“Owo Blow’s Fatai Speaks: Inside Sunday Afolabi’s Years of Struggle”

Before the minibus, before the viral video, before strangers began arguing online about what Nigeria owes its ageing entertainers, there was Fatai Ajeromi.

Audiences who came of age on Yoruba home video in the 1990s will remember him instantly; the hard-eyed member of a robbery gang in Tade Ogidan’s Owo Blow, a character whose arc, like the film’s larger theme, turned on the cost of a life built on shortcuts.

A few years later, Sunday Afolabi showed a different register entirely, playing the unyielding head warder in Madam Dearest, the kind of prison officer whose presence alone could quiet a cell block.

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Between the two roles, a generation of Nigerian filmgoers/watchers came to know his face long before they knew his name.

That history is precisely what made the viral clip so jarring for so many people. In it, an older, visibly leaner Afolabi is seen calling out destinations and ushering passengers into a commercial minibus, popularly known in Lagos as a korope, the kind of everyday hustle that draws no attention at all unless the man doing it once shared a screen with some of the biggest names in Nollywood.

Breaking the silence

Speaking on the Talk to B Show, hosted by actress Biola Adebayo and aired this week, Afolabi finally addressed the footage directly, and in doing so offered something the clip alone could not: context.

His account is less a single dramatic collapse than a slow accumulation of ordinary setbacks, the kind that quietly erode a working actor’s life over years rather than all at once.It began, by his telling, with a decision that made sense at the time.

Building a home of his own on a limited budget meant looking beyond central Lagos, and the land he could afford was in Badagry, a suburban border community well outside the industry’s usual orbit.

He put it simply; the distance from Badagry to the city became a barrier, in a profession where visibility and proximity to producers often decide who gets called for the next role.

A cascade of losses

What followed reads like a ledger of quiet indignities. Unable to afford repairs on his Nissan Quest, Afolabi eventually sold the vehicle for ₦180,000, using the proceeds to settle debts and buy a fairly used motorcycle, hoping commercial cycling could bridge the gap.

It did not go smoothly. Afolabi admits he was never comfortable on two wheels and fell repeatedly before an accident, a fall into a pothole during a plumbing job, injured his jaw badly.

A second crash left him hospitalised for close to two weeks, effectively ending his time on a motorcycle. Rather than fold, he tried on trade after trade; tailoring, solar panel installation, photography, and eventually, commercial bus driving.

He is unambiguous about why he chose hustle over handouts. What he said amounted to a simple declaration; begging for food is the one thing he refuses to do, no matter the job available.

When the internet meant well but got it wrong

Afolabi’s reaction to the viral video itself is more layered than a simple correction of the record. He acknowledged that public sympathy affected him, admitting the widespread concern made him feel the moment had been misrepresented to the world, even if the concern came from a good place.

He also recognises the professional risk etched into a video like that; a viral clip of an actor doing manual labour, however dignified the labour, can just as easily discourage a producer from calling with the next role as it can also rally public goodwill.

He was careful to note, too, that the minibus itself is presently out of operation, a detail that complicates the easy narrative of a man still out there hailing passengers every day.

What he is actually asking for

Unlike a general appeal for sympathy, Afolabi’s request is specific and practical. He is asking for accommodation support closer to Lagos’s central film hubs, reasoning that proximity alone would meaningfully improve his chances of being remembered for auditions and location shoots.

Alongside that, he has asked for help acquiring a reliable car, ideally a Toyota, that he could put to work as an e-hailing driver rather than a minibus conductor. His framing is worth sitting with; a shift from calling out bus stops to driving for Uber, he insists, carries no shame in either direction, only a difference in dignity of presentation, and the practical benefit of flexible hours that could still leave room for film work.

A pattern the industry keeps producing

Afolabi’s account does not exist in isolation, and it would be a disservice to tell his story as though it were an aberration.

Nollywood has, in recent memory, had to publicly reckon with veteran actress Jumoke George’s six years of homelessness while she searched for a missing daughter, a story that ended, after public outcry, with reunification and a gifted home.

Veteran musician Daddy Fresh has described being bedridden and hallucinating for over two years during a prolonged illness, as well as a host of others that actor Kunle Afod brings to his YouTube channel almost every week.

Each case is different in its particulars, but together they describe an industry whose veterans, especially its older male stars, frequently age out of visibility long before they age out of the will to work.

A career that predates most of his critics

It is worth remembering, amid the concern and the commentary, exactly how long Afolabi has been doing this work.

His roots in performance trace back to 1970 with the Adelove Theatre Troupe, well before Owo Blow or Madam Dearest existed, through decades of stage and screen work including Super Story and Village Headmaster, television institutions in their own right.

He has, by any honest accounting, already given Nigerian audiences more than half a century of his working life. Through all of it, he singled out one steadying presence; his wife, whose loyalty he credits without qualification as having carried him through the hardest stretches.

The ask, restated plainly

Strip away the video and the viral commentary, and what remains is an ordinary, specific request from a man who built decades of goodwill with Nigerian audiences and is now asking a fraction of it back; a place to live nearer the industry that made him recognisable, and a vehicle that lets him earn with dignity between roles.

Whether Nollywood, an industry not short of wealth even when it is short of institutional memory, chooses to answer that request may say as much about the business as it does about the man asking.