Opinion
By Adama Gaye
IN her native Nigeria, she has already entered in the best books of history as Madame Due Process.
More is to come. The inspirational and action-oriented leader, I believe, Africa has been long yearning for, her trajectory to greater heights has only began.
Let me be blunt about this. For a person always in doubt, double-checking and slow in reaching a conclusion, nothing like that guided me in forming my sentiment about Doctor Obiagely, Oby Ezekwesili. As she turns 60, the age when life begins, I am humbled and delighted to join a diverse and vast chorus in saluting what is already a life replete with accolades but that is only now starting yet another landmark journey towards more and even brighter ones. I
In a double-S mold. Othereise, when all start afresh, at the pinnacle of a previous mind-boggling run!
There will be some to wonder how she did it. Others may believe it is cheer chance that give her such a life by our Creator. And indeed no matter what she put in her own right to reach those heights, there is one thing clear to anybody who cares to understand -and that is a violent reality to sprung to anyone’s face the moment Doctor Obi, as she is fondly referred to, appears either in a private or public encounter.
A true Leader
In my case, when I first met her, my impression quickly turned into an enduring, since then ever-lasting, conviction. Here, indeed, was in front of me a true leader, buyoant, intellectually intense while pragmatic, with her eyes akways solidly focussed to a sound and clear true North. Not a surprise in truth as she is the ultimate no-nonsense person.
I admit to be one of the countless people to be dazzled by her personae. A blistering feeling. Like I seldom have experienced in my lengthy career as a journalist, top official, author and not only an African but a world citizen.
Ours happened in Tangiers, a Northern city of Morrocco, few years back at one of those key international conferences where we were supposed, with other participants, to discuss about the future ot that Maghrebian Kingdom strategic movr as it was mulling over her return to the African Union (AU), the continental political body from which it had withdrawn over twenty-years earlier.
The gathering was star-studded, with the best and brightest invited from across Africa and many other places around the world.
In such circumstances, where huge egos are displayed only to beg for attention, I could not but notice the figure of a calm but strong lady.
Here she was, surrounded by the crowd, as she progressively imposed her thoughts on the public, the conference guests struggling to get closer to her, in a bid to hear what she got to say even before the formal opening of the event they all had come here to attend.
She was already clearly the towering figure in their midst without being the tallest.
Her traits and her dark, radiating ebene contexture, commanded attention and highlighted further her prime stature…
Here she was radiating, smily, and articulate, acting like a magnet, that the beautifully dark-skinned, short aired, projecting her white-teeths while her eyes seemed continuously turning all around where she stood, behind her academic glasses..
In my life I have encountered, travelled, be-friended people of all kinds, across geographies, including some who are considered as topmost-world leaders, such as Nelson Mandela, Paul Kagame, Jerry John Rawlings, Ellen-Johnson Sirleaf, Jacques Chirac, Kofi Annan, Abdoulaye Wade or The World Bank’s former President, Barber Conable, to name but a few.
Distinctive Character
Yet in Doctor Ezekwesili what made her one of the most distinctive character I have come to consider as the new face of an Africa in the making, albeit not yet enough known owing a soft discretion from what may be a religious self-restraint, is not just her humility.
She has no inferiority complex, though.
Personnality, oddly, is better measured through menials things.
Case in point: watch in her case how she dresses up.
The adoption of African clothing as her unmissable outfits when she could afford fancy signature designers ones translates her own seal of authenticity.
A stamp to express her africanity but also the strong sense of purpose she wants always to display against the backdrop of the clarity of thinking emanating from her relentless efforts at convincing any crowd on her never-halting journey.
When we met in Tangiers, while everyone was awaiting her presentation to the conference, we suddenly, shockingly, learnt, the next day, that she was leg-injured and had to fly out, back home -leaving a void the conference never recovered from!
However, less than a few months later, here she was, back to the frontline, field-ready, waging an electoral campaign in Nigeria, not long before I discovered she has laucnhed what is obvisosly one of the most compelling leadership program coupled with a Movement aimend a lifting African Politics from the doldrums it had be drowning in for ages….
Because these were projects fully-researched by her, I didn’t hesitate one second to join in when given the chance to do so.
Ever since, being in closer contact with her and people making the inner-circle of the ecosystem she devised, I have now found even more reasons to believe why my first instinct on her was prescient.
Not just a systemic approach in the rolling out of the project makes it one that may end up fixing politics in Africa, via a triangular pillar, from a capacitated electorate to the entrenchment of sound institutional frameworks as well as the emergence of a vast group, of leaders driven by ethical values, competence and capacity, thereby forming her new leadership initiative I am honored to be one of the students of.
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In this innovative enterprise, I could not escape its Ezekwesiliesque signature: evidence-based, sound, rigorous, promising Africa to at last engage on the right-road towards claiming a prime role in the world, in this century, as its resources, human and natural, but also pundits around the world believe it is destined to.
Who was better framed to make this possible than our own Doctor Obi, the ever firm, straightforward, articulate, principled leader whose generosity is expressed through her determination not to sit on any fence nor join party-goers and unfortunately the growing crowds of corruption-clients in our continent.
She was born to make a difference and has been at it since her birth, it seems.
Now, I am pleased to have enountered her, when she is prone to make history. I am solidly seated on that wagon launched at a breathneck speed, but in safe hands, under the control of a phosphoreacent but deliberate mind….
***Adama Gaye, a Senegalese is the former editor of the London-Based West Africa Magazine: a former Director of Communication of Ecowas; author: Tomorrow, The New Africa (Editions L’harmattan Paris) is a graduate, among many international programmes, of the SPPG, Cohort 2021.
Tags: Adama Gaye Oby Ezekwesili.
