I may have spent years researching uncertainty and writing about it, but I still do not like being taken by surprise.
The ultimate master of uncertainty, who can be excused because He put us on notice from the get-go, surprised me again. He called up a source of encouragement for me, more than half of my adult life, Albert Ijebu Alos, to where there are many mansions. And the news came to me out of the blue. I had been making ready to catch up with him on Wednesday. But alas.
In this transcendental excursion of man, ironies abound aplenty. It was one such irony that I should learn that Professor Albert also joined the ages at 40,000 feet above the Atlantic in an aeroplane as I turned on wifi.
For more than 36 years, my many travels were an opening note of our greetings whenever Prof. Alos and I met.
When I turned on WhatsApp on the flight from which I am scribbling these thoughts and saw the message, the surprise made me not so sure which to do first: say a prayer, begin to write a tribute before my brain reminds me that it is aging, or smile at the likely fact that he would be saying where he is: Patito, where are you coming from or going to again?
Albert Alos, with whom I sat at meetings every Monday during the early years of the Lagos Business School when he served as Dean, was a man whose heart overflowed with love, dedication to service and placing the Creator at the zenith of all human activity.
I had met him before I met him. There were these expatriates who came to Mass at St Anthony’s in Gbaja, Surulere, where I went to Mass on holidays from Loyola College Ibadan and UNN, before heading off to grad school in the US. I would find that, on my return to establish a career, he was one of them. They lived around the corner, on Ishawu Adewale, close to my family domicile on Oseni Close, in Surulere.
Years after I returned to Nigeria, I was drawn to the opportunity of means of formation offered by the people of Opus Dei that helped the conscience struggle to refresh and seek the compass to the true North. It was there we formally met.
When the idea of a business school began to be discussed by members of Opus Dei I was an executive in industry who wanted to be a teacher. We soon became close partners trying to build something from nothing.
The Lagos Business School would emerge from those efforts with the gracious giving of so many others and the kind prayers of many more.
The sense of the magnitude of what was accomplished came the day we both journeyed to the NUC to receive the license of the university, when the NUC invited us to help them with how the case study method works.
The fuel was faith and Albert Alos had a tank full of that fuel.
His energy, willingness to sacrifice, quickness to counsel and readiness to smile no matter how daunting the audacity of play would become a mirror of reflection.
And when the impossible becomes possible, he offers a hug and says, ‘Patito, we have to give thanks.’
His training may have been engineering, a discipline in which he led education in three Nigerian universities before the founding of LBS, but building was clearly in his DNA.
He built structures as he built people and culture.
He never tired of soliciting assistance for initiatives that advanced the common good.
My life was enriched because our paths crossed. The prayer I offer as incense of gratitude for love poured out to this beneficiary and so many others now chanting a chorus of blessings to the creator is that the words of supplication rise with the angels as escort for this leader who served, in the voyage of transcendence, to the city where a crown awaits.
From the entity triumphant, we ask that he who has gone ahead remember some of us still battling the waves of the entity militant.