Death Of The Pacesetter

Muyideen Aromire was a pacesetter in many respects. Until 1988 when he came out with Ekun, the first made-in-Nigeria home video on VHS format, which signalled a new era in the country’s entertainment industry, film lovers in Nigeria had to visit cinema houses to watch any local movie. After acting in, producing and directing dozens of others in the Yoruba genre, he moved on to set up Yotomi Television, the first indigenous cable station in Nigeria. He was later to pioneer private investment in housing for low income earners with his Yotomi Estate. A prolific songwriter and entertainer, his Alpha Future Music has also impacted immensely on the local music industry. His death on Friday 4 July, from injuries sustained in a vehicle accident, therefore, was a big blow to various segments of the Nigerian society.

Popularly called Alade, a name he adopted in many of his films, Aromire died at Duro Soleye Hospital, Ikeja, where he was taken after his black Toyota Landcruiser collided with a trailer along the Lagos-Ibadan expressway. He was 45 years old.

Born in 1963 into the Aromire ruling house of Lagos, his quest to improve on his education took him to West Germany, as it was known then. He enrolled at Goethe Institut, Cologne, with the intention of studying Deutsche, the German language. But while there, he discovered the institute ran a crash programme in film and television production specifically for foreign students, and the lectures were delivered in English. After the three-month course, he was posted to Dutch Willick Television Village on the outskirts of Dortmund. The hosts at the television village ran the station in their own dialect of Deutsch.

Assured that he had not made a wrong choice by going into television production instead of the language he originally wanted to study, he decided he would do something similar when he got back to Nigeria. This was to later manifest as Yotomi TV, where all programmes are 100 per cent Yoruba language.