Not everyone turns 60 like this, with governors, artists, and friends queuing to say “Happy birthday, Ekua.” Some milestones pass quietly. Hers arrives like a chorus, each voice carrying a note of admiration for a life spent weaving institutions out of vision and persistence.
Ekua Abudu-Akinsanya is many things. A lawyer by training, a chartered administrator by discipline, a school proprietress by calling. Thirty years ago, she co-founded Greenwood House School in Ikoyi, now a fixture of Lagos education. Her hand still shapes its rhythms, steady as a metronome.
Her reach spills past classrooms. She once presided over the International Women’s Society, the country’s oldest female charity. She chairs the Interior Designers Association of Nigeria, mentors younger women, and helps steer the Olave Baden Powell Society that funds Girl Guides across the world. Quite a constellation of causes.
If lists could tell the whole story, hers would stretch from law firms to savings institutions, from editing Essential Woman magazine to serving as a benefactor at MUSON. Yet beyond the bullet points is something less tangible: the art of gathering people, convincing them to build, convincing them to stay.
At 60, Ekua enjoys her quieter days. She seldom courts the limelight, though the occasional Instagram post of her in a pink caped gown, maroon fascinator perched at an angle, suggested she knows how to step into a room. Style, for her, seems less an act of display than a gentle punctuation.
Still, tributes now flood in. They recall a woman who could manage a boardroom and still find time to raise a vocational academy. They recall energy dressed in patience, a contradiction she seems to carry with ease. What more can one wish her at 60? Perhaps simply this: may the chorus never end.
Leave a comment