Femi Gbajabiamila: The Weight of Power, The Grace of Restraint

FACTFILE with Lanre Alfred

Every country produces politicians but only a few produce custodians.

Nigeria, unfortunately, has seen too many of the former and too few of the latter.

I have spent enough years around the machinery of power to know its peculiar chemistry. Power changes the tenor of a man’s voice and alters his gait. It also expands his appetites and shrinks his patience. Sometimes, it creates an invisible moat around him, separating him from ordinary suffering. Thus, it can turn decent men into emperors and public servants into minor deities.

Yet every once in a while, you encounter someone who seems curiously resistant to its intoxication.

That, perhaps, is why I have found myself repeatedly drawn to the story of Femi Gbajabiamila.

I know, I know. In our society, praise is always greeted with suspicion. The moment one says something generous about a public official, somebody somewhere begins to calculate what contract has been awarded, what favour is being sought, or what office has been promised. We have become so accustomed to betrayal by our leaders that admiration itself has become suspect.

But not every reflection is a transaction. Sometimes, one simply encounters a public figure whose journey compels contemplation.

Gbajabiamila is one of those figures. I have watched him for years. I have observed him in moments of triumph and while he handled criticism. I have listened to those who adore him and to those who distrust him. And I have come to one conclusion: his greatest political talent is not strategy, not eloquence, not even longevity.

It is empathy. Not the sentimental, performative empathy that politicians suddenly discover during election season. Not the kind that arrives with television cameras and disappears with the last ballot paper.

I mean power empathy, the ability to understand that authority is not ownership and that the true owners of political office are the people.

The Chief of Staff (CoS) to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu understands that governance is not merely about ruling but about carrying the anxieties of millions as though they were your own. In a country where power often behaves like a private inheritance, this quality is almost revolutionary.

I have seen powerful men who entered office with noble intentions and emerged with palaces of ego. They stopped hearing ordinary people and became prisoners of protocol, protected by layers of aides, insulated by convoys and convinced that their importance was proof of their infallibility.

Gbajabiamila has never struck me as that kind of man. The first thing people notice about him is restraint. The second thing they notice is discipline.

The third is something harder to explain. It is the sense that he understands the burden of office and carries it with unusual seriousness.

He does not perform power, rather he inhabits his office and the responsibilities it imposes upon him. And this distinction matters.

It explains why he can move through the corridors of influence without appearing intoxicated by them. It also explains why he can occupy powerful offices without becoming their captive.

Look at his political journey: Twenty years in the House of Representatives. Twenty years. In Nigeria, that kind of longevity is usually accompanied by scandal, fatigue or arrogance. Yet he managed to remain politically relevant while steadily deepening his institutional influence.

That alone deserves study, because our politics is littered with brilliant sprinters and very few marathon runners.

Gbajabiamila was once a minority leader, and subsequently, a majority leader. Then Speaker of the House. Now he sits at the nerve centre of executive power as Chief of Staff to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

What this means is that he is close enough to power to shape its daily rhythm, and distant enough to avoid its vanity. Those who follow society and politics in equal measure understand that influence in Nigeria is rarely a solo performance. It is a terpsichore of trust, calculation, alliances forged in private rooms and tested in public storms.

Gbajabiamila has mastered that waltz without reducing or sullying himself. He knows when to speak. More importantly, he knows when silence does the heavier lifting.

It was this quality that compelled me, eventually, to undertake a serious portrait of the man in the form of a book: The Power Empath. Not because he is flawless, but because he represents a type increasingly rare in our national theatre: the institutionalist. The man who believes that structures matter more than slogans.

The first chapter of the book, A Boy Raised Between Law and Ledger, traces the early currents that shaped him. Lagos in the 1960s and 70s was not merely a city; it was a proving ground. Raised in a household where business sense met intellectual discipline, he absorbed two parallel educations: the pure mathematics of enterprise and the moral syntax of law. Those twin influences would later define his political temperament.

From there, The Making of a Lawyer examines the long apprenticeship to the law, University of Lagos, the discipline of the Bar, the further sharpening abroad. America further refined him. There, in courtrooms far removed from Surulere’s crowded streets, he learned the muscularity of argument and the necessity of preparation. Law taught him patience. It also taught him that institutions, however flawed, are stronger than impulse.

Yet the most telling decision of his early life was chronicled in The Return. He could have remained in the United States, built a comfortable career, and enjoyed the anonymity of distance. Instead, he came back. That return was not romantic. It was deliberate. He chose to test himself in the rough-and-tumble of Nigerian politics, where pedigree guarantees nothing and survival demands stamina. The book treats that decision as a hinge moment, the point at which ambition met obligation.

Entering the Green Chamber revisits 2003, when he first walked into the House of Representatives as a young legislator from Surulere. The chapter lingers on his early days, when observation mattered more than volume. There is a misconception that effective politicians must begin loudly. Gbajabiamila began attentively. He studied procedure. He mapped personalities. He learned that in Parliament, mastery of rules can outlast mastery of rhetoric.

By the time we arrive at June 2019, The Gavel, the narrative shifts from apprenticeship to authority. His election as Speaker of the 9th House was not merely a personal triumph; it was a referendum on endurance. This chapter explores how he handled the office, restoring order to the budget cycle, accelerating long-delayed reforms, steering contentious bills through debate without reducing the chamber to chaos. He forged a working relationship with the Executive that critics feared would compromise legislative independence. Instead, he attempted something subtler: cooperation without surrender. This did not please everyone. It was not designed to.

But if Abuja gave him altitude, Surulere gave him grounding. Surulere as Moral Compass argues that his constituency has never been a political ornament. The roads he reconstructed, schools he renovated, and the health facilities that he upgraded, became, in the book’s telling, a moral accounting system. In Surulere, performance is visible. The constituents remember, and Gbajabiamila, to his credit, understood early that representation must translate into brick, asphalt, and light.

Education emerges as a recurring motif. In Mindbuilder: On Gbajabiamila’s Educational Legacy, the focus turns to ICT centres in secondary schools, support for tertiary institutions, grants for students. The chapter suggests that his educational interventions reflect a private conviction: that politics without investment in minds is merely noise.

Equally compelling is Empowering the Youth, which chronicles job fairs, entrepreneurship support, and vocational initiatives. Critics may question scale; supporters point to impact. What cannot be denied is consistency. He has returned repeatedly to the question of youth opportunity, aware that Nigeria’s demographic dividend can just as easily become a demographic storm.

Then comes Leaving the Chamber Well. Few politicians know how to exit gracefully. Fewer still resign from a seat they have held for twenty years without clinging to its privileges. His departure from the House to assume the role of Chief of Staff is treated as a momentous transition rather than an abandonment. That chapter reads almost elegiac: twenty years distilled into a final speech while his colleagues rose to honour him, out of respect.

Power, however, is never static. Tinubu, Trust, and Shared Burden delves into his relationship with President Bola Tinubu, a relationship rooted in progressive politics and shared battles. Trust in politics is a rare currency, and the book does not romanticize it; rather, it interrogates it. What does it mean to stand so close to the centre of executive authority? What compromises luck? What responsibilities multiply? Gbajabiamila’s new role demands discretion, coordination, and a willingness to absorb pressure without public applause.

Still, the most human portrait may be found in Still Among His Own. Despite the altitude of office, he returns—physically and symbolically—to Surulere. The chapter suggests the significance of proximity to ordinary. A politician who forgets his street loses his compass.

And because Nigerian politics is also a theatre, the book does not neglect his quieter passions. Champion of Grassroots Sports explores his facilitation of mini-stadia and support for local athletic initiatives. Sports, in his worldview, become both social glue and economic opportunity.

So why write this book? Why risk being accused of proximity, of praise, of alignment? Because I believe we must document not only flamboyant leaders but also the high-achieving, methodical ones. Because the Nigerian story is too often told through crises and rarely through craftsmanship.

Yet, I must say, Gbajabiamila is not beyond criticism. No politician is. His cooperative stance with the Executive has unsettled purists who prefer perpetual antagonism between arms of government. His loyalty to party has earned him both admiration and suspicion. Yet even his critics concede that he has approached public office with preparation and seriousness.

Gbajabiamila’s appeal lies in continuity. In his refusal to defect when defection was convenient, in his patience to climb the legislative ladder rung by rung, and his ability to leave an office without diminishing it.

As I wrote, I found myself less interested in his victories than in his habits. Victories are public; habits are private. Victories can be counted; habits must be observed. It is easy to catalogue bills passed, offices held, titles earned. It is harder, and more revealing, to examine how a man prepares before he enters the room where those outcomes are decided.

It’s inspiring to see Gbajabiamila with documents. Not the ceremonial folders waved before cameras, but the dense briefs that arrive without glamour: policy notes layered with footnotes, fiscal projections heavy with implication, and legal drafts whose commas can alter national consequence. Gbajabiamila does not skim. He reads with the caution of a lawyer and the suspicion of a legislator who knows that every paragraph contains both a promise and trap.

Then there is the way he negotiates tension. Nigerian politics is not merely competitive; it is combustible. Ego collides with ego, region presses against region, while ideology yields to survival instinct. In such an atmosphere, many leaders mistake volume for strength. Gbajabiamila has built a different reflex. He lowers the temperature before he raises a point. He listens longer than his critics expect and allows others to exhaust their outrage before he introduces structure into the conversation. He understands that resolution requires oxygen, and oxygen rarely survives shouting.

When crises erupt, he avoids the temptation to dramatise his involvement. Instead, he works corridors rather than podiums. He calls meetings instead of press conferences and absorbs criticism without staging a counter-spectacle. This has preserved his credibility.

In the end, the spine of his story is not a single election or appointment. It is the accumulation of these disciplines; small, repeated acts of seriousness. Power may elevate a man, but habit sustains him. And in Gbajabiamila’s case, habit explains far more than triumph ever could.