From the high-stakes calculus of international market research, octogenarian corporate pioneer Kareem Tejumola now pursues a different margin—the sliver of light that makes an image worth the risk. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke writes
Among the array of colour-saturated landscapes on the walls of corporate mogul Kareem Tejumola’s Maryland office—sun-drenched Atlantic horizons, floating communities built on stilts, escarpments folding into mist, waterfalls caught mid-psalm—a few photographs refuse to blend. One of them, a black-and-white study in brawn and shadow, broods. It shows a mountain—most likely Tula Yiri—muscling up out of Gombe’s Kaltungo district: dark, rounded, wind-scoured. Rising somewhere between 300 and 700 metres—depending on which surveyor one believes—this mass of rock and scrub thrusts into a hazy sky, ringed by trees that look less ornamental than ominous.
Sometime in 2024, Tejumola had arrived at its base at dusk in a convoy of rented motorcycles, engines clanking and backfiring as though the spectre of gridlocked traffic had blundered into this desolate place. A local guide—every one of his many expeditions has one—issued the warning with oracular clarity: between 6 and 7 p.m. for the best shots of the peak; by 8 p.m., one lingers at one’s own peril. That was when the nocturnal beasts resumed dominion. The riders took their money up front—naturally—then buzzed downhill with promises to return within the hour, vanishing in a snarl of fumes.
Trust the octogenarian founder of Research and Marketing Services—constitutionally averse to the obvious vantage point—to orbit the ridge in search of a truer angle. Soon the light dimmed, and the mountain loomed in silhouette. By the time he lowered the camera, satisfied, the hour had edged toward 8 p.m. The motorcycles had not returned.
Eventually—after a stretch of taut silence—a mechanical murmur clawed up the slope. One headlight. Not three. One motorcycle for six men and a darkness that offered no comfort. The guide improvised: Tejumola and one assistant would ride ahead; the others would follow. Somewhere mid-descent, the machine coughed, shuddered, and sputtered into silence. An assistant dropped to his knees, forced into mechanical work by necessity.
The rest, meanwhile, kept moving—walking, then jogging—through a landscape that had withdrawn its welcome… That sunny Tuesday afternoon, February 17, in Tejumola’s office, the photograph hangs on the wall, testimony to an adventure that still carries the chill of the shadowed ridge.
Long before he was scaling ridges in north-eastern Nigeria or visiting communities seemingly frozen in time, Tejumola was tackling something steeper: corporate terrain. Markets instead of mountains. Balance sheets instead of horizons. In those days he travelled with what he called “small compact cameras,” slipped into carry-ons on research trips to Cyprus, Ethiopia, the Congo—wherever duty beckoned. Photography was incidental. The numbers, never.
“When I started RMS—Research and Marketing Services—we were going to many countries,” he narrates. “Some dangerous. Some safe.” He says it the way a man might describe weather systems.
With the calm certainty of someone who understands markets as living organisms—temperamental, hungry, capable of surprise—he travelled relentlessly, sometimes with younger colleagues and a relative, Razaaque Animashaun, collecting data that could tilt competitive advantage by a degree or two. They were there for numbers. Percentages. Margins.
But the world does not let itself be confined to a spreadsheet. Congo offered streets layered with tension and resilience. Ethiopia—codes and courtesies that would not yield to easy charm. France, he discovered in his younger days, opened doors to foreigners like him with ritual warmth, while England perfected the art of distance, summed up in the legendary words: “Mind your business.” He returned home with stories that only shrank in the retelling.
“You tell people what you have seen,” he explains, “but they cannot figure it out unless they can see.” Over the years, his compact cameras became inadequate. He upgraded. Then upgraded again. Among his latest acquisitions: a Nikon Z-series with a 24–120mm f/4 lens, and a Nikon Zf paired with a Viltrox 35mm f/1.2.
Unlike his friends, his interest drifted toward the landscapes he had visited. Mountains. Waterfalls. Coastlines. Not trophies—testimonies. If a landmark had been photographed a thousand times, that was no deterrent. It was a challenge. “My ambition is that I don’t want to be like the others.” He studied where most photographers planted their tripods—the safe, consensus spot—then walked away, sometimes toward a precarious edge.
Yet he knows all too well, from a friend’s misstep, what precarious truly means. Aiming his lens at a mountain peak in Wales, the man was distracted by a bird sweeping across the face. He stepped back for alignment—spot-on composition, sublime symmetry—and stepped off the edge. A helicopter rescued him. Six months in hospital; a limp remains. Still, he never gave up the cameras.
“That is the passion,” Tejumola sums it up. “He still goes out.”
Passion intensified as retirement approached with time’s blunt punctuality. “I could feel it—I was getting tired. I could not do research as effectively as before.” Younger executives ran RMS with speed and fluency. His hours loosened. The man who once chased contracts began pursuing the scenes—the landscapes, the ridges, the rivers, the coastlines he had long studied from spreadsheets and reports.
“I said to myself, I want to do photography—really.” He enrolled at the London School of Photography. Three months. Then another session. Aperture. Shutter speed. Composition. The grammar of light. But he realised manuals were merely scaffolding. “In the field, you must think. What was happening when I took this? What was I thinking?”
Fifteen years on, he muses about audience feedback: professionals dissect his work, friends are favourably disposed, and his son dispenses unsentimental verdicts: “Too much saturation. You are over-editing.”
“Editing is not supposed to change what you saw,” Tejumola insists. “If it changes it completely, it doesn’t make sense.” Some of his favourite images are unannounced moments—a woman on a motorbike near Zuma Rock, unaware of the lens. “I just wanted them to be moving,” he says. “Not noticing me at all.”
The man, director of Kantar Africa Insight Limited since 2004, does not pretend this is inexpensive. Expeditions—like his recent trip to Benin—require assistants, guides, sometimes even security escorts. “If you need good service, you must pay.” Out of 300 photographs, perhaps one or two survive. “That is how it is.”
Now he is assembling a book—Nigeria and Ghana, mountains and waterfalls, coastlines and escarpments. An exhibition will follow. “I want to show that anyone can take a photograph if they pay attention and are interested,” he adds.
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