NAAPE PRESIDENT X-RAYS ABUJA
NAAPE PRESIDENT X-RAYS ABUJA
My name is Comrade Balami
Isaac David I work for Aero Contractors Company Nig. Ltd, as Business
Development Manager, overseeing third party maintenance across all airlines in
Africa. Also the President of the National Association of Aircraft Pilots and
Engineers, (NAAPE) the trade union that caters for pilots, aircraft maintenance
engineers, and flight engineers in Nigeria. Comrade Balami Isaac David is the
president / founder of Isaac Balami Foundation which the vision is basically
aimed at empowering and uniting the people, Nigeria and African Continent at
large. I am married and blessed with a child.
Why do you choose to live
and work in Abuja?
I don't work only in Abuja,
my base is Lagos but because of my role as the National President of the
National Association of Aircraft Pilots and Engineers and Spokesperson of the
Trade Union Congress of Nigeria, which I was elected last year July that made
me to always visit Abuja. Aviation
Minister, Ministry of Labour and other Government parastatals are here in Abuja
so it is very easy to meet the MD’s of all these parastatals.
I will say that the
lifestyle of Abuja is not bad in terms of security. Abuja has grown very fast
unlike Lagos. Once it is 10pm along Airline, Victoria Island, Ikeja, lekki
express way, you hardly see a salon that is open 24 hours basically because of
security. But today in Abuja, if you go round, at about 2am you will see not
less than five salons that are operating 24 hours that is to say if you are a
busy person you can make your hair at that time.
Abuja lifestyle in the night
is very encouraging except the threat of Boko Harm. Abuja is safest for work and everything.
Lifestyle itself, Abuja is a
place where people live a lot of fake life, you see people come to this town
without direction. They are just all over the place and most of our youths are
been carried away by the things happening like the politicians especially the
ladies and the young men. The politicians have this money the make very quick
and the use it to make our youths lose focus and that has pushed a lot of them
into prostitution including the men is a two way thing now no longer one way
because we have homosexual and these politicians use them for rituals. A lot of
things are happening. Abuja is a place if
you are here, you need to focus and don’t allow the lifestyle of night life to
carry you away because that is not enough to destroy your future.
What are your challenges in
Life?
As my parents will always
say and I quote the patron of Isaac Balami Foundation of Blessed Memory. He
always tells us that the day you wake up as a man and discover there are no
challenges, it means that you are dead because
in as much as you are alive there will always be challenges everyday. In
as much as you are alive, at home, street, even in the place of worship there
is challenge. But what matters is how you arrest the situation. I could remember when I was still in Lagos of
course am still in Lagos, it was very clear that I wanted to be the president
of the National Aircraft Pilots and Engineers, there were lot of challenges.
They said I was too young to lead that association but the only way I could
overcome that challenge was to face it, talk to people about my vision, what I
have in mind and once you have the spirit of perseverance, you are consistence
in what you are doing people will pick interest in you and they will overlook
other factors that are usually limited.
When I was in Aviation
College, I remembered that I needed much money to pay my school fees, my
parents could not even raise up to ten percent (10%) of what was required but
somehow I persevered. You will always
overcome. If you find yourself not overcoming a challenge, it means that God
has a better plan for you. What you just need to do is to look for elsewhere
and restructure yourself. A challenge to me is the most interesting thing about
life and it must come, once you overcome, you come out victoriously and you
celebrate it.
To crown it all everything
falls back to God. If you look up to man, man will fail you but when you look
up to God, He will make a way even where there is no way.
What are your driving
philosophies?
It's genuine love for what I
do, passion, commitment which is paramount. I believe in unity in respective of
tribe, religion, and ethnicity. That is what is missing in this country today.
When you talk about the six geopolitical zones everybody has his or her own
view, everybody wants to identify his or her own interest to a particular tribe
or religion which is not good and is not what God wants from us. Note that this
problem is not only in Nigeria alone but in the continent. Among everything in
life, what I value most is truthfulness, transparency which is paramount.
Where do you want to be in
the next five years?
In the next five years, I
want to believe that I have advance very well in my career, get more training
to keep myself for the future most importantly my NGO, achieving the project 1
million children back to school which the Isaac Balami Foundation has launched.
Currently, we have over four hundred children we could support to go back to
school both primary, secondary and university levels.
August 25, 2014 was my last
birthday, we launched a new product and set a new campaign where we discovered
that about eight million children are not in school that is why it is very easy
for Boko Haram to breed and keep cross breeding because they have the tools,
they have people that are illiterates they can use. For example in Borno,
Adamawa, Yobe, Bauchi, Taraba almost all the northern part of the country they
are prevalent.
In the next five years, we
believe that God will give us the grace to support at least one million
children to go back to school. The
campaign has started and also with the help and support of serious people that
have the interest of Nigeria at heart to send these children to school because
even in Abuja city, you will see young people coming to clean your car
windscreen and they are not in school. The matter is that we have forgotten
that if we refuse to educate those children, they will be the one that will
attack us tomorrow. That is why we believe that empowering and uniting people
are the key factors. Another thing we want to achieve through our NGO is to see
how we can convince the government to introduce some subjects in our primary
and secondary schools such as unity. That subject will act as a unifying factor
by the time a child is through with his common entrance or SSCE, he must have
understood the dangers of not loving one another or tolerating ones faith or
belief. By the time we begin to train our children from primary to secondary,
when they are out of school, they will have respect for each other irrespective
of the tribe or religion by so doing we will have a peaceful country in the
nearest 20 – 30 years. These are what we want to achieve believing with the
support of Nigerians even outside the country God will help us to achieve it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hello We are OddThemes, Our name came from the fact that we are UNIQUE. We specialize in designing premium looking fully customizable highly responsive blogger templates. We at OddThemes do carry a philosophy that: Nothing Is Impossible
0 comments:
Post a Comment