The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Portrait

  • Portrait of Nigeria’s youth as caged animals (2)

    Millennials” have a delusive edge to them; a supposed sense of worth and ardour for growth that defies convention. Digital broadcaster, DSTV/Multichoice, understands this “truth” hence it sinks its fangs into their minds, as the falcon does to stray rat.

    There is no one to protect this significant youth divide from the aggressive cues and wild decadence the broadcaster insinuates into their psyches. The fault is hardly with DSTV/Multichoice, however, but with Nigerian parents who leave the purveyor of filth to the task of raising their wards.

    The blame goes to a Nigerian leadership stymied in a swamp of freebies, like complimentary boxes of the broadcaster’s DSTV Explora, free satellite subscriptions, among others.

    The press, which ought to serve as Nigeria’s shield and last bastion of resistance to the South African broadcaster’s perverse programming, like Big Brother Naija (BBN), and other weird inclinations, is enslaved to its tokens.

    In pursuit of N45million and a brand new SUV, inmates of BBN’s amorality jailhouse shunned dignity, decorum and supposed good breeding, to engage in wanton sex, voyeurism, and tantrums.

    Like dogs and bitches in heat, they had sex in a public toilet, before a global audience. The depletion of condoms provided by the show’s organisers, by inmates, further emphasised the crooked bent of the show. They wanted inmates to have random sex without inhibitions or fear of venereal diseases.

    The scene prefigures the transition in Nigerian civilisation from high morality to decadence. The antics of youth in the debate about the BBN depravity, however, emphasised a throwback to primordial whim.

    One hyperactive youth responded to my critique of the show, stressing that it offers youth like him, limitless opportunity to ‘blow’ (become celebrities) and achieve their dreams. He cited the case of certain former inmates who attained instant fame at their exit from the BBN show.

    To that, I said: “Should terrorism be legalised and considered productive because perpetrators make a fortune by it?” The youth quipped in response: “Oga na English u dey speak.”

    Since Shekau and co attained eminence and cult-following via Boko Haram; and the terrorist sect’s commanders receive at least N500, 000 monthly stipend in hard currency, for provisions and ‘running costs,’ why not declare Boko Haram, a legitimate path to acclaim and self-actualisation?

    Going by pro-BBN argument on social media, we could also approve armed militancy in the Niger Delta, because Asari Dokubo made a fortune by it. Then we can go on to legitimise armed robbery, internet scams/advance fee fraud, public office corruption and organised prostitution etc. because some youths attain celebrity and wealth by towing these criminal paths.

    The obsession with DSTV/Multichoice’s BBN show thrives by the broadcaster’s smirking depravity and the sudden melting of inhibitions of its Nigerian public. It’s like the holocaust and apocalypse.

    Society stands at ground zero, incinerated by the South African invader, DSTV/Multichoice. The latter’s Nigerian staff play pimping pawns; they persistently solicit for secondary pawns comprising fame-junkies and fortune hunters, eager to live like caged animals or guinea pigs, in the broadcaster’s televised dross – for prize money.

    The shows’ participants simply cheat themselves of a learning experience; they circumvent slow, steady, educative path to acclaim, to self-intoxicate in BBN’s accidental celebrity. Unknown to them, the instant fame and opportunities in which they luxuriate are merely flash currents in the electric moment before lightning strikes, and they are reduced to rubble: celebs, glitter and all.

    A glance behind the glitter usually reveals something more than a colourful paradise. It invalidates the deceptions of fame and instant wealth. It is akin to what Saul Bellow likened to picking up a dangerous wire fatal to ordinary folk or rattlesnakes handled by hillbillies in a state of religious exaltation, in his novel, Humboldt’s Gift.

    Many who grasped these super-charged wires and serpents have been found to incandesce in acclaim for a little while, and then they wink out, which leads to a more profound suspicion of DSTV/Multichoice’s BBN celebrity culture.

    Winners and losers are goaded into a maenadic dance of death by the manipulative broadcaster and their puerile, fawning fans. Eventually, they incinerate in despair, to rigid definitions of their lives by the public and their handlers.

    The discerning among them eventually understand, that they weren’t really significant. Looking inwards, they will cringe from different labels they had been led to bear and answer to, like bitches and pups in a dog farm.

    There is no gainsaying DSTV/Multichoice’s BBN perversity unmoors its audience from reality, coaxing them into a world of magic. In the cowardly retreat, truth is reviled and ignored according to manipulations of a predetermined universe, where the search for truth and solutions to real life problems become irrelevant in the scheme of things.

    At the moment, the Nigerian youth is too intoxicated by filth and primordial sentiments to mind real issues that affect their world, and which may ruin their lives in the long run. Boko Haram’s abduction of 110 school girls in Dapchi, for instance, was negligible to them.

    The sad case of Hauwa Mohammed, the 25-year-old midwife and ICRC staff who got kidnapped by Boko Haram wasn’t worthy of their fury or obsession. Hauwa’s death cry, via Whatsapp didn’t incite their angst. It hasn’t provoked them to action.

    “Please go and tell my parents they don’t know the situation that their daughter is in now. For God’s sake, go and tell them…We are now in the barracks and the gunmen have come back again. Oh, Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajiun (We belong to Allah and to Him we shall return),” she cried.

    Hauwa still isn’t considered front-page material by a cowardly press, and her abduction doesn’t infuriate her spineless peer or spur them against the criminal leadership that renders several Hauwas easy marks to terrorists and other delinquents.

    They would rather fixate on peers bonking each other like he-goats and dogs in heat, in the BBN show.

  • Portrait of selflessness

    Two important events happened in the family of Bauchi State Governor Mohammed A. Abubakar. In Lagos, Vanguard newspapers honoured the governor with the prestigious ‘Governor of the Year’ award while his wife Hadiza received the Zik Award for Humanitarian Services.

    It is needless to state that it was a well-deserved recognition. Her life trajectory long before she became the first lady of Bauchi State had been that of service. She has had an unblemished record and a distinguished public service career spanning over 30 years, retiring at the peak as a director in the nation’s apex bank, the CBN.

    Her ascendency to the top wasn’t by accident. It was a mixed bag of “inspiration” and “perspiration”. Juggling a career and raising a family required great sacrifices. This could be scary to the faint-hearted. Like her husband, obstacles are no more than opportunities to excel. That was exactly what she did, thanks to a greatly supportive husband. But before then, a doting grandfather and scholar of repute had encouraged her baby steps in the acquisition of eastern and western knowledge at a time the girl-child education didn’t excite most folks.

    Her ‘can do’ spirit manifested from her teens as an undergraduate at the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) where she met the young Mohammed A. Abubakar who later became her husband. Their union has proved, in graphic terms, the vision of the father of modern Singapore, Mr Lee Kuan Yew in which he saw an educated couple with a minimum of first degree excelling. At the time he recommended that a graduate male should marry a female graduate in Singapore, he was roasted. The policy was derided and mocked. The womenfolk were up in arms. They kicked and screamed. His argument was that if an educated man marries an educated woman, they would breed smart children. This was in the early 80s.Today Singapore is a first world with a GDP higher than the USA and zero illiteracy.

    The Abubakars have actualised the Singaporean leader’s vision. Husband and wife had degrees from the start. Today, they share multiple degrees between them and after nearly forty years of their union, five children and six grandchildren later, the bond between them waxes stronger by the day. Their children clearly have inherited their smart genes. All five of them are graduates, some with masters to boot.

    Rarely do you see a “power” couple complementing each other so perfectly. In Hadiza MA Abubakar you find independence enough to complement and support her husband, feminine enough to have her identity and respect boundaries.

    She is a unifier. She puts others first. Naturally, people are drawn to her. From across divides- family, work place and community, Hadiza Abubakar lives up to her name as a giver and leader.

    Her NGO, the Bauchi Sustainable Women Economic Empowerment and Peace Initiative (B-SWEEP) have altered, for good, the depressing narrative of misery and want among the womenfolk in the state. It seeks to boost  “the productive capacity of women through skills acquisition and financial literacy.  It is also working to complement government effort by providing maternal and child care delivery services, re-integrating women and girls into the formal school system, enhancing food security through women participation in agriculture and creating awareness and coordinating activities aimed at fostering peace”

    Lofty ideals, no doubt. To match vision with action, the B-SWEEP has trained over 600 women, youths, and IDPs in various skills, provision of foodstuff, clothing, and hygiene items to leprosy, tuberculosis patients, VVF centre, Rehabilitation Centres, and School for Children with Special needs.  It has provided nutritional meals to 1400 malnourished children as well as the provision of delivery kits to 1600 pregnant women across the 3 senatorial zones in the state.  B-SWEEP also supports the treatment of some cancer patients.

    Over 100 IDPs orphans and vulnerable children in primary and secondary schools have been given scholarship.  It is collaborating with UNESCO to see how they can integrate over 500 women and girls back to formal and non-formal school system.  On peace B-SWEEP has organized peace clubs in 10 selected public schools so as create awareness and promote peaceful co-existence among our youths?

    She has interfaced with the Ministry of Women Affairs and Child Development and also the State Ministry of Health so as to touch the lives of women, children and vulnerable groups.  Over 2000 women drawn from the    20 local government areas were trained in various skills, wheel chairs and other relief materials provided to the physically challenged persons, distribution of food items to IDPs in the state, distribution of food and sanitary items to the motherless babies’ home, distribution of food items to women during festive periods i.e. Sallah, Christmas. The list is long.

    In Hadiza Abubakar is a rock on which her family leans for support. She is a steadying hand all the time to her husband at the home front. Little wonder, she is being regularly celebrated and showered with accolades. The Zik award is the latest of such recognition. Others are Total Magazine Most Outstanding First Ladies Award, Most Valuable Governors Wives Award, ECOFEPA Ambassador, Northern Nigeria Women of Merit Award, NCWS Meritorious Award, and the National Advocate for Vaccine Access Award, Maternal and Child Health Champion Award, World Humanitarian Awards, CBN Best Staff Performance Award and NTA Outstanding Performance Award.

    With a first degree in English and a graduate degree in Public Administration, a chain of local and foreign courses in human resource management, they don’t come any better. Only a few came this prepared for the office of the First Lady of a state.

    • Ali is an aide to Governor MA Abubakar
  • Portrait of a Nigerian marriage in a heartbreaking debut novel

    Portrait of a Nigerian marriage in a heartbreaking debut novel

    The two narrators of Ayobami Adebayo’s stunning debut novel — a Nigerian woman named Yejide and her husband, Akin — remember the stories they heard when they were children, and they hope to pass on these stories to their own sons and daughters. They are folk tales featuring talking animals and magic potions, but while they often come with an old-fashioned moral (“He who has children owns the world”), Yejide devises her own versions, adding new bits and pieces as she goes along, turning them into allegories that speak to her own life and that of her country.

    Like those fables, Adebayo’s “Stay With Me” — a beautifully produced book with a Matisse-inspired jacket that felicitously captures the spirit of the author’s writing — has a remarkable emotional resonance and depth of field. It is, at once, a gothic parable about pride and betrayal; a thoroughly contemporary — and deeply moving — portrait of a marriage; and a novel, in the lineage of great works by Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, that explores the pull in Nigeria between tradition and modernity, old definitions of masculinity and femininity, and newer imperatives of self-definition and identity.

    Beginning in the 1980s, a period of political tumult in Nigeria, and moving on through 2008, “Stay With Me” fluently explores the interface between the personal and the political, and the precariousness of stability and safety in both realms: how public events — be they elections, protests or coups — take place while people are getting on with their daily lives, eating or opening a window, fighting with a spouse or taking care of a sick child; how dreams, ideals and romantic relationships can be shaped by distant but momentous developments on the national stage.

    Adebayo — who was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and who studied with Adichie and Margaret Atwood — has two master’s degrees in creative writing, and “Stay With Me” is deeply informed by a knowledge of contemporary and classic literature.

    But while readers may pick up on this novel’s many allusions and borrowings (for instance, its nods to Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” and Lauren Groff’s “Fates and Furies,” in creating a stereoscopic portrait of a marriage), “Stay With Me” feels entirely fresh, thanks to its author’s ability to map tangled familial relationships with nuance and precision, and her intimate understanding of her characters’ yearnings, fears and self-delusions.

    “Stay With Me” pivots around a series of secrets Akin has kept from his wife — and the terrible, unspooling consequences those secrets will have on their marriage, and on the life of Akin’s importunate brother Dotun. The novel’s one flaw is that it’s hard for the reader to believe that Yejide, however naïve she might be, would not have immediately grasped the first of Akin’s lies, but Adebayo’s orchestration of the emotional chain reaction set off by those deceptions is so assured that this stumbling block is soon forgotten.

    Akin tells us that he loved Yejide from the moment he met her, but four years of childless marriage blunted his belief that “love could do anything”: “If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and sometimes does break. But even when it’s in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn’t mean it’s no longer love.”

    When they married, both Yejide and Akin said no to polygamy, but as years pass without a child, their relatives insist that Akin take a second wife, Funmi. Yejide is told to accept Funmi as a “younger sister,” a “friend,” a “daughter.” Akin’s mother cruelly says: “Women manufacture children and if you can’t you are just a man. Nobody should call you a woman.” She goes on: “We are not asking you to stand up from your place in his life, we are just saying you should shift so that someone else can sit down.”

    Yejide, whose own mother died in childbirth, becomes desperate to have a baby. She gets hospital tests, and the names of doctors, pastors and herbalists. In one sad, comic sequence, she treks up the “Mountain of Jaw-Dropping Miracles” to visit a healer named Prophet Josiah, who has her dance with a white goat she’s dragged to the summit as his chanting followers swarm her. She soon believes she’s pregnant, despite doctors’ insistence that there is no baby.

    These events are recounted with a mix of sympathy, humor and suspense, but as the novel progresses, it shifts into a more minor key, as Yejide does become pregnant, only to face the prospect of sickle cell disease in her children. Instead of bringing the couple closer together, this fear accelerates the fissures in their marriage, as Yejide realizes that Akin has withheld painful truths from her from the start — that she had refused to see “things standing in plain view.” It’s a realization that forces her to question traditional attitudes toward women in Nigeria — including the primacy of motherhood and deference toward their husbands — and to try to sort out her own expectations from those she’s inherited from her family and society.

    Adebayo, who is 29, is an exceptional storyteller. She writes not just with extraordinary grace but with genuine wisdom about love and loss and the possibility of redemption. She has written a powerfully magnetic and heartbreaking book.

  • Portrait of the Nigerian as a ‘black’ ant

    We live to a devastating stereotype. Like fattened ducks, we waddle against the walls of institutionalized pigeonholes as the ram thrashes in its soul at the descent of the butcher’s jackknife. But we are no ducks neither are we cattle of any kind. We are humans, learning to live as livestock, because we think it’s shrewd and fashionable to do so.

    Freedom has a thousand charms to show, that slaves, however contented, never know, writes Cowper and quite truthfully too. The tragedy is in the details. And the details are all around us, in our past glories and defeat, infinite quirks and measured sobriety. It is in our fabled heritage and defunct humanity, colourful history and grand inadequacies. It’s what separates our mistakes from what we term fate. And what symbolizes our mental inferiorities and political expediencies.

    But necessity, like William Pitt the Younger would say, is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants and the creed of slaves. Slaves like the Nigerian nigger.

    A 27-minute video among other things, distinguishes a select few of Nigeria’s pioneer statesmen from the gangs of glorified eejits – if I may insult poor eejits by comparing them to the country’s ruling class – that currently occupy the country’s corridors of power. The video is of the July 1961 visit of Nigeria’s first Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, to the United States of America (USA).

    Great thanks to Farooq Kperogi, a Nigerian scholar resident in the USA; after he stumbled on the video on the website of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, he promptly shared it with friends on Facebook. The video is intense with charm and instructive with lessons in manhood, desirable pride, poise and refinement epitomized by the league of extraordinary statesmen that served Nigeria at independence.

    Between July 25 and 28, Kperogi, enthused and it could be confirmed in the video, the late Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and a modest entourage of about 10 key government officials visited the United States on the invitation of the late President John F. Kennedy during which Tafawa Balewa visited major historical landmarks in representative parts of the United States and addressed a special joint session of the United States Congress that was convened in his honor.

    Only a select few, as Kperogi noted, “are accorded the honour of addressing a joint session of the United States Congress. Certainly no Nigerian head of state has been accorded this honour since Tafawa Balewa.” According to the website of the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, since 1874 when the King of Hawaii first addressed a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress, there have been only 112 such privileges granted to foreign leaders and dignitaries.

    Watching the video was as enchanting as it was delightful; Balewa’s address to the joint session was persistently “punctuated” by thunderous, standing ovation. In all the cities he and his entourage visited, Americans came out to wave at them hospitably, and U.S. government officials bowed very respectfully when they shook hands with the Nigerian Prime Minister. Thus was the depth of respect the pioneer Nigerian leader and nationalist inspired in 1960s America.

    Men like Balewa and his contemporaries at the period in the persons of the late Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe to mention a few, personified the infectious grandeur, unimpeachable character, progressiveness, patriotism, depth and self-assurance that remains the prime requirements of statesmanship that Nigeria and the African continent deserves. These men, despite their shortcomings, were no Nigerian niggers. The same can hardly be said of incumbent Nigerian leadership and citizenry.

    If you separate President Muhammadu Buhari and Vice President Yemi Osibajo from the herd, a greater section of the incumbent leadership could be likened to men gifted with the mentality of the hyena and the sensibility of the guinea fowl. The same may be said of the citizenry. Our lust for unearned riches, acclaim and the West’s approval, illustrates the Nigerian adult’s ignorance and awfully preadolescent mind. It reiterates a very shrill cry for help that’s at once self-seeking, infantile and regressive.

    It is what makes Nigerian public officers pilfer and deplete the nation’s treasury in order to finance reckless trips abroad, to learn Western-European governance styles. It is what makes Nigerian leaders throw their doors open to every visiting foreign cub reporter even as they deny seasoned journalists back home, similar opportunities. During such interviews, such characters persistently expose themselves to ridicule, presenting themselves as inveterate boobs; by their utterances which are tailored to glorify the disturbing plots and agenda of the foreign newshounds.

    The citizenry is guilty of the same inanity as indicated by the widely broadcast documentaries on Niger Delta militancy, the insidiously “professional” and manipulative “This is Lagos” and “Law and Disorder in Lagos” documentaries on Lagos which glorifies the city’s shanty and street urchin (area boys) culture and malaise. Such media fare reveals contemptible plots to fulfill derogatory news agenda to the delight and pitiful acquiescence of the news subjects.

    I am yet to see a Nigerian journalist travel abroad for instance, to enjoy similar courtesies and lack of common sense from the countries’ leadership and citizenry. It’s even more worrisome to note that the incumbent Nigerian leadership has never enjoyed and will never enjoy the kind of respect accorded the late Tafawa Balewa, Obafemi Awolowo and their ilk at independence. It is impossible for the average Nigerian to enjoy such courtesies and honor given the inexplicable greed, complacence, degeneracy, shallowness of thought and character characteristic of majority of the Nigerian people.

    The kind of inferiority complex projected by the ruling class and passed down to generations of Nigerian youth affirms the western belief that we are not as mentally proficient as they are. Consequently, they see us as irredeemably ignorant, inept, corrupt and susceptible to inexplicable violence and inferiority complex. Unfortunately, the average Nigerian’s sociability and prodigal nature manifests to further serve as evidence of a collective idiocy and inferiority complex of a crude race that recognizes and accepts its intolerable limitations.

    That we are very accommodating and hospitable like Akin Akindele rightly notes shouldn’t make us “bend over backwards to impress any white or yellow man more than we would any other ordinary person.” But the import of such admonition is lost on us; mediocre and highly incompetent foreigners come to Nigeria and are immediately regarded as ‘expatriates.’ Yet many brainy and exceedingly talented Nigerians are treated with contempt and suspicion at home and abroad. Abroad, they are despised for being Nigerians based on bigoted generalizations about the average Nigerian’s fraudulence and deadliness. At home they are despised for being different and capable of evolving the process that would lead to that progressive and prosperous socio-economic system that we seek.

    If we are to be judged by indigenous mores of morality or what Greek philosopher, Pythagoras, deems the human measure of all things, we shan’t fare excellently well, not by a smidgen. We have fared diffidently for too long; that is why local and international idiots as fragile as clay toys have evolved into outsized heroes and gods, on our watch. To the rest of the world, we are just a bunch of contemptible niggers; still.

  • Official portrait for Ambode

    Official portrait for Ambode

    Lagos State Governor-elect Mr. Akinwunmi Ambode yesterday released his official portrait.

    He  said he would want to be addressed  as Mr. Akinwunmi Ambode, the Governor of Lagos State.

    A statement by his media team said the governor-elect would not want any other appellation to be added to his name.

    “He hereby puts it on record that from May 29, he wishes to be addressed as Mr. Akinwunmi Ambode, the Governor of Lagos State,” the statement said.

    The portrait produced by famous photographer TY Bello shows Ambode in a black suit, a white shirt and a blue tie.

    The portrait can also be viewed on  www. akinwunmiambode.com

  • Portrait of a rare amazon

    Portrait of a rare amazon

    Eunice Oluwafunmilayo Adunni Olayinka (nee Famuagun), considered one of the most attractive and resilient women in Yorubaland, attained corporate and political prominence through commendable hardwok, commitment to excellence, courage and perseverance. She was a perfect fusion of ageless beauty and profound brains. All through her 19,268 days on earth, she radiated inward and outward beauty, and was unarguably an epitome of humility, fidelity, faithfulness, forthrightness, elegance, honesty and decency. A diamond vessel of honour she was; her commitment to humanitarianism and Ekiti transformation was quite legendary.

    A native of Ado-Ekiti, ‘Funmi was born at precisely7am, on Friday 20th June 1960 in Ado Ekiti,to the noble family of Chief Festus O.Famuagun, the Agbaakin of Ado Ekiti and Deaconess G.A Famuagun (nee Faboro) from Ido-Ekiti.  Her ‘Dad’, as she fondly called him in many of her letters to him while she studied abroad, is a retiree of the Western Nigeria Cocoa Board, while her mother was a textile trader in Ado Ekiti. She is the first daughter of her parents. Her baptism and naming was performed on 20th November 1960 at the Christ Apostolic Church and she grew up beaming virtues, exuding wisdom andinspiring affection.

    She was admitted and enrolled at Holy Trinity Grammar School in January 17th 1972 at the age of 12.During herstay at the Holy trinity Grammar School, she was consistently rated as an exceptionally well-behaved student, who displayed aptitude for French, mathematics and geography. She rounded-up her secondary education in 1976 and proceeded to Olivet Baptist High School, Oyo, for her Higher School certificate (HSC) on November9th 1976. At Olivet Baptist High school, young ‘Funmi was again rated as a very well-behaved and dedicated student; her marital, social, career and political life bore the hallmarks of her long-standing good character and devotion.

    Her combined academic performance at Holy trinity Grammar school and Olivet Baptist High School earned her the overseas admission into Central State University, Oklahoma, USA, to study Business Administration.

    She arrived at Central State University (CSU) on Monday, 12th September 1977 to commence her undergraduate studies. Upon settling downin her hostel on campus, she wrote a very inspiring and prophetic letter to her father. The second paragraph of that letter was deeply intuitive and discerning, it depicted her appreciative attitude, and faith in God. She prophetically and prayerfully stated:

    “Infact, I’ve got to thank you a lot for the opportunity you gave me that am here today, while am thanking the Lord too, am not so surprised because you had been a father who always runs after the progress of your children. God too will surely recompense you and give you longer life so that you will eat the fruit of your labour. I also pray that you may increase your efforts to do the same to other brothers and sisters after me. More grease to your elbow.’

    36 years after, these prayers and fervent wishes have come to fulfillment in many ways.

    She was named to the Central State University honour roll and was consistently on the dean’s honour roll ‘as a result of outstanding scholastic achievement’. She graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in business administration (Marketing) in 1981 and proceeded to study for her master’s degree the same year. She completed her post-graduate studies in 1983 and was awarded an M.A. in Political Science (public administration).

    She was nominated as a member of ‘who is who’ in American university in 1981. She was mobilized fornational youth service Corps (NYSC) in 1984 and posted to the National Cereal Research Institutein Ibadan, Oyo State, for her primary assignment. She completed her national service in 1985.

    Her career life began while she was studying at the CSU. She seamlessly combined full time studies with part-time work. She served as Clerk at the Central State University Bookstore, as Supervisor in Sales & Marketing at Street Merchandise and as Cashier & Office Clerk at Sterr’s Foods.

    ‘Funmi returned to Nigeria after her studies abroad, and her first full-time post-school employment was with First Bank of Nigeria Plc as Supervisor in June 1986.She was at different periods appointed as Relationship Manager for Corporate Accounts in Access Bank, the defunct Merchant Banking Corporation (MBC) and the United Bank for Africa Plc.

    In August 2002, multi talented ‘Funmi took up the Corporate Communications role and moved over to head the Corporate Affairs Division, UBA.  She afterward became Head, Brand Management & Corporate Affairs, thereby leading the Team responsible for delivering a compelling Brand proposition and re-branding of the erstwhile UBA which helped to drive the bank’s business strategy, increased its visibility and added value to the total image of the Brand.

    ‘Funmi was also the 2nd Vice President of the Association of Corporate Affairs Managers of Banks (ACAMB) between 2002 and 2004.

    She was Co-Chairman, Branding Sub-Committee and Member, Media Relations Sub-Committee during the merger process of UBA & Standard Trust Bank.

    Her last role in banking was Head, Corporate Services, ECOBANK NIG. PLC where she was responsible for communicating the bank’s activities to the public, relationship management with thepublic and providing feedback to management as it relates to the total image of the bank. Additionally, she also headed the General Internal Services Unit with responsibility for overall co-ordination of administrative services for the entire bank.

    Her entry into politics and public service began in 2006 when she was deservedly nominated to contest as deputy alongside Dr. KayodeFayemi, present Executive Governor of Ekiti State under the Action Congress party ticket. At the expense of her personal comfort and risk to life, she was actively involved in the struggle to reclaim their mandate. For almost three years, she fought doggedly for their stolen mandate with uncommon bravery, valour and tenacityreminiscent of Princess Moremi of Ife and Queen Amina of Zaria.

    As deputy Governor of Ekiti State, ‘Funmi assiduouslyperformed oversight functions over the Muslim Pilgrims Welfare Board, Christian Pilgrims Welfare Board, State Emergency Relief Agency, Boundary Commission, Ministry of Local Governments and Chieftaincy Affairs, Urban Renewal Agency, Multipurpose Credit Agency, Fountain Holdings & Investment Limited and Community & Social Development Agency. Her skillful co-ordination of these MDAs enhanced their overall performance and service delivery. She additionally sat as chairperson ofnumerous State Executive Council-empanelled committees including the State Economic Management Team, Brand and Communications Strategy Committee, State Tenders Board, to mention a few.

    She was responsible for the strategic re-branding of the State, culminating into a new and distinctive visual identity that has so far projected a coherent image and definitive slogan expressingthe core ideals and goals (political, economic, perception change) for the State.

    Her loyalty, courage, transparency, commitment, devotedsupport for the Fayemi administration and constancy of purpose has led to uncommon transformation of Ekiti State across the broad spectrum of the administration’s 8-points agenda and delivering beyond election campaign promises.