Ajibola Ogunshola: 80 Cheers to an Extraordinary Life

Ayokunle Ogunshola

No matter one’s level of despair about the state of Nigerian politics and society, there remain in the country exemplary people who remind one concretely of a Nigerian virtuousness that once existed whole and undaunted.  Their presence also rekindles – from time to time – one’s hope for a Nigeria that might yet come to be.  If, we could somehow imbue, overnight, all of Nigeria’s 200-million-plus citizens with the personal characteristics expressed by these exemplars, the country would be instantly transformed into a First World country.  Were extraterrestrial beings to visit our planet, asking to meet our best humans, Nigeria could present these exemplars as the country’s contribution to an assembly of the earth’s finest.  I can say here without any fear of contradiction that Ajibola Ogunshola — first black African Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries and former Chairman and/or CEO of several companies (including Niger Insurance and PUNCH Newspapers) — is one of these top-shelf Nigerians.  I am immensely privileged to call him my father.

I am not the first to think or talk of him this way. Despite being a publicly reserved person, he has admirers across Nigeria.  The broad strokes of his career as an (international) actuary and Nigerian corporate leader   the public domain.  Those who have never met him in person may have come across his deeply analytical attitude, as captured in several newspaper and internet interviews.  So, his persona is partly accessible to the public. But he has not only been a very productive man and leading citizen; he has also been a tremendously good father to my siblings and me, and a generous and loving grandfather to his grandchildren.  On this occasion of his 80th birthday, I will very briefly explore his life, highlighting a few instances that showcase his uncommon personal characteristics. You will see that he has impacted not only his immediate family but also the lives of many other people.  I am sure that at the end of this accounting, you will join me in raising a glass to wish the Baaroyin Ibadan a Hearty and Happy 80thBirthday.

An ‘A’ student up until his Higher School Certificate, purposeful hard work has proved to be one of his paramount virtues. I recall that, on some of his adult birthdays, he would deliberately work till as late as 9pm in his home office.  He lost no opportunity to emphasize – to us, his children – the importance of hard work and thoroughness in any task one under took.  In our growing years, he highlighted the poor maintenance culture in Nigeria as being rooted in a cultural disdain for thoroughness.  Although he did quite well in art subjects in secondary school, he also excelled in mathematics and, eventually, on the advice of his maternal eldest brother, chose to become an actuary.  He acquired his Mathematics degree at the University of Ibadan and qualified as an actuarial Fellow in 1973.  I am not going to rehash his very lengthy CV here: the points I wish to isolate are his choice of difficult career goals early in life; his commitment to the very hard work necessary to realize those goals; and the thoroughness with which he approached his goals.

You might then ask: surely, he must have relied on religion to provide him with the strength and faith to get through the obstacles in his way?  Surely, he must have consulted with a higher power, especially in the tougher stretches.  No, he did none of that. He became a man of reason early in life, committing himself to scientific research and knowledge as the basis of decision-making and action. His training in mathematics – with the formal reasoning and logical rigor that field demands — and later, his training as an actuary (requiring attention to many facts across several fields) developed this early philosophic attitude.  He committed himself to being analytical. “Thinking is hard,” he would tell me from time to time, pointing out that too many people shied away from it.  If only more people committed themselves to thinking, Nigeria would improve.  He introduced us in our teenage years to the need to provide hard evidence to support one’s thinking and arguments. He did not attend church with us on Sundays. I recall asking him, sometime before I turned ten, whether he believed in God.  He smiled and replied that he believed in Man.  Becoming non-religious myself as a teenager, I often wondered how he coped with so many religious people around him in a society struggling to develop technologically and politically. I later came to understand that, although he was not religious, he was not a nihilist.  He did not desire pretentiously to smash human conventions to smithereens in order to “rebuild society from scratch.”  Family structures; firm friendships and loyalties; the joys and vagaries of human life, deeply matter to him.  He loves his family and cherishes his friends. They enrich his life and give it meaning, motive, colour, and joy.

Though a firm disciplinarian as a father, he was not the harshest father around.  He was not strict for the sake of strictness. He introduced us to chess, table tennis, serious non-fiction books, and – much later – to wine.  He wanted us to see the whole of life, within reason. He made sure our home had the latest technological devices (VCRs, video game consoles, computers, etc.) so we had a very vibrant upbringing. He loved – and still loves – technology so he made sure we were surrounded by it. I was nine when he bought me my first computer – a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. This computer was the first of several personal computers he bought for my siblings and me in the years to come.  (He had begun using computers right from the start of his consulting practice.)  He would always find time to teach us any school subject topics if he found we needed further coaching.  “If I don’t already know it, I will read the text and then teach it to you,” he would say. This attitude to self-education was one of his greatest gifts to his children, as it conditioned us early to see no areas of knowledge as outside our ultimate capacity.  It imbued us with an intellectual confidence bordering on arrogance.  What motivated this passion – still evident in his actions today – for giving his children the best opportunities?  It would be too easy to say he was acting in accordance with Yoruba maxims like “our children must be properly trained” or “that is a good father’s duty. “An accident I suffered while at the University of Lagos provides some context into the raw emotion that motivates this analytical man.  I had dislocated my shoulder and been taken to the hospital.  My father was notified, and he rushed over to the hospital in time to witness the doctor set the shoulder back in place.  I was already unconscious from the sedative I had been given, but the ball had been out of socket so long (a story for another day) that I cried out in my sleep when the shoulder was reset.  According to my father’s driver at the time, my father unconsciously lunged at the doctor.  My father never mentioned the incident to me – I only heard it from the driver later that week.  There have been far more serious acts of fatherly love by him to all his children over the years, but none so great as the role he played for his beautiful, ambitious, and beloved daughter -our late, older sister – Yetunde at the terrible time she needed him most. 

Serious actions motivated by hard thinking and intense devotion constitute his life story. These actions have not been limited to his chosen profession or his immediate family. In 1987, following the untimely deaths of two of his maternal older brothers, he was placed in the very difficult position of not only leading the PUNCH Newspapers out of financial trouble but also of guiding and consolidating his late brother’s family. He was only 43 years old and had only spent one year in self-employment!  Most people that age have not figured out how to prosper their own businesses, but the Baaroyin had to solve the PUNCH’s problems while working to establish his own fledgling consultancy.  He had to widen his scope as a father to include his brother’s family. As if these problems weren’t enough, he had to succeed in these areas while an underdeveloped Nigeria suffocated under a military dictatorship. The difficulty of successfully raising a family of even two children under military dictatorships would hobble most men. Yet here was a forty-three-year-old father of four who had just quit the safety of paid employment now being thrust into business and extended family difficulty with the expectation that he steer the ship aright. The most amazing fact of the matter is that he eventually and mightily succeeded.

Merely stating that he was living and working under military dictatorships does not adequately convey the difficulty of his peculiar operating conditions. He was not your regular educated professional trying to survive under military rule.  The PUNCH, which he led, was one of major institutions entrenched in the struggle to restore Nigeria to civilian, democratic government.  The military dictators moved viciously against the PUNCH several times.  But Baaroyin Ogunshola, as Chairman of the newspaper, refused to stifle the courageous, truth-telling journalists at the newspaper.  At the newspaper’s leadership level, he matched the journalists’ boots-on-the-ground courage and helped stiffen the spine of resistance to the military. Beyond his own principled commitment to a free and democratic republic, he had been friends with the late Bashorun MKO Abiola at the time of his post-June12 imprisonment.  He kept faith with Abiola and his family throughout the June 12 struggle to the degree that, in those heady days, one writer in the Concord (whose name fails me) titled him the “generalissimo” of Abiola’s friends. Many years later, in 2017, Segun Adeniyi, a former Presidential spokesman, wrote in the Thisday newspaper: “In August 1997, as an Assistant Editor at Sunday Concord, I wrote a book to commemorate Abiola’s 60th birthday at a time he was in detention. [..] Titled ‘Abiola’s Travails’, the publication was partly financed by the then PUNCH Chairman, Chief Ajibola Ogunsola, easily one of the few genuine friends of Abiola…”

My father’s virtues of courage, active citizenship, and loyalty to his friends, crystallized in my consciousness one fateful night in July 1998.General Abacha had died in June.  The following month, US envoys arrived in Nigeria and met with MKO Abiola. We began to receive reports across all media that MKO was about to be released. There was a sense of expectation and lightness growing across the country. In our home, my father was in a palpably good mood. I had become quite political myself, so I was hopeful, even expectant. Then, in a very cruel plot twist, news of Abiola’s death flashed on our living room TV screen.  My father’s physical reaction to the bad news has never left me, as he rarely gave way to his grief. In that grief-stricken state, very late at night, he had me drive him to the PUNCH premises. Expectedly, riots had broken out spontaneously in the streets.  On our way, we were accosted by stick-wielding thugs who had formed illegal roadblocks and demanded our money.  Ordinarily, one might have been slightly fearful of the roadblocks and weapons wielded by the thugs, but the pain and anger caused by Abiola’s death gave us a sense of indifference to the thugs.  My father calmly and steadily gave them some money while raising his voice at them, which surprised the thugs somewhat.  They let us through, and we got to the PUNCH safely.

I wrote earlier about his thoroughness concerning his work. This thoroughness also extended to his health, especially as he grew older.  Diet, exercise, and medicine have long been topics of great interest to him.  A swimmer in his youth, he was always careful with his diet, concentrating mainly on controlling the amount of food he ate. “O ti po ju,” he would always say on spotting a plate of food piled high. On the level of a well-educated layman, he has kept up with the technical arguments around nutrition – whether to eat mainly plants or animals, for instance – and became a consistent exerciser in his later years. Walking long distances, lifting weights, and isometrics have been part of his regimen at different times throughout his life. Medicine, the third leg of longevity, is another area in which he has done much reading over the years. It all paid off very handsomely, not just in how good he always looked in his clothes, or in how long has been alive, but also in his health span.  At his 70th birthday party, he was able to easily out dance men 35 years younger than him. I am not talking about merely remaining on his feet or shuffling creatively to a beat.  He was jumping and dancing vigorously to drumming non-stop for 20 minutes straight.  His feet were hardly on the ground.  No one around him dared keep up.  As we all took it in, one older, female cousin remarked to me: “Grandpa is showing you boys how it’s done!”

Even though I have barely scratched the surface here, we can see a bit of what constitutes the life of an extraordinary man.  Baaroyin’s life demonstrates the virtues of analytic depth; immense productivity; attention to his own health; love and devotion to his immediate family; love and benevolence towards extended family and closest friends; loyalty and goodwill to his good friends.  In the wider socio-political context, he has been an active citizen and institution builder, founding or serving on many committees, boards and societies.  Because he has led a purposeful and noble life, it has been quite the life. A good life is a life to be proud of.  Pride, Aristotle tells us in The Nicomachean Ethics, “seems to be a sort of crown of the virtues; for it makes them greater, and it is not found without them. Therefore it is hard to be truly proud; for it is impossible without nobility and goodness of character.”

It is men like Ajibola Ogunshola that Aristotle referred to in his Rhetoric: “Honour is the token of a man’s being famous for doing good. It is chiefly and most properly paid to those who have already done good; but also to the man who can do good in future. Doing good refers either to the preservation of life and the means of life, or to wealth, or to some other of the good things which it is hard to get either always or at that particular place or time…”So let us honour and celebrate Baaroyin Ajibola Ogunshola on his 80th birthday. Eighty hearty cheers to Baaroyin Ajibola Ogunshola, my father, our father, a man my siblings and I are proud to call “father.”