Sometimes I think it is a cruel thing to ask a child what they want to be when they grow up. As a child, I wanted to be many things. I wanted to be a doctor; then a lawyer; then – and this still evokes a wealth of humour over family holidays – a president. All these ambitions, however oversized they were, were nurtured with echoes of support from my family. It seemed as though it was possible to have a job simply because you dreamed it.
There is a privilege in dreaming that is reserved only for children, where imaginable worlds seem possible, alive with no threats of their extinction. In the days of my adolescence, there were kids who stayed in our family home while their parents worked late. I remember being young and surrounded by neighbours from up the street in Dolphin Estate, some of whose kids spent the night at our house when their parents needed to catch a plane, sometimes rushing in the middle of the night. I remember thinking how absurd it all seemed, having a job, losing your life.
Of course, decades away from that idea, I have found myself doing the work that required the dedication I was so easy to frown at; the work that – although was not imagined by my eight or nine-year-old self, seem to have been made only for me: communicating.
I always knew that I loved language, but it never occurred to me that I could work with and through it. I just knew that things that were written had a different effect on me, for which I was left changed. It never occurred to me that I would use this in communicating and echoing stories of impact from across the world.
There are many big and small joys in what I do. It is refreshing to see the level of impact the Tony Elumelu Foundation is driving on the continent; the sort of impact that is multi-layered, full of vigour and wondrous possibilities. Through our support for African Entrepreneurs, many lives are changed.
In my role as communications manager at the Tony Elumelu Foundation, I am humbled to deliver messaging around transformation and be a part of the goodwill the foundation has nursed since its inception. Often, when strangers ask about what it is I love about my job, I find myself recollecting into a moment from an infamous speech by our founder, his voice thundering amidst cheers, “it’s about leaving a legacy”.
For many years, I have nursed a career that has placed me at the intersection of different countries, and in certain moments, I have found myself reflecting on how a particular organisation aligns with whatever legacy I hope to leave behind. I do not believe in the philosophy of a dream job. Dreams are illusionary; a dream is an uncomplicated alternative. And every day, I am choosing to embrace the work that demands just as much, swallowing me into air-conditioned buildings as the sun rises and releasing me just as it was going to sleep. There is no greater satisfaction than this. And it occurs to me that that is the point of having any job at all: the satisfaction that feels, always, like a personal victory.
What I did not know as a child, was that all jobs – the labour we give our time to, can play a role in shaping the world. That the work we do depends on us, yes, but also on our relationships with things – theories, science, beliefs and goals for humanity, but that ultimately, the work we commit ourselves to is for the generations and people coming after us. It is almost never for us. This is the responsibility of our labour: to leave a legacy – to show how we were able to come through a sector, a cycle, a project, on objective, or even an organisation, for the better.
