WORDS & WISDOM
Verses on freedom, constraint, and the philosophy of leadership.
The Unseen Prison
The Threshold
There is a prison —
a barely perceptible architecture
buried deep in the recesses of your mind.
Its walls are invisible,
yet firm as any fortress raised by men.
The Walls
Its unseen walls are fashioned out of truths —
the unquestioned certainties
you have sworn to without knowing.
You believe that nothing lies beyond them,
and so the world contracts
to the size of your convictions.
The Gates
Its gilded gates are engineered with faith,
faith not as liberation
but as the scaffolding of constraint —
the doctrines you must uphold
even when the horizon calls you
to wander further.
The Sentence
What you long to die for
is not the vast universe at all;
it is the familiar shape of your confinement.
You are serving time
in the unseen prison of your own mind,
and you do not yet know
that the sentence is self-imposed.
Pilgrimage to a Ruin
Ancient ruins at Sobrena, Spain — the inspiration
Sacred spaces with minarets
kissing the clouds at sunrise
Cathedrals looking down at palaces
Where kings once took the lives of priests
A pilgrimage to a place of opulence
A pathway to dreams of layered hopes
To find the inner self is to sit on bare floors
And eat from broken plates with broken people
With four fingers and crocked thumbs
The soul within can be found at the ruins
Of palaces and on lands yet to be claimed
In places once loved and now undisturbed
The self you seek lies under piles of stones
and broken potteries Where everyone is
beyond value and everything we touch
Has the mythical breath of life.
A journey where the things we see
between the air we breath and the land
we rest upon are sacred choices
even the food we eat has a halo
A pilgrimage to a ruin is a discovery
You are a reluctant witness on earth
All that is pillaged and plundered are
but wrinkled autumn leaves
Shed by great oak trees
To be swept by implacable winds
All the stones we move
shall be turned to ruins in time.
MEMORABLE QUOTES
"You cannot lead people to where you are, you can only lead people to where you have never been."
Thoughts on Leadership
2024
"Leadership is SACRIFICE, because only those who are in the present, those who are grateful and those who feel they have received from the society more than their fair share will willingly sacrifice and therefore, can truly lead."
Lagos Leadership Summit
2024
"My purpose is to thrive, joyously, with the minimum possible resources and to produce, harmlessly, the maximum useful output I can."
Personal Philosophy
2024
"We are in the make-up generation. Everything is made up. Light touch, shade, brush, attachment, toned."
Social Commentary
2017
"We are not one million, we are one hundred million and some. We are not one tribe, we are three hundred tribes... the Dubai story is inspiring but we need to look elsewhere for a model we can emulate."
On Nation Building
2020
"It is true that our government has failed us woefully. But it is equally true that we are failing our country now. For it is our duty to fix it."
Civic Responsibility
2020