HKS MCMPA  Class Speech 2009 - Copy.avi
Channel: Ojoboa
Date: 27/10/2011

Mid-Career Masters in Public Administration Class Speech 2009 at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government by Ojobo Ode Atuluku, introduced by Class graduation marshal, Olfat Hammad

The Power of a Chain Link
My Asian brethren, European friends,  South American compañeros, Australian colleagues, I greet you; my fellow Africans, in the American tradition, hi; to our hospitable hosts, the North Americans, thank you for receiving us and sharing with us, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. And to our professors and other school officials, thank you indeed for trusting us enough to give of yourself in tutelage: like some of the mysteries I learned in my quants class, you will be multiplied even as you self-subtract to share your knowledge with us.
 As I stand before you in this moment in time, it is for me the culmination of a 20 year quest. A journey that has taken me from my family, through the lessons in public service from my teacher of a father and a highly ingenious self-educated mother, through legal education, and a multifaceted career, across seas and continents, across time and cultures across 10,000 kilometers from my native Nigeria to the Mid-Career MPA to arrive at the center of my personal being, to find that what I sought all along lies within me. 
Perhaps, it is the same with you? -- A quest for answers to questions that are for ever changing, to solutions that remain satisfactory but only for a moment? An expedition that again and again, in differing words and ways, leads me to ask - who am I and how can I be meaningfully significant to my own world? It is a search for contentment that eludes me because I am not doing enough in the face of the dangers that threaten our world and its billions of disadvantaged people. It is a search that led me to find you. Yes, you. 
Here we are. Look at your neighbor.  Go-on, take a look. What do you see? A friend, a network? A person. The world is complete here But to what purpose? To be better equipped to contribute to what? Under the shadow of 10,000+ who have passed this path before us, the hopes and aspirations of how we will create the needed change is almost tangible. But if we have so many like us before us, why is our world still in this downward spiral? What have they done or not done? With each step it takes forward in science and innovation, it takes three back in human security, suffering and loss of humane ness. What does it look like from where you stand? The events of the past year have made this time more significant than any other. 
It is a global cry for help, for action, for partnerships, for linking globally to create the needed transformations. Let us not ignore it but build ourselves, connecting across our worlds to save the earth. Don't ignore it. Now is the time, not next year, not later when we have lost the earth because we were waiting to hear a louder call, or because we do not quite know what to do or because we feel so weak and insignificant.
Inspite of my questions, I know enough to share with you that all it takes is the power of one. One person who feels a twinge to do something, to do anything. That one reaching out to another one and the two ones reaching out each to another and the chain keeps growing, getting stronger as more join it. It does not matter what you do, how you do it or where: please do something. And make it count as a part of a chain, not in isolation, for then it disappears. And so as we leave here, I invite you all, please be a link in a chain. Let us rely on the power of numbers to share a common vision of peace, development, and of growth, of happy healthy children. Act where you are but, act in your world with the rest of the world in mind and with a picture of the most vulnerable person you ever knew in front of your mind's eye. 
There is only one hurdle to this happening and that is the person you see in the mirror every day.  
And so, Mid-Career class of 2009, forget your inner contradictions and let us go change the world, one person at a time!!!