Nigerian Press Celebrates Kola Adeshina’s 62nd Birthday
A tribute published by This Day, one of Nigeria’s leading privately-owned newspapers and distributed through AllAfrica, has marked the 62nd birthday of Kola Adeshina. The writer opens with a playful rebuke in Nigerian English — “We can no longer use ‘rising star’ for my Oga again o” — before insisting that, at 62, Adeshina has long since moved beyond the phase of promise. This star, the columnist declares, is “set,” and the birthday week provided an occasion to read the many accolades poured out for him by admirers and colleagues.
The headline of the original piece, “A Shining Star,” captures the writer’s preferred register: not anticipation of what may still come, but recognition of what is already established. Tributes such as these, in which the birthday of a prominent Nigerian becomes a pretext for the wider public to take stock of a career, are a familiar fixture of This Day‘s weekend output. Founded in 1995 and based in Lagos, the paper is part of a small group of privately-owned Nigerian titles that have shaped public discourse for nearly three decades, and its reach extends well beyond print through its digital platforms.
As AllAfrica reported, the Adeshina tribute fits squarely within that tradition of in-house profiling, where the milestone is treated less as a celebration of a life still taking shape than as a gathering of public testimony about one already well-lived.
Sources
This report was written from coverage published by the following news organisations. Follow the links for the original reporting.
- AllAfrica — Nigeria: Kola Adeshina – A Shining Star
