Bode Akindele: For a Departing Industrialist … You Did Not Trample on Your Mother’s Shawl

Akeem Lasisi/

The foundation of your glory predated your birth
But you did not trample on your mother’s shawl
Nor go astray like a prodigal lad
You inherited a stone and turned it into a mountain
You met a house and turned into a palace
Whether on land, atop the sea
Through the dint of vision and sleepless honesty
You turned a river into a compound sea

In the scheme of your industry, Akindele
The Bible and business were not at war
You did not rob God to pamper man
Nor lure a child into the Soka cave
You did not point a gun at the throat of the state
Nor drill a protracted hole in our refinery’s heart
Because you believed in prospecting for the day that succeeds the night
Your rain emerged after weathering the heat of the sun

Although you towered like your imposing height
Giant at heart, giant at sight
You did not soil your mother’s shawl.
In your crystal-clear mission,
High rises evolved from the earth
An estate was just the product of a state of mind
Because you did not mortgage the foundation your mother built
It was given you would build a fortune and deliver a town

Very much like a summer parrot
Everyone is serenading farming
Everyone sings agric is the masterstroke
But none is eager to cuddle our lonely soils
But because you were versed in the economics of the road less travelled
And remembered the Book and parable of the sower
Long before the bursting of our bubbling crude
You embraced the forest and the difference is clear

From cocoa to matches,
From Swiss with love
Your appetite for enterprise was so huge
You traversed the sectors like a mystery man
You were a titan at trading,
Yet you produced in leaps and bounds
From magnificent estates to money mart
You were the one to beat in the shipping game

There is a level to which a man turns so wealthy
It becomes the duty of the wealth to speak the language of the man
Because money understood your mother tongue, Akindele
It faltered not in your astute hands
When it came to giving
You did not opt for a flutist’s show
Because you were synonymous with sophistication,
You built a hospital as imposing as the sky

Every soul passing by
Thinks the monument is for WHO or Hague
But because your mission was for the high and low
Aramed bars no soul, it caters for all and sundry still;
Because you did not exchange the Psalms for a plate of porridge, Akindele
You remembered the son of the Methodist you were
Whether in Lebanon or London still
You clung to the method in your father’s faith.

*Lasisi, a poet, journalist and teacher, lives in Lagos