Destiny Beckons (2021, Purplebloom) is a memoir written by Oluwabusola Oni, an enabler with passion for deploying innovation and design thinking as problem solving tools to harness economic potential of individuals and companies. The book is a four-part, 194-page memoir written by an African lady, who tells her life story of how she became an orphan at an early age and in spite of that, beat the odds to come out as the best student in WAEC. The memoir shows how she breaks the barriers to achieve academic excellence and pursue purpose.
It also talks about how the author switched her career paths from a lucrative accounting tax consultant position to a world of innovative education.
Titled Beautifully Painful, Part 1 talks about the author’s birth. This section discusses the loss of her mother at age six, and moving to Ibadan to live with her grandma alongside her two brothers Oladipupo and Olayinka. She tells us beautiful stories about her childhood, the formative years, and those happy moments when they played with dolls, and other such children’s experiences, particularly when you have parents who were hard working.
She devotes time to talk about the death of her mother, how external interference and unresolved foundational issues made things difficult for the family. She highlights how these made her a troubled child though she excelled at school. Oluwabusola recalls how she bedwetted even up till secondary school, and how this led to a damaging effect on her. She tells us the story of bouts of insecurity and how this also prevented her from cultivating real and deep friendships.
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This section of the book also reveals how she discovered God herself which led to a new beginning in her life. And how this discovery made studying now effortless and fun and how she was able to forgive her father.
Part 2 of the book tells us how she lost her father in a 2004 accident. She also discusses her journey to leadership when she and some other students pioneered a Christian club named “Christeens” an amalgamation of Christian teenagers. She reports that they engaged in different projects like giving to orphanage homes and to persons with disability. Due to imposter syndrome the group dissolved after they finished their WAEC.
WASSCE came and went and Busola had all A’s and also got 260 in JAMB but she was unable to gain admission that year. Heartbroken, she settled for A’ levels which ended up being a blessing in disguise. WAEC called her for a citation during the annual national convention. She was presented with an envelope filled with money and also got a scholarship to study in the United Kingdom at the London school of Economics and political science. The nine months before she travelled to the UK was instrumental in building her self-esteem and also gave her a sense of purpose. The three years she spent at Birmingham was filled with endless hours in the library and class, she also made wonderful relationships. Along the line she discovered she wasn’t a Nigerian by mistake and she had the urge to contribute to the development, she did not wait till she completed her studies before seeking ways to pay back. Birmingham was a place of growth for Busola. She was able to fully discover herself and also learn independence.
Every holiday she returns to Nigeria, and on one such occasion she was selected for a four-week internship at Citibank in Victoria Island. Overall, working at Citi gave her an appreciation for good work ethic but also she settled at the back of her mind that she does not want to work in the commercial sector in spite of the free lunch, luxurious office, fat salary packages and company cars.
Due to her good grades and God’s miraculous intervention she was able to get support from the previous Governor of Oyo state and also from family and friends to return to London for her masters. One key takeaway from her experience in London is that education is a means to an end and not an end in itself.
During her National Youth Service experience in Oyo State, Oluwabusola discovered that the students couldn’t communicate in English and the school had very poor infrastructure. The school was grossly underfunded. This all led to a question of leadership because there was so much corruption in the system. The burden of leadership kept her up late at night. She spent hours researching best practices from other countries. The more she reads, the more she recognizes the intentionality of their leadership in grooming the young population. This is the focus of the third part of the book, and it is aptly titled, The Call.
At the end of her service year she had completed and proposed a project whose idea was to run a teen leadership session that would be held once a week in her Alma Mata. After NYSC, she got a job at Deloitte as a tax associate. Later in 2016 she was selected as a Mandela Washington Fellow. The six weeks she spent at the University of Minnesota were truly remarkable. She boosted her confidence and changed her career path from tax consulting to education. Her vision started getting clearer.
The book’s fourth part, The Impact Cycle, contains the author’s 2017 discovery of design thinking. She stumbled on design thinking which she connected to her journey towards Design thinking. She introduced it to a boot camp programming and it was instrumental in activating the experimental approach they believed would unleash the potential of their participants. Her research led her to Nuvu studio Cambridge Massachusetts and that was how she found herself in Boston in June 2018. She returned to Nigeria and piloted some of the ideas by encouraging prototyping with basic materials for design challenges.
Essentially, the book, Destiny Beckons is an inspiring text on how grace and determined hard work can be propellants to acclaim and celebration. It is the story of how a young lady beat the odds to break barriers, achieved academic excellence and pursued purpose.
. Olatunbosun is a broadcast journalist, fact checker and book reviewer at Splash FM 105.5, Ibadan. He can be reached via 0802-351-7565 (SMS only) and [email protected].
