BY
Chief Femi Adagunodo
“No man can struggle with advantage against the spirit of his age and country. However powerful a man may be, it is hard for him to make his contemporaries share feelings and ideas which run counter to the general run of their hopes and desires. ” – Alexis De Tocqueville,
Democracy in America.
“A national brand is shaped to a large extent by a nation’s conception of heroes; by the character of those it bestows iconic status upon” – John Kayode Fayemi, Reclaiming The Legacy, 2013.
Stop deceiving yourself. You cannot stop the hands of the clock.
But you may keep trying sha, finally,
iwo lo maa su, because even if you are not only trying to stop the clock, even if you choose to actually break it, you will eventually find, to your shock, consternation and ultimate frustration, that even a broken down clock will always be correct two times every day. It’s you that will get tired.
From next week, thousands of goodwill messages and eulogies of various shades, tones and lengths will start going out on sundry media platforms in felicitation; JKF is 60!
It is really an achievement worthy of thanksgiving on any scale conceivable to see JKF attain the now highly sought after age of 60, given the turbulent weather under which his political ship set sail more than three decades ago.
Nigeria, is a country that swallows giants and coughs out lilliputians.
It is a country where leadership has never been more tasking; where young leaders now grow grey hairs contending with the endless list of expectations that the successor generation nurse; where youths who have had little more than a slight political experience think they already found the formula for solving life’s socio-political problems which daily develop compounded dimensions of which leaders the world over are still pondering how to confront.
Former British Prime Minister and leader of the free world during the Second World War, Sir Winston Churchill was once asked why he always expressed self-assurance that posterity would be kind to him, he told them that he would write it by himself, and he did. JKF has been doing the same thing too writing endlessly, but posterity, it seems cannon wait, it has already begun flashing its fine set of teeth, beaming smiles at him.
JKF’s legacy projects, dotting the landscapes of the state, now stands as towering monuments to his life of service to humanity. Over this period, he has not only led his generation in starring down the vicious regime of military dictatorship, he has also inspired youths to take a shot at the purported “dirty game” of politics, and many of them are now making bold decisions at diverse fronts of elective representation. There is also a growing class of young leaders in diverse fields of innovation, business developments, investment prospects and creativity.
Taking their wings right from his shoulders, they now represent an imperishable legacy that will keep the nation on sound footings in a sustainable way. Whether or not the full testament of Ekiti leadership history is rewritten, updated, reviewed, revised, abridged or even subjected to the most malicious of revisionism, the works of JKF will keep his name and his inclusion on the front burner of leadership discussion and activities.
It is in the light of all these that this celebration of the age, person and achievements of JKF matters.
Not a few of us have been beneficiaries of this leader’s constantly expanding leadership influence and far reaching hands of service. The number of Nigerians and Ekiti people whose lives have been positively impacted by his works constitute an endless list. The beneficiaries and the extent of reach of the JKF midas touch during his governorship era in Ekiti and during his time as our Federal Minister of Mines and Steel Development can never be fully known.
What is undeniable however, and more of which would be revealed in time, is the fact that his good works live in the very existence and works of those people who worked with him and the state and people he worked with and still continues to serve directly and indirectly.
Another of the many reasons why we cannot stop celebrating JKF is because we all represent the same posterity that we like to refer to and await. I like to know if indeed anyone has witnessed a more favourable verdict of posterity than when a man sees, during his own lifetime, the works of his hands progressing and gaining unintended social momentum, popular relevance and multiplying values.
Many in my generation neither ever had the benefit of meeting or working with Chief Obafemi Awolowo or any of his major contemporaries, but JKF is one of the great leaders we met and must appreciate.
I have had the unmitigated grace of not only working with JKF for more than fifteen years, but as one still trying to justify my inclusion in the humbling grace of a continuing call to service by the unmatchable Governor, His Excellency, Biodun ABAYOMI OyebaHis BAO, I am still indirectly hitching a hike with JKF on the long trajectory of his seemingly infinite political journey of service.
A leader of simultaneous inimitable local uniqueness, national relevance and escalating global rank, JKF occupies a class of his own among the leaders. And I can hazard the effrontery propose JKFism as a school of thought in political sophistication.
My professional engagements as a journalist freshly venturing into photography brought me close to him in 2007 when photographing that movement of early Action Congress leaders of the South West. The heady turn of events of the Ekiti Governorship election re-run and (re re-run) eventually threw me into the ringside seat while his political struggles came to its most critical points. I witnessed and covered his struggles not merely as a spectator, but in the mould of a media ball boy during certain critical, observable phases of the struggles that characterized his turbulent political career.
Just in the ways we eventually came around to accord high regards to Chief Awolowo’s legacies today, experience keeps showing that many legacy works of great leaders often take years, even decades before they are fully hatched, understood or appreciated by even the same people those works were meant to serve.
For the reasons of the shifting and unstable nature of human existence, perception and appreciation, how long a leader’s work lasts in memory or in the long run of history mostly depends much less on how far the leaders went in promoting them by themselves. Rather, it depends much more on several other factors, most of which lie largely on the side of life’s turn of events itself. These factors often include what array of issues of importance the people of that particular time considers to be of utmost importance to them, whether on the short or long term; another one is whatever issues of outlandish importance the people allow themselves to be distracted by at that particular point in time; and the other one is the unforeseen economic, social and political realities providence brings to a people at a later time soon or long after that leader has left the saddle.
Good works are borne of qualities and durability of their own and they almost always live in the memories of grateful people forever even though time and events still find ways to play their own unavoidable roles.
JKF has already worked hard enough, and is still working. That is why he holds down a place of high regards today within the league of leaders in Nigeria and generations of their followers, he has had almost too much to do since he left office, and just as when he was still in office, his presence has been observed to be regular where critical national and international issues are being negotiated both in Nigeria and overseas. His legacy projects as two time governor of Ekiti state are there for all eyes to see, trying to list them is tantamount to introducing Jesus Christ to Virgin Mary; who passes through the center of Ado Ekiti the state capital and fails to catch a glimpse of Ekiti’s own “White House” kissing the clouds on Oke Ayoba located right in the middle of the city? The Ekitikete Pavilion in Ado Ekiti nko?, The New expressway leading other Nigerians from Iyin Ekiti into Ado Ekiti nko?, The Ekiti State Water Corporation complexes on Iworoko road nko? The Oja Oba Erekesin Market in Ado Ekiti nko? The Obafemi Awolowo Civic Center nko?
Are they not all visible; and traceable around the state? They are in your towns anywhere in Ekiti. You can visit them, you can write about them, they are being used for their purposes, studied and planned for. So much have already been written about them in newspapers, magazines, published online on the social media and archived in libraries, they have been made into coffee table and pocket books for tourists and displayed in arts and exhibitions at intellectual rendezvous across Nigeria.
The Photographers who worked with JKF documenting his works and strides and his time in office both as a governor and as a minister now represents another body of walking repositories of not just his works, but also the history and events that took place in Ekiti within the last two decades. JKF raised a class of young intellectual turks for the onerous task of governance as well as for the arts and creativity industry. As a governor, he sought out many deeply gifted and highly connected sons and daughters of Ekiti and drew them into government to contribute their own ideas to moving Ekiti state forward. Today, successive leaders of high intellectual tastes, both in the task of governance as in other fields of endeavour are finding them enterprising and continue to draw them close to themselves, engage them for more work because the reward for work is more work.
One seeming downside to all of these is our now worn out culture of unbridled, often unreasonable expectations as followers. And this is further complicated by a stubborn mentality of entitlement to what a hard working leader can still do for us. The symptoms of our insatiability manifests by our reluctance, even refusal to underscore and ponder the works our leaders have already done and how the values of those works could be understood and explored for solving the challenges we contend with under today’s economic realities.
Thankfully, it is not that these leaders did not leave any legacies of increasing importance that you we can look to and neither is it that there is a dearth of textual or pictorial information pointing out the location of these works, our challenge stem mostly from the seemingly short attention span that we give anything rigorous or bygone. There therefore arises the need to ask if this generation has found the time to sit down and really think in a way untainted by political or partisan sentiments about our unforeseeable future and the works of our leaders.
This challenge is compounded by our posturing. We see these works and pretend not to see them. How we do this is that even though we know they are good, we refuse to speak openly about them or tacitly avoid acknowledging their values by rarely including them as topics, especially on the various social media platforms.Some of us who found ourselves in a position to say these things got the chance not because we are the search for the best has been closed or the list of the best has been exhausted, left alone to our own devises, many of us will make bad businessmen.
That is why a call any day to service around leaders like JKF must be a great opportunity to start out a life of service. This rarely sounds like music to the ears of people who want to lead first before following that some people are born followers, some people learn to follow and some people have followership thrust upon them.
Rarely do photographers who worked with leaders turn round to say the works of such leaders constitute a non-event. This is because of how sensitive the works of leaders are. The length of time over which they did it and the beneficial use to which these works have already been put are of very high historical consequences both as record and as history. To throw away, destroy or misplace the photographs of the leaders they once worked with is to first deny themselves of the bragging right to the claim of service. For every photograph of that leader they have taken, there is hardly a convincing way to pretend that it was not at the pleasure and with the cooperation of that leader that they did their jobs.
This is the saving grace that ensures we do not develop short memories and forget the works of our leaders. There is a tomorrow that they all saw, of which regardless of the level of sophistication we may develop, we will always look to their works as landmarks in drawing the roadmaps in constructing the frameworks of our own future.
Finally, nothing demonstrates what this article is all about than the way the young guy who prayed at the recent inauguration ceremony of President Donald Trump performed his role. You saw a young black man who in 2025 prove that he had the messages of his leaders grafted in his mind by clearly reciting off-hand, borrowing with uncanny aptitude some of the very memorable words of the late Dr Martin Luther King, while adding the necessary gesticulations and body language to convey a very critical message to the world. He performed so well so that even a light smile started playing on the cheeks of President Trump who slightly opened his eyes and threw a look at the youthful orator who appeared to be so conversant with the salient points of leadership history.
Since that impressive performance took place in this same epoch, nothing stops any youth of Ekiti extraction from performing even a better feat.
The need to revisit, study and emulate leaders like JKF cannot be overemphasized. Leaders like them are all we have for now, and nothing makes them inadequate for us as models of world class leadership now and forever.