19/08/2025
JUST IN| The whole world will know me today - Sam Okwaraji's last statement hours before the fateful match on Saturday August 12, 1989
It's exactly 36 years that Sam Okwaraji left the world while playing a World Cup qualification match against Angola at the Lagos National Stadium in Surulere, Lagos State, but his last words keep reverberating.
His ex-teammate, Ademola Adesina, confirmed Okwaraji's last words in an interview with Punch. Read below:
“He was my roommate and we were very close. We left Belgium together for the game against Angola. The Friday before the game, while chatting with Sam, he said, ‘Demola, if I play this match (Angola game), the whole world will know me, they’ll look at me well and the whole world will notice.’
“That was the last time he spoke to me. After making that statement in the room, the next day was the day of the match. We trained together, and then we left in the team bus. On the day of the match, around 10am or 11am, the bus came to Sheraton to pick us, but he (Okwaraji) told me he’s going to visit one of his family members; that he’ll soon come back, and he’ll be a bit late.
“Eventually, he came back and when we asked him where he went to, he said he just went to visit his family, and he was on the match list, all of us. That’s the last time I could remember we spoke.”
Adesina also said: "He was a jovial guy, a very good man. I can never ever forget because we were in the same room, I think Room 224, but what he told me, ‘the whole world will know me if I play this match’, is something I can never ever forget, but it took me years before I remembered the meaning of what he said. Maybe, he saw it in his spirit a premonition of something like that, maybe something was going to happen to him, I don’t know. The whole world will miss him.”
