A joyous Rasheed Yekini after he scored his country’s first world cup goal. How could he have known that the same country will later let him down.
Nigeria is legendary for despising its real heroes. While those who have paid their dues for country are sidelined, undeserving people posing as leaders, who have given this country nothing, feed fat on the commonwealth.
Rasheed Yekini was capped 58 times and he is Nigeria’s leading goal scorer with 37 goals. He was the one who scored Nigeria’s first ever world cup goal. It is needless to recall the shabby treatment Nigeria meted out to its hero, Yekini while he lived. But suffice it to say that he would have been alive today if Nigeria had cared for him when he needed ñhis country, he gave so much, the most.
If it was an opportunity missed by Nigeria, it is sad that no remorse has been shown as the country looks away as the 80 year old mother of the late legend, Alhaja Sikiratu Yekin now toil in poverty.
In an exclusive interview with the Punch, Alhaja Sikiratu Yekini weaved a moving story of life without her providing son. According to her, life has never been the same as she now sells bread in her daily struggle to eke out a living.
On NFF’s insensitivity towards her plight, she said: “They have not done anything. If government or people have been giving Yekini’s lawyer (Jibril Olanrewaju) in Ibadan, things to give me, he has not been sending them to me. I am not aware that NFF has given any money to the family since my son died.”
She explained that, because no one cared, poverty was one of the reasons that drove her into selling bread. “Poverty is one of the reasons. I want to make money. I may buy bread at N300; when I sell at N350, I make N50 profit, which I use to survive. I do not want to stay idle. I am selling bread to make money, so that I won’t die early.
“Since my son died in 2012, there was nothing else for me to survive on, so I started selling bread. I was not selling bread when Rashidi was alive; I started this business because of hardship.”
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