A Chat With Comrade Balami Isaac David

My name is Comrade Balami Isaac David I work for Aero Contractors Company Nigeria Limited. 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 allover 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 loose 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.