Mr. Femi Babalola is an engineer and the owner of the popular Jogor Centre, Ibadan. In this interview by TUNDE AYANDA, he speaks about his life at 60, his guiding principles and other issues.
You will be 60 in October, do you feel 60?
I actually don’t know how 60 feels, I’ve never been there before. But if you ask me if I feel the way I felt 40 years ago, I will say no. If you ask me if I feel the way I felt 10 years ago, I will say yes. Definitely I feel that in terms of wisdom, in terms of energy, I’ve definitely seen changes. In terms of perception of life, I’ve seen changes, in terms of my attitude to issues around me, things have changed. So, if that is a way of feeling 60, yes.
Is there any lesson life has taught you at 60?
I particularly don’t have any singular life experience. A lesson my mother told me when I was around nine has continued to be very relevant in my life and I found out that it applies to everything that I’ve done. What is this story? There was a day I was supposed to go out with my friends and it was a real battle between my mother and me, that I should not go. Eventually my mother sat me down and she said one thing and since then the lesson stuck and it has been my guiding principle of life. My mother said the people I thought were my friends might not be my friends. You will be shocked that when I put it to practical use, when I was in the university, it shocked me when I confirmed what my mum said. That was about 15 years after. My mother said in a class of 10 students the teacher asked every student to stand up and the teacher asked them all to bring out a small piece of paper and pencil, that they should write the name of their best friend in the class. At the end of the day the teacher found out that no two persons wrote each others names. If you wrote my name as your best friend, I didn’t write your name as my best friend, the person’s I wrote as my best friend, wrote another person. That lesson taught me life. You don’t know where you are with anybody and you don’t know where they are with you. God has given us the power to influence so many things. You may think that situation will favour you, but there are people behind you that will not make that situation favour you and this may be somebody you felt you’ve given your life to. The lesson there is that you should just put all your hopes in God and build everything around yourself. That has been my guiding principle. I should be honest with you, in ten out of ten episodes, I’ve had in life, it has always been around that. It’s always been someone you trusted, someone you thought was watching your back. It’s a lesson I’ve told my children individually and collectively and it’s the only thing that guides me.
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Despite having this life lesson at an early stage, one wouldn’t have expected you to go into politics.
There are some things in life that you are all destined to be. God created all of us and at the time of creation, God has put some talents in us, and he had also put interests. Mind you, interest is different from talent. In some of us, he put passion. I cannot really explain why I got interested in politics. My father, I think to some extent, was very current in politics. He was a civil servant and was always discussing politics, I don’t know if that influenced me. In my school days was involved in some school politics which was more of associations and president of societies, secretary of a society and by the time I got into the university, I joined NPN Youth Wing in 1979. I was very active. By the time I got to the university I didn’t have a choice, I was very active. I was secretary of my hall, Sultan Bello in a particular year and I was going for a second term but I discovered that I was an engineering student and I needed time and I was at that time the chairman of the Engineering Student Society of UI which I held for three years. Once you are the chairman of an association, you will be part of the school politics because whoever wanted to contest elections at the school level and needed to talk to engineering students must necessarily come through you. Whoever wanted to talk to Sultan Bello student must come through me being the secretary. So, I had double influence. I was influential at the faculty level and I was also influential at the dormitory level. I played politics like that and it went on and on until 1991, I left university in 1986 and in 1991 when government lifted embargo on politics again, by providence I found that I was close to Engineer Hameed Gbadamosi who eventually became the deputy governor of Kolapo Isola. By the way, he wanted to be the governor, I was more of his advisor, he used to call me a politician; he called me a political engineer. So, it was just natural when he made up his mind to contest that I must be his advisor. We got on well and did everything together. In fact, I can conveniently say I was one of the people that advised him to go for Deputy-Governorship. When he didn’t get the ticket, he didn’t want to contest again, I was like if they offered you this thing, take it. He brought me into his government. Throughout his 11 months I was everywhere with him, unfortunately that tenure was truncated. When politics started in 1998 I didn’t have a choice I pitched my tent with the PDP, I can say conveniently that Dare Adeleke and myself were the youngest members of the PDP as of 1998 in Oyo State. We were the first to join, he joined before me, then I joined and we were the two young ones running around in PDP and it went on like that. Nobody dragged me into it; nobody influenced me and my own politics was not out of nothing to do, I’ve always been a busy man and it’s one of the reasons many people feel I should be a full time politician. But I love engineering and I want to play politics by the side, but unfortunately we are not getting the right people that play this politics, so it keeps bringing me out to want to influence and do other things. We need people that will influence policies. Politics is not only about elections, there are people you want in political parties that could draft policies for government, there are people that will tell you how you need to implement the policies, there are people that can implement but cannot draw the policies. It cuts across, but unfortunately, people just see politicians as people that can contest elections and win and mess up the whole thing and that’s the issue we’ve been having.
You claimed at a time that business is dirtier than politics, what experience gave you this impression?
That’s the truth. Just as in politics and everything else, everybody is fighting for survival. You are going after a project and I am also going after a project. There is usually a lot of back-stabbing, badmouthing which is the same thing in politics, even dirtier.
In 2006, former Governor Rashidi Ladoja was impeached. Your name came out as one of the financiers of the impeachment. Do you regret being a part of it?
No. I will tell you what happened. It’s going to be part of my memoir. By the way I was in PDP before Alhaji Lamidi Adedibu. He came from the All Peoples Party (APP), but this is a man I’ve always known. I grew up in College Crescent area and one of his children has always been my junior brother, very good friend. So, I’ve always known that house and I knew him as a politician, but when I was in PDP in 1998 he was in APP, but in 1991, I was in SDP with him and I’ve always marveled at his way of playing politics, he was someone I liked. So, when he crossed over to PDP, I think in 2000 or 2001, I was one of the first people to go and greet him and I thankfully became one of his favorites. I was so close to him. In 2003, I supported Dele Adigun for obvious reasons to be the governorship candidate and Baba brought in Ladoja. Ladoja was not part of us initially. We were going to win that primary election, we did our work and Baba knew something was going wrong, so he called me and Baba Nureni that he wanted us to leave Adigun and support Ladoja. We were like, why? I didn’t know Ladoja so well, but I knew Adigun well and we’ve done a lot of field work but he was more experienced than us. He called us the second time that we should support Ladoja, we went on and on and during the primaries we came third because we didn’t know that Baba was going to camp the delegates. We were waiting and Baba just went ahead with the delegates, but at the same time he had a soft spot for us, particularly me because he knew we were going to win that primary. Immediately we left the stadium that day, he sent for me and he sent somebody to also call Nureni and we were there at his house and he apologised, he said ‘nkan ta fi ju yin lo niyen’, of course I accepted and he said he wanted us to cooperate with Ladoja that we should persuade Adigun to work with Ladoja. So, Baba Nureni Ile Iba and I went to Adigun and we agreed we didn’t have a choice. It was against our wish that we worked for Ladoja to emerge as governor and God crowned our effort and he became the governor. There was nothing Baba Adedibu didnt say and I looked at him as a hero for putting his life down for somebody to become the governor. On the day of that 2003 election, Rotimi Akeredolu, the present governor of Ondo State, myself, Baba Adedibu and Baba Nureni were all in my house for two hours strategizing, election had started but we needed to do some things.
Later it became Baba did not want me to do this and that to see Ladoja win the election. Naturally I was in Baba’s camp, I was one of the closest people to him till the day he died, a lot of people don’t know this. The day his car was collected at Oja’ba mosque by Ladoja. Baba left the mosque and came straight to my house. He usually called me ‘Engineer’, but that day when he said ‘Femi’, I knew something was wrong. He said ‘Ladoja gba motor nidi mi.’ He now went down memory lane. He told me how he went against everybody. He said despite that, I should see how Ladoja repaid him. He was in my house for four hours. There and then, I called Folarin, I called Gbenga Babalola, Taofeek Arapaja and some other people. We had a meeting where we agreed to replace the vehicle seized from Baba, we then moved from there. We got Baba a new bus.
I will not lie, I was there the very first day Baba mentioned impeachment. It was more of a prayer thing, he said ‘so, Ladoja did this to me with all that I went through. God won’t allow him to stay in that office for long’ and that was it. He was our man and we had to support him. We all had roles to play in the impeachment. I had my own roles and we shared roles out and one way or the other we got it done. If you listened to Baba’s story, you would cry. If you have ever been betrayed by someone that made you go against your wish, that made you fight your own friends, do you know among the people Baba did not support was Dr Omololu Olunloyo, who was his neighbor and a former Governor. There was also Engineer Adesina. When we were on Governor Makinde’s case at the last election, i was at a party and they were spraying money on behalf of Bayo Adelabu, it was an APC dominated party, I went to the musician and asked him to start singing Seyi, I was alone, nobody joined me and it was election time. Think of such things, such sacrifices.
You mentioned Senator Teslim Folarin as your friend, how did you feel when he emerged as the APC governorship candidate and you are in another party?
He remains my friend till tomorrow and I wished him well and supported him. If I have a childhood friend contesting under APC and he comes to me and I feel I can assist him I would do it. That does not take away my belief in my own party.
There was a time you were charged for money laundering with the late Chief Adebayo Alao-Akala. Would you say that was your lowest point as a politician?
Throughout that case, I knew that we were not going anywhere but the only thing that kept coming to my mind was my mother’s story. You may or may not believe it, it was the handiwork of some people. When you look at the way the case was couched, it was funny. Initially they said government put N8billion in Jogor’s account, I didn’t even bother myself. The day EFCC invited me to come to Abuja, I went there with my statement of account because I also heard the rumour. I thought the case would not last three months and to my surprise it dragged on and on. We had a fantastic team of lawyers and when they presented the case, the judge disagreed and I as a science person, saw a lot of loopholes. We had about eight judges at different times. It was just a waste of time. At some point, my lawyers said I was too jovial with the case. I was living my life, the only feelling I had was that my mother’s story kept on reverberating because I knew all the people that wrote the petition and these were people that all benefitted from Akala. I just kept looking at life and the story my mum told me, the people behind it were our friends, it was a waste of time and it exposed me to our judicial system and it is one of the areas that need serious reforms. I was at the court at that time experiencing other cases, somebody was jailed for 7 years because he had a one million naira business transaction that failed with his friend. It was funny because business is a risk, how can you jail someone for that? I witnessed a lot and concluded our judicial system needs serious reforms.
You were also one of the closest people to former Governor Adebayo Alao-Akala, what do you miss most about him?
He was somebody that was well-prepared for governance. He respected everybody’s views. He never listened to rumours.
Any leader should be able to face people directly and ask what he heard. There was a time Akala had this crisis with Folarin and someone told me they saw me with Folarin. He called me and said this person said he saw you and your friend, Folarin. I told him that we went for a party together and from there we went somewhere to eat. I said ‘if you have issues with Folarin, I don’t have an issue with him, we are friends’ and he agreed and that did not in any way affect our relationship. Guess what? The day Akala and Folarin were reconciled in Ghana, I was not there. Assuming I had taken a position and fought my friend because of him, what would have happened? Nobody called me that they were going to Ghana. In fact, it was Musiliu Obanikoro that called me and said he was thinking of inviting me to Ghana. When I asked what happened, he said he was looking for somebody between Akala and Folarin. They were reconciled. Akala was a very good man. He had good ideas and you can’t go to him with lies but the sad part of that I always remember was that the people that made him lose his re-election were the people that benefitted hugely from him. They all worked against him. I was going through a list recently and I saw the names of those I know Akala was good to, but they all betrayed him.
A lot of people know you by your nickname Jogor, what does it mean?
Jogor came as a nickname right from my Form One in secondary school. It was given to me by my classmates and it stuck. There used to be one comic brought in by Kunle Abdul in those days, Jug Heads, I was reading it and they said ‘see his head like jug-head.’ That was how I became Jogor.
20 years of Jogor Centre, what’s the success secret?
God is the secret and also dedication. Jogor Centre was the first stand-alone event center in Nigeria. We are not attached to a hotel. People were using halls in hotels for events; nobody had that dream that it could be a business. God gave me the dream and the empowerment to execute it. I’m happy that we now have duplications everywhere in the country. I went to the East and I saw halls. I went to the North and I saw same thing everywhere. In Lagos, we saw halls and I felt happy we were able to influence employing generations. You will be surprised at the level of employment generation event centres have on the economy. That was why Sanwo-Olu couldn’t close down event centres during the Covid period; he only regulated them. The diesel man supplying generators, the women selling ankara, the caterers, the decorators, musicians, photographers, deejays, cleaners, they can’t function without event centres.
source: Tribune Newspaper
