The Weight of a Calling

“The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited horse, and to continually inquire what’s possible.”

~ Diane Ackerman

I.

The first classroom I ever taught in was not mine to teach in. I was fourteen years old, in Molete, Ibadan, in 2010, a weekday during a school holiday, the precise circumstances less important now than the image that remains. Rows of primary school pupils, the particular smell of chalk dust and worn wooden floors, and a teacher’s desk that I had no business standing behind. I had accompanied my mother to school that morning, as I sometimes did. She was a teacher, and school was, for her, a place you went even when you were not strictly required to. I wandered into a colleague’s classroom. I did not leave.

What happened next was not planned. I began to teach. I marked scripts. I brought treats for the children who answered correctly, small rewards that I suspect mattered less for the incentive they provided than for the message they carried, that their effort had been seen, that someone thought it worth acknowledging. I was fourteen. I had no pedagogy, no training, no authority. What I had was my mother’s example, absorbed over years of watching her treat the work of teaching as something sacred rather than just being occupational. That morning in Molete planted something that I would not fully understand for another decade.

By the time the National Youth Service Corps posted me to a food processing company in 2016, I was twenty and had graduated from the department of Food Technology, a degree that, in the most conventional reading, pointed directly toward exactly the kind of industrial placement I had been assigned. The logic was clean. It was also wrong, or at least incomplete. What my undergraduate years in Food Technology had given me was not simply a technical understanding of processing and preservation, though it gave me those too. It had given me a deepening conviction that the gap between what Nigeria’s food systems could be and what they were was, at its root, a human problem. A problem of knowledge, of capacity, of institutions that had failed to invest in the people who were supposed to operate them. You could not solve that problem from inside a factory. You could not solve it without first understanding how education either prepared or failed to prepare people to engage with the systems that shaped their lives.

I got reassigned to another PPA through the NYSC process. Formally, through the proper channels, in the way that things are supposed to be done, and the small satisfaction of doing it correctly was not lost on me. A secondary school in Ota, Ogun State received me. Twenty-five faces watched me from behind their desks with the particular scrutiny that adolescents reserve for adults they have not yet decided to trust. I held a marker in front of a Mathematics board as though it were a kind of credential. It was not. What I had instead was something I had been given, unknowingly, in a classroom in Molete six years earlier, the understanding that showing up with genuine attention is its own form of authority, and sometimes the only form that works.

What I learned instead, slowly, over the nine months that followed was something more durable, that trust is built through the consistency of showing up, through the discipline of preparing even when no one will check whether you did, through the quality of attention you bring to a room that is watching to see whether you will treat them as worth the effort. I did not know, standing there, that I was being formed. Formation rarely announces itself. It simply proceeds, quietly, through the accumulation of choices that one makes when no one important is watching.

Turning thirty invites a man to turn back and look at those rooms. To look at the classrooms, the field sites, the policy meetings, the long evenings of drafting and redrafting and ask what they have made of him. I find myself, in this looking-back, neither entirely satisfied nor entirely dissatisfied. That seems about right. A man who is entirely satisfied at thirty has probably stopped asking the questions that made his twenties worth anything. A man who is entirely dissatisfied has perhaps failed to notice that the work has been accumulating into something real.

II.

The question that has organised the better part of my working life is not one I chose deliberately. It chose me, in the way that questions sometimes do by presenting itself so persistently across so many different contexts that to continue ignoring it would require a dishonesty I was not prepared to sustain. The question borders on why systems that are designed to serve people so consistently fail them, and what it would take to make them work.

This question finds expressions with specific coordinates. It is clearly seen in the data on stunting rates in rural Benue, in the gap between what agricultural policy says and what a smallholder farmer in Plateau State experiences, in the supply chain that loses thirty percent of its produce between farm and market not because of nature but because of governance. I did not set out to spend my twenties mapping this terrain. But the terrain kept presenting itself, and I kept finding I could not look away.

There is a particular intellectual inheritance that shaped how I came to read these problems. Growing up in Oyo State within the long memory of a political tradition that had once built roads and schools and cocoa cooperatives in the era before such things became symbols of impossibility, I absorbed early the understanding that governance failure is not fate. It is a choice, made repeatedly, by people with the power to choose differently. That understanding is both a source of frustration and the only serious ground for hope. If failure is chosen, then so is its opposite.

The history of that place never released me, even when I was far from it. The voices of Awolowo, Ige, Adesina and their arguments about what a self-respecting people owed to itself, about the relationship between education and emancipation, about the ethics of power, formed a kind of intuitive conversation that I carried into every policy document I wrote, every community dialogue I sat in, every institution I tried to understand or strengthen. They were not models to be imitated. They were questions to be answered, in a different era, with different tools.

III.

There is an image from Benue that I return to more often than most. A smallholder farmer, late afternoon light, explaining with the patience of someone who has said the same thing to too many outsiders that the problem was not the harvest. The harvest had been adequate. The problem was the thirty kilometers between the farm and the nearest market, the absence of storage that could hold produce past the day of glut, and the trader who knew both of those facts and priced accordingly. The loss, while natural, is also structural, and it had a logic, and the logic was enforced by the absence of institutions that had either never been built or had been built and then quietly abandoned. I did not have an answer for him that afternoon. What I had was a clearer understanding of the question, and the conviction that understanding it precisely was the necessary first work before any intervention could be responsible.

That encounter, and the hundreds like it that have accumulated across a decade of field work, is what the institutional work has actually been. Through the Nigeria Food Security Project, through Spheraid, through the Supply Chain Research and Innovation Hub’s partnerships with Universities, through the SPRiNG Project in Benue and Plateau, through food systems engagements in Maiduguri and project interventions across Kaduna, Kogi, Niger, and Kwara. Each of these has been, in its own way, an attempt to demonstrate that the gap between what is and what ought to be is not fixed. That it can be narrowed, incrementally, by people willing to do the hard and unglamorous work of understanding a system well enough to intervene in it responsibly.

There is a craft to this kind of work that I did not fully appreciate when I began. The project flag-offs, policy documents and proposals are only the visible surface of it. Beneath them lies the work of building trust with communities that have good reasons to be suspicious of outside intervention; the work of translating between the language of academic evidence and the language that policymakers actually use when they are making decisions; the work of holding a coalition together when the pressures of institutional self-interest push its members in different directions. None of this appears in the outputs that funders measure. All of it determines whether the outputs mean anything.

I have also learned (more slowly than I would like to admit) that institutional reform is not a problem that yields to intelligence alone. It yields, when it yields at all, to a combination of analytical rigour and relational patience that most people find difficult to sustain simultaneously. The rigour is easier to cultivate. It responds to effort, to reading, to the discipline of thinking carefully and writing precisely. The patience is harder. It requires a kind of faith that is neither naive nor unconditional. Having faith not in what institutions are, but in what they could become, under different pressures, with different people inside them, and with enough sustained attention from people who refuse to mistake the current arrangement for a permanent one.

IV.

The decision to be academic in approach is, in one sense, simply the next logical step in the development of analytical instruments. There are questions I encounter in my work that I do not yet have the methodological tools to answer with the rigour they deserve. Questions about the causal mechanisms linking governance quality to food security outcomes, about the conditions under which supply chain interventions produce durable change versus temporary improvement, about how to measure institutional capacity in environments where formal indicators are systematically misleading. These are languages I am learning because the problems I care about will not yield to any instrument blunter than the one I am still sharpening.

But I am aware that there is something else in the decision too, something harder to state without sounding as though I am reaching for a narrative rather than describing a reality. It is the recognition that the kind of influence I want to have on food policy, on agricultural systems, on the institutional architecture through which the Nigerian state delivers or fails to deliver on its obligations to its citizens, requires a form of credibility that is only built over time, through the accumulation of demonstrated competence in multiple registers. Credibility, as I have come to understand it, is not reputation. It is the earned right to be taken seriously in rooms where serious decisions are made. Those are different things, and confusing them is one of the more common errors made by intelligent people in a hurry.

A man of thirty who is in a hurry to be influential and not in a hurry to become competent is, in my observation, a man who will eventually cause more damage than good. The work of becoming genuinely useful to a broken system is slow. It resists shortcuts. It asks for the willingness to spend years building the knowledge and the relationships and the track record that make transformative intervention possible rather than just being well-intentioned. I am not there yet. But I know more precisely than I did at twenty-five what “there” looks like, and that specificity is its own kind of progress. A man who cannot tell the difference between a project failing and himself failing has already confused the work with his identity, and that confusion will eventually cost him both. The specificity of knowing what you are building towards, and why, and at what pace, is its own form of discipline. I have come to believe it is also one of the preconditions for doing serious work without being consumed by it.

V.

There are things about being thirty in Nigeria that have nothing to do with professional ambition, and I would be less than honest if I treated them as peripheral. There is the specific weight of knowing that people you love, parents who invested in your formation without any guarantee of return, siblings who carry their own versions of the same questions in different spheres of life, are watching your life with a combination of pride and hope that you did not ask to be entrusted with but have been anyway. That weight is not a burden, exactly. It is more like a constant reminder of what the work is ultimately for, and who it is ultimately about.

There is also the particular quality of attention that comes with having chosen a companion for the long road. When the future acquires a face, when the aspiration for a life of meaning becomes tethered to a specific person, to shared plans, to the ordinary particular happiness of a life built in common, something in the relationship between ambition and purpose shifts. The plans for a life with a loving partner are not a footnote to the larger project. They are pretty important, as deliberate as anything I have written, that the life I am building has room in it for joy, for ceremony, for the kind of commitment that no institution can ask of me and no policy framework can contain. A man whose life has no such room is not, in my observation, more serious than one whose life does. He is simply more brittle, and brittleness is the one quality that the work I have described cannot afford.

These things matter to the work in ways that are not always easy to articulate but are not, on reflection, mysterious. A man who has no ground to stand on outside his professional identity is a man who will eventually mistake his work for his character. He cannot tell the difference between a project failing and himself failing, and that confusion is professionally fatal. Not because failure becomes more likely, but because it becomes less legible, less instructive, less survivable as information. The stability that comes from roots, from love, from the ordinary human things that persist regardless of how any given project turns out, is not a distraction from serious work. It is one of the structural conditions that makes serious work sustainable across a lifetime rather than being intense across a season. I have watched enough talented people burn through their best years on work they could not separate from their sense of self to know that this is not a minor point. It is, in fact, one of the most important things I have learned in the life this reflection is trying to account for.

VI.

There is a question I have been asked, in various forms, by various people over the past several years, and I want to address it here because it touches on something I consider important. The question is, given everything you know about how this system works, why do you stay? Why not redirect the competence and the energy towards something more immediately rewarding, somewhere less resistant to the things you want to build?

The honest answer has two parts. The first is that I do not know how to answer the questions that genuinely interest me in any context other than this one. The political economy of food systems in Nigeria, the institutional conditions of state capacity in our country, the specific texture of governance failure in communities I can reach and understand. These are not problems that translate. They belong to this place. And I belong to this place, in ways that go deeper than sentiment.

The second part of the answer is that I believe, on grounds I consider defensible rather than felt, that this generation of Nigerians is living at one of those rare historical inflection points at which the accumulated pressure of failure begins, slowly, to produce the conditions for genuine reform. These moments do not last long. They require people with the technical capacity to propose credible alternatives and the institutional knowledge to navigate the process of getting them adopted. I want to be one of those people. Not as a matter of personal ambition, though I will not pretend ambition plays no role, but because I think it is what the moment asks of those who have been given the preparation to answer it.

VII.

I do not know, at thirty, exactly what the next decade will produce. That kind of certainty is unavailable and, I suspect, undesirable because a life that unfolds exactly as planned is a life that has failed to encounter the world in its full complexity. It denies one of the thrills that comes with crossing hurdles. What I know is what I am working towards and what I am working with. They include a set of analytical tools that are growing sharper with use; a network of institutional relationships built on demonstrated reliability rather than personal charm; a set of convictions about governance and food and dignity that have been tested enough by experience to be worth holding.

I know that the work of building something lasting in Nigeria requires a longer timeline than most people are comfortable committing to. I know that the distance between the country as it is and the country as it could be is not fixed. I also know that it has been shortened before, in specific places, by specific people, through specific combinations of vision and craft and endurance. I know that the version of Oyo State I carry in my imagination is not the sentimental version, but the version that the history of that place suggests is actually possible. It is worth spending a serious life working towards.

And I know, in the way that one knows things that have been earned rather than just being learned, that the quality of the work matters more than the speed of the recognition. That the communities in Benue and Plateau whose food systems we have tried to strengthen are not a stepping stone to something else. They are the thing itself — the actual substance of the calling, not the occasion for it. A man who loses sight of that distinction has, in the only sense that ultimately matters, lost his way.

VIII.

Thirty is not a destination. It is a position from which the distances become clearer. Both the distance already covered and the distance that remains. Looking back, I see a young man being formed in ways he did not fully understand at the time. By classrooms in Ibadan, Ilorin, and Ota, by the political inheritance of a particular state, by the slow accumulation of evidence about what it actually takes to change the systems that shape how people live. Looking forward, I see work that is larger than I am, that will outlast the specific forms it takes in the next decade, that requires me to keep becoming more capable than I currently am.

There is something clarifying about this view from thirty. The grandiose fantasies of early ambition have been grounded by something more useful: a clearer sense of the specific contributions that are actually mine to make, and a more honest reckoning with what they will cost. Not cost in the melodramatic sense. I am not labouring under the illusion that serious work is a tragedy. But cost in the ordinary sense. The sustained attention, the disciplined patience, the willingness to be in rooms where the progress is invisible and the resistance is not.

I carry an obligation. I did not choose it in the way one chooses a profession or a city or a manner of living. It presented itself, through the accumulation of everything described here, as the only honest answer I have found to the question of what I am for. It is not light. There are mornings when the distance between what is and what ought to be feels less like a challenge than a rebuke, and the only reasonable response is to return to the work anyway, without the comfort of certainty about whether it will matter. I have done that. I expect to keep doing it. What I know at thirty, with more precision than I knew it at twenty-five, is that the version of this country I carry in my imagination is not a fantasy, and it is a historical possibility, demonstrated in specific places by specific people, waiting to be demonstrated again under harder conditions by a generation that has fewer excuses than any before it. I am not under any illusion about the cost of that work, or the timeline it demands, or the number of rooms in which the progress will be invisible for years before it is legible. But I have not, in all the years of carrying this, found a reason compelling enough to set it down. I do not expect to find one. The questions remain open. And with everything I have, I intend to be working on them for a long time.