa’s Player of the Year (third in 1977 and second in 1980). It took 10 years to achieve it but Rashidi Yekini did well, re-wrote every single football record in the country, and did even much more – he had a very successful professional career abroad and played at two World Cup finals! For a part of his illustrious career I was there with him, a silent guide.

When I became the Team Manager of the Super Eagles (the country has not had any since then) to the 1994 African Cup of Nations and USA ’94 World Cup, I worked very closely with him guiding him through the minefield of the power-play and player-rivalry that eventually almost destroyed that great team. So, Rashidi trusted me. That relationship has sustained till now. Thats why where all others have failed to get him to open up about his life I may have done slightly better.

So, some four weeks ago, for the first time since 2006, we arranged to meet and have a conversation again. We did in Ibadan, just the two of us in the seclusion of Onireke Guest House, far from the madding crowd and away, for the first time, from the football field! What a refreshing and reassuring experience that was.

Without going into the details of our conversation (I leave that for another day) I want to say that Rashidi Yekini is likely to be back to football very soon doing what he knows best. At almost 40 you will not find him in the colours of any football club, no! But the people will have the opportunity to watch the master at play again on the field re-enacting his magical football skills amongst the youths that need to learn the art of controlling the ball in flight, shielding the ball, racing with the ball, lurking behind defences, bending the ball or shooting with both feet, and entertaining audiences all over Africa. Those were the things Rashidi Yekini did as a player. They are the same things he is going to start to do as football’s ambassador once again. Africa, watch out for this new chapter in the life of the one known as ‘Gangling’!