Buruji Kashamu

His birth was providential and profound; so were the events leading to his christening, growth and his entire life. Although his father was doing well as a farmer and businessman, things took a turn for the worse shortly before Senator Buruji Kashamu was born. However, before his christening on the eighth day, there was a turnaround that surprised members of the Kashamu family. The miraculous turn of events informed his being christened “Buruji” which literally means one who came into wealth early in life. This was in line with the Yoruba tradition of taking cognizance of happenings around a family when christening a child.

Born on the 19th of May, 1958, Senator Buruji Kashamu is the second son and the third child of his mother’s four children for Pa Kashamu Sodipe. Like most men of his time, Pa Kashamu was a polygamist. He had five wives who bore him thirteen children.

For those who saw the young Buruji through infancy, his first faltering steps and the events afterwards, they would readily surmise that the name was divinely inspired.

After his early education at the Ansarudeen Primary School in Ijebu Igbo, Ijebu North Local Government Area of Ogun State, he was taken to Lagos where he began to live with an uncle in Surulere, Lagos. The uncle had a hotel known as Lolas Lodge near Tejuosho, Yaba, where he worked as an attendant during the day and then attended evening classes at Igbobi College, Lagos.

Although his early exposure to the work life could be said to have momentarily distracted him from his educational pursuits, his strong desire for knowledge and self-improvement made him to later sit for the Senior School Certificate Examination (SSCE). Thereafter, he took a correspondence course in Business Studies at the Pitman College, London and much later a Diploma in English Language at the University of Lagos.

But, suffice it to say that his early exposure to the work life set him on a path of industry and self-dependence from which he never looked back while many of his peers were still tied to their mother’s apron strings. When he was barely 20 years old in 1978, he found his way into Yaba Local Government Area of Lagos State where he was engaged as an agent for motor vehicle registration and documentation, licenses and the like.

After working for about a year, he made enough savings from which he began his automobile business. Yes, automobile business! How he did it? Here is how: he worked Monday through Friday at the local council. But, on Friday evening, after the close of work, he would leave Lagos for Kaduna where he would arrive the next day. From the park or train station, he would go straight to Peugeot Automobile Nigeria (PAN) in Kaduna where he made his purchases and then return to Lagos on Sunday so as to resume work the next day. Whenever he got to Kaduna late, he would make contact with his the sales personnel, make all the necessary arrangements and return to work. He began with one 504 Peugeot car, and then progressed to two, three...

Kashamu later veered into the real estate business. His first was a plot of land he bought in Ikotun Egbe, a Lagos suburb on which he built his first house – a block of four flats. His immediate elder sister lived in one of the flats until recently when she relocated to Lagos Island.