Redeeming the time: tribute to Chief

Time and chance
We are all given many, many opportunities to redeem the time over our life time, and I wonder how many of these we might have misused.

The opportunity to start that business you’ve always wanted to have. The opportunity to put money aside for that university degree. The opportunity to buy a piece of land and make a home for your family, free from the domination of a landlord. The opportunity to show kindness, demonstrate compassion to those less fortunate than yourself.

These are our God-given every day opportunities to redeem the time.

I once knew a man who redeemed the time with immense gusto. That man is one of my heroes - my late father, Abdul Razaak Olajide Sanusi. Chief, as we liked to call him.

Shopping trolleys and night school
Chief grew up dead poor. Child number three of illiterate parents who could not afford to send their children to school. He left his home town Abeokuta for Lagos probably in his late teens. He left barefooted, for he didn’t own a pair of shoes. With his cousins who had left for Lagos with him, Chief worked in an open market carrying on his head (in large baskets and aluminium bowls) the groceries of shoppers who cared to hire him to carry their groceries. No trolleys in those days!

The story goes that sometime later their assiduousness caught the eye of a British colonial man who had a stall in the same market selling bicycle tyres, bits and bobs of items made from iron and steel. They started to work and learn from him. They worked long and hard and were diligent with what had been entrusted unto them. They also started to go to night school.

Breakthrough and grit all in the same breath: the making of an industrialist
As their boss grew older, he longed to return home to the UK and he made them an offer of a lifetime – the chance to own the business. Chief and his cousins borrowed money for the purchase and accepted the offer with fervour. Business was good but, as is the norm given times and seasons, the business also knew down times. It was during one of these down times that I am told that Chief tried to commit suicide. Drenched in debt, he thought he had no other option.

As fortune would have it, someone who knew him spotted him by that fateful bridge on Lagos Island, asked him what on earth he thought he was doing, and promptly took him home. Thank goodness he met that man.

A testimony to the rewards of hard work and making the most of every opportunity, Chief went on to build substantial manufacturing companies across Nigeria, manufacturing iron and steel products and rubber products. He employed thousands in the process. He owned real estate in choice areas in Nigeria and in the UK. His story does not end there.

Education, education, education
He had twenty four children, and in his life time paid for each and every one of them to be privately educated in the UK through primary, secondary and or tertiary education; and he also provided for as many others of his nieces and nephews to do the same in the Nigeria, the UK and in the United States. A Bachelors degree was not enough – a Masters degree had to be added on to that, fully funded, living allowance and all.

Morunmubo
When Chief built his dream home in the township of his birth, he named the house Morunmubo, which means I returned with bounty. When you enter the main living room in that house you discover what Chief considered to be bounty. Plastered all over the wall of that living room are the graduation pictures of his sons, daughters, nieces and nephews whose education and upkeep he had provided for over the years. That was his bounty. He redeemed the time.

But I often wonder what would have become of me if Chief had not redeemed the time.

My everyday promptings to redeem the time
My own work takes me to some of the poorest countries in Africa and during these travels I see scenes of abject poverty which prompt me to remember that had Chief not redeemed the time I may well have found myself living in the same abject poverty.

When I see that poor, only partially literate woman with a child tied to her back selling fried yam and plantain on the roadside – I think to myself, ‘’that might have been me’’. And I thank God once again that Chief redeemed the time. I also thank God once again for redeeming the time, sending His only begotten Son, our Saviour, Our Redeemer, to this world.

Whenever I find myself being frivolous with money, I remember Chief. I bear in mind that had he being as frivolous as many of his contemporaries, I may not have had the opportunity to be frivolous at all. Sometimes I celebrate his achievement by just going ahead and being frivolous, but I have learnt to celebrate his accomplishments more by making the most of every opportunity.