By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
The King of Comedy called Ali Baba is a funny man, but I have a longstanding grouse with him that is not funny at all. The trouble is that I cannot understand how Ali Baba could get a very stingy man like the then President Olusegun Obasanjo to pay him millions of Naira.
Poor Maxim, I once had to fly out of Lagos one early morning to Abuja to interview Obasanjo in Aso Villa, and after the interview, the man did not give me one Naira, not even one biscuit! One was stranded and would have had to trek out of Aso Villa with the interview team made up of Alhaji Ibrahim Ida (CON), C.K. Alabi, Tommy Odemwingie, and the late Ken Tadaferua but for the benevolence of Orji Ogbonnaya Orji who offered a ride out of the citadel of power in his own car. There is no greater marginalization than Ali Baba being paid millions when I did not get paid a single Kobo by Obasanjo.
Even so, Obasanjo kept recommending Ali Baba to most of the state governors he visited, and humorously kept asking the comedy king for his cut, which he never got!
Well, Ali Baba whose original name is Alleluya Atuyota Akpobome (or Akporobomeriere, according to one Warri babe who claims to know the guy more than everybody) has paid his dues.
To give him his due, Ali Baba is a true original who knows where he comes from in his rags-to-riches story and gives deserving appreciation to the personages who supported him from the get-go. The comedy mogul does not forget my buddy, the music impresario Edi Lawani who encouraged him from the beginning to come to Lagos after his studies in Ekpoma, Edo State.
If memory serves me right, I can remember the early days when Edi Lawani brought Ali Baba to a show at the University of Lagos, Akoka, and the young wannabe comedian brought the roof down with his unbeatable jokes. Then Ali Baba was taken to a bigger show at Lekki Sunsplash and he roused up the audience with entirely new jokes. Edi Lawani advised that Ali Baba should have repeated the UNILAG jokes at Lekki because the show was bigger and the crowd was different. He happens to be so fertile and prolific that he hardly ever duplicated jokes in his steady march to superstardom.
Another buddy of mine, Patrick Doyle, helped to showcase Ali Baba early on television, and the comedy maestro truly deserves celebration for raising the stakes such that comedians can no longer be looked down upon as clowns. From its rustic analog base, Ali Baba took Nigerian comedy to the digital platform of pagers and onto the stratosphere.
For him, any talent given to one by God must be extended to others and the community at large for total sharing and enjoyment. His old jokes are being told all over the place by younger comedians, sometimes barely refurbished and most times wholly copied without any attribution whatsoever to the original source. He turns down jobs that are lowly priced so that the other comedians can feed off these jobs initially offered to him.
It is little wonder that Ali Baba got so highly paid that his doting banker wife, Mary, had to cry out: “You must be an armed robber to earn in one day what I get paid working for 30 days!”
It is all so cool to be paid more than a million quid per show because Ali Baba is definitely not a poor man’s brand. The rich and the poor can of course enjoy his many jokes, but the pocket needs to be heavy, indeed, to pay for them. He has opened doors for many other comedians, as he says: “There are over 40 big society weddings that take place every weekend and I cannot perform at all of them.”
It’s so funny that Ali Baba’s children think he is unemployed and jobless because he hardly ever goes to work as they see other fathers do. Ali Baba, in truth, qualifies for the rank of a Member of the Idle Rich Class, as playwright George Bernard Shaw would have it.
Ali Baba is so vastly wired that he even had a personal relationship with the late controversial founder of The Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN), Pastor T.B. Joshua. When Ali Baba somewhat reluctantly performed at Joshua’s 50th birthday ceremony, the pastor encouraged the comedian to get born again into church ministry, only for the King of Comedy to reply that he neither wanted to fast nor intercede for anyone and that he was, in fact, not a good boy. Pastor Joshua had a hearty laugh and replied that Ali Baba could not have been worse than David or Paul in the Bible and that even if he was a killer, God can use anyone. Ali Baba readily admitted that he was “handsomely rewarded by the cleric for gracing his 50th birthday celebration”.
After Ali Baba’s Covid-19 experience, Pastor Joshua called to pray for the comedian and sent something “for Phensic.” Ali Baba told Pastor T.B. Joshua that the “Phensic” made the prayer work faster!
After all, is said and done, laughter remains the best medicine.
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is a renowned poet, journalist, and author.
Ayodelé is a Lagos-based journalist and the Content and Editorial Coordinator at Meiza. All around the megacity, I am steering diverse lifestyle magazine audiences with ingenious hacks and insights that spur fast, informed decisions in their busy lives.
