Recently, I read Ivy McGregor’s piece titled, ‘The Burden and Blessing of being the First’. It was her take about USA’s first female supreme court judge, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and her journey to occupying that office. Shortly after, I got a call from a former colleague in Radio Nigeria inviting me to the breakfast show of Metro FM, the first FM station in Nigeria, as a sit-in guest. It was to commemorate its forty fifth year anniversary.
I asked the senior producer pertinent
questions about who the hosts would be and what research they had done about
me. I didn’t want a shoddy ‘intro’ nor a rambling one, riddled with ‘you guys’,
that presenters exhibit on air nowadays. Usually, it’s a tell-tale of inadequate
preparation and lack of information about their guests.
When I told her that I started the station’s breakfast show, Am Lagos in 2003 with Frank Edoho, Nigeria’s host of ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire’, she was surprised.
Once a colleague said to me, ‘the
first building on the street is not always the finest’. The word floats back to
me often. It means it doesn’t matter, if you got there first, others would
arrive and best your record. Yes, but that first house would always be the one
with the history. It will bear in its solemn simplicity the majesty of breaking
forth and the glory of being the first.
Unlike Justice Ketanji’s or VP
Kamala’s records, the new paths you chart in the workplace may not be recorded
nor celebrated. Nevertheless, document your story, enable it with technology
and leave the rest to the universe. Someday, your rarity and pioneering work
will be recognised. Someday.
0 Comments