SOCIETY NEWS
I can’t recall the primary school I attended, but after finishing I went to State High School in Lagos for my secondary and finished in 1996 before proceeding to get a degree in Law at the Lagos State University. I then went to law school and was called to bar in 2003 at the Abuja Law School before going to pursue an LLB in Belgium.
After that I went to many more schools across the world. I have been a visiting student at Columbia University in New York. I’ve also been a visitor at Yale University in Connecticut, both in the US. I can boast of attending 12 different universities, and it makes me question the education system in Nigeria and how much more we need to do in terms of developing it so that we do not teach people but create thinkers and innovators.
Immediately after I was called to bar, fortunately for me, I started working the following week as an intern and then as corps member (NYSC) at the Women Advocacy Research and Documentation Centre in Lagos, Ward C, before moving on to work with some colleagues at the Environmental and Human Rights Developmental Agency (EHRDA) where we were doing a lot of work on corruption and the environment.
And of course being a lawyer, after coming back from my masters, I started working at the Legal Resource Consortium (LRC), and I think it did a lot in shaping me for my next job because there, we were doing a lot of work on public interest lawyering, which was something I had actually done from the beginning of my profession. They then began a new initiative by the DFID called Coalition for Change, which is a dynamic development sector-orientated programme in Nigeria. The whole idea is to have a public/private partnership and Issue-Based Programmes (IBP), and one of them is on corruption called Movement Against Corruption, which I coordinated from 2008 till mid 2010, before joining the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) ahead of the 2011 elections.
I was working at our Lagos office. In between I took a break and moved back to Abuja towards the end of 2012, and I’m still at the CDD doing great work as the director.
CDD has given me exposure not only in Nigeria, but in West Africa as a whole, since we are a regional organisation. You become acquainted with what is happening in the 15 ECOWAS countries. Being part of a Pan African organisation is very interesting and is also a very exciting place to work.
It was very interesting. I had a family where I felt so much love. We learnt about sharing everything we had. My parents went a long way in trying to THEY PLACED SO MUCH ATTENTION ON US: THE GIRLS, AND MADE US BELIEVE THAT THE SKY WAS OUR LIMIT. THEY MADE US UNDERSTAND THAT WE COULD BECOME WHOEVER WE WANTED TO BE