It is not every day that a corporate titan pauses to say thank you to yesterday. But when Bimbo Ashiru speaks of the late President Muhammadu Buhari and the revered Awujale of Ijebuland, Oba Sikiru Adetona, he does so not as a boardroom veteran or political figure, but as a man who understands the quiet weight of legacy.
To Buhari, he offered a nod to discipline, to unity, to the restless ideal of a Nigeria that could be better. Of Adetona, the monarch who shaped generations of Ijebu thought and pride, Ashiru called him mentor, moral compass, and “father figure.”
And perhaps it was in that phrase that the heart of the tribute beat loudest. For Ashiru, reverence is not a ritual. It is a lineage.
He was not the only voice that rose. Others sent condolences, spoke glowingly of the monarch’s reign or Buhari’s public service. But it is the precision with which Ashiru honours the past—clean, dignified, unforced—that stands apart. In a time when gestures often serve ambition, his seems anchored in something older: grace.
It is this instinct, this cultivated blend of duty and decency, that now guides him as chairman of the Odu’a Investment Company.
There, too, his fingerprints are visible: in boardroom deliberations, in regional strategy, in a vision that weds market sense with cultural mindfulness. He does not command the room; he aligns it.
Ashiru once transformed Ogun’s industrial terrain as Commerce Commissioner. Now, he shepherds the Southwest’s economic crown jewel with the same quiet charisma. The man is not seeking to be remembered. He is simply remembering and, in doing so, making memory itself a kind of leadership.
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