I have no political ambition –Fela Durotoye

Durotoye

Fela Durotoye has been one of the biggest personalities in Nigeria for some years now. And he’s always an interviewer’s delight as he responds in a manner that can be termed garrulous.

That was the case as well when Oseyiza Oogbodo, curator of OSEYIZA OOGBODO BLOG interviewed him in 2009 and due to his posturing, it was evident he would one day seek political office, even the highest political office in the land, as he’s believed to be doing now.

Now, OOB brings to you with pleasure the main excerpts of the interview concerning his political disposition.

The excerpts:

Can you give us concrete examples of what you've transformed successfully?

Well, number one, my life. I think my life is the biggest transformation you can imagine. And the story is out there, how I've gone from something slightly below nothing. Nothing was more than what I had, if you know what I mean. I was below zero and I've been able to transform that into something that today, I'm able to give bountifully. But beyond that, I've helped organizations transform, sometimes from just being a dream, to reality. I've helped organizations that didn't believe they could achieve their goals for a year transform into doing much more than they thought they could. There was a particular bank that when we started working with them, they were in a loss position. Within one year, they had declared one billion naira profit. I've helped to transform companies that had very bad, poor brands into admirable brands. I've helped lots of people transform and transit in their career from something that was just nearly a job that they were doing to something they became incredibly passionate about. I've also helped several societies transform from situations where the people that were there were always in rancour. There's a particular society, in fact it's in a university, where all the fellowships were in total acrimony, they were not in agreement, their pastors weren't even speaking to each other, and they called me in, and I had two days with the pastors. It started one evening, Friday evening, and then we had a Saturday morning breakfast, and we established something called 'One In Love,' and it's amazing that in that one year, first of all, at that event, by the time I finished talking to them, they started hugging each other, and from that point in time, I've heard that there is probably no campus that has such a strong body of Christ in this country like that particular one where we worked on, to the point that pastors actually invite other pastors to come into their fellowship to preach without the fear of saying that someone will take my flock away. So that's it, that's a social transformation, we're currently working on a national transformation, to transform Nigeria to becoming a nation where the values are clear and known to everybody. There's a clear vision as to what you are trying to achieve, everybody's engaged, everybody accepts responsibility for an area that they want to transform, and hopefully, by 2025, we'll be, undoubtedly, one of the world's most desirable nations to live in.

That means you've political ambitions yourself. Are you thinking Governor, or President even?

I think that I'm not called to political office. I believe that my calling is to raise people who will build the nation, leaders who will be able to do great things, some of them in political office, others in corporate world, some in science and technology and the academia. That's my job, raising people, I'm not called to lead the nation, so I have no political ambition.

*** Oh well, people can change with time ***