Adeniyi Olasoji Augustine is the Babaloja ( leader) of the biggest IT market in Sub-,Saharan Africa, Computer Village in Ikeja, Lagos. He recently celebrated his 68th birthday in grand style.
A native of Ifewara, Osun State but born in Lagos, he attended Ikeja Grammar School before proceeding to the United Kingdom to further his education and later proceeded to Chicago State University for his Bsc and MBA at Xavier University, Louisiana
He worked briefly with DHL in America and was posted to Nigeria as an expatriate. He was brought up in the Catholic faith and grew up in a family of eight children; four boys and four girls.
A philanthropist par excellence, he has contributed positively to the lives of the people around him. During his birthday celebration, he championed and supervised the distribution of food palliatives among traders in the market.
In this interview, he reminisced about his growing up life, challenges of running the market as well as plans by the government to relocate the market.
Recently you celebrated your 68th birthday, what are some of the fond memories of your childhood?
I have been very lucky with good health. With the way we are working in Computer Village , a lot of people don’t believe my age. They see me as younger than my age because I am still very active. Part of my activity is being the leader of the computer village. I deal with a lot of people which is interesting. They come with lots of problems which I have to resolve as the head of the market. We deal with different ethnic groups so we have to be careful with the way we deal with different cases. We are not biased because I am not tribalistic. We believe everybody is one. We have people incharge . All these activities serve as therapy for me.
As the leader of the market dealing with different ethnic groups, what challenges do you face because people are saying the Igbo have taken over the computer village? Iyaloja-General also locked the market some time ago.
Iyaloja-General never locked the market. What happened was that there was an agitation when we wanted to install Iyaloja and Babaloja in the village. I used to be the CDA chairman of this community for over five years before becoming Babaloja.
In 2019, there was a protest where some people said they don’t want Iyaloja and Babaloja,that the village is not where they sell pepper. Iyaloja-General made them understand that anywhere there are five or six shops, a leader has to be there. They made a lot of protests but at the end of the day, they found out she was telling the truth. Since then, we have been having cordial relationships. There is unity and security. Since we have been on board, there have not been cases of thieves breaking shops or robbers coming here.
How do you deal with unscrupulous ones among the traders because as good as the market is, it also has a reputation as a place where they sell fake things to unsuspecting buyers?
In a big market like this, you will definitely find some bad traders who do things like that. We have our task force on the ground who monitors these guys. We also have the youths in the community who knows most of these guys than us and they checkmate them . Moreso, if any of these people are caught selling ‘fufu phones ‘ to buyers, we hand them over to the police and they take them to court. Now, it has reduced drastically.
What is the worth of the market interms of Naira and kobo?
It is worth billions of Naira. We have about 6,000 shops and one shop may be worth N10million so you can imagine the huge amount when you multiply these together.
Many IT companies are in the computer village. Is there any partnership with them to train our youths in IT so they also can be producing?
When the computer village started, it was at the time our youths graduated and there were no jobs so a lot of them started learning how to repair phones which has helped them a lot. We have been planning with some phone companies to organize training programs. There was a time when Samsung organised training for our youths here. There are lots of engineers here better than people abroad, just that they don’t have opportunities like those abroad.
Government has been saying they want to relocate the market to Katangowa. What is the latest on this?
It started during the administration of Babatunde Fashiola as governor of Lagos State. We had town hall meetings with him and he told us the government wants to make this place like a high street like the ones in the UK, US and Tokyo.
Most of the buildings here are privately owned, they do not belong to the government. What we are looking at is maybe all the attachments can be removed in order to make it look more like a smart area.
