By Henry Ukazu

Dear Destiny Friends,

If you are asked, what’s your calling, what will be your response? If you are asked what your purpose on earth is, what will be your response? If you are asked who you are, what would be your response? These, no doubt, are interesting questions to decipher one’s calling.

Finding one’s calling is the best thing that can happen to anyone. According to one of my most cherished mentors, Dr. Yomi Garnett, the day you find your purpose is the day you become a millionaire. I couldn’t agree more with this saying because it is nothing but the gospel truth. This is because the best thing that can happen to anyone is knowing their calling.

According to Mark Twain, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born, and the day you find out why. This is a fact. It’s quite unfortunate that many people are just existing as opposed to living. We were not created to exist, we were created to fill a vacuum, and we can only make an impact if we are intentionally answering our call.

Let’s circle back to the question I asked at the beginning of this article, what’s your calling? To answer this question, I would like you to approach it from a spiritual perspective. At creation, God called us to be something in the world, that’s why he gave us gifts and talents and told us to be fruitful and multiply.   

Just like we all have names that our parents, friends, children, mentors, etc. call us. These names are reflections of what we mean to them or how they perceive us. Names are symbolic and have deep meanings if we apply reasoning to them. So, if we can answer the names we are called to earth, how about answering the name God called us at birth. I believe that’s the most important call or name we need to answer as human beings. When we answer the name God gave to us, the world will begin to respond to what we say because we have answered the mother’s call.

Why do I say this? Your purpose was made in heaven, but your calling is meant to be fulfilled on earth. It’s sad to see people answering different names they are not called. When God created you, there’s something he had in mind for you to accomplish or solve on earth, but it’s unfortunate that, due to life’s vicissitudes, some of us derail from the path God destined for us, and hence that’s the reason many of struggle because we are not working in the direction and pathway God designed for us to tread.

It should be known that your calling was not a conference call; the call was personal. If God wanted anyone to know your calling or purpose, he would have revealed it to anyone he wants, but he chose to reveal it to you, so the onus is on you to focus on it, follow it religiously and ultimately fulfill it because that’s the only way you can get fulfillment.

I also asked, what’s your purpose? Your purpose is the reason why you do whatever you are doing. In this context, your purpose is your why.  According to Dr. Myles Munroe, “When the purpose of a thing is not known, abuse is inevitable.” Your purpose is the reason why you applied for a job, married your partner, started an NGO, a business, relocated/travelled, started school, or even wrote a book. There’s always a reason why we do something. That reason is the inspiration and motivation we need to forge when everything else fails.

Again, I ask you what’s your purpose? If you can’t figure out your purpose, I will strongly advise you to go to your creator (God) and ask him, what’s your purpose because he’s the person that created you. When people desire different interests in different majors, skills, profession, vocation, etc., it’s simply because someone puts the desire and interest inside them.

To understand how purpose works, there’s no problem on earth without a solution. The only problem without a solution is the problem the person with the solution hasn’t arrived.

Let me share a practical example on purpose. There was a story of an old man whose car (Ford) broke down in the middle of the road, all efforts to fix the car proved abortive. An old man was passing by and saw this man struggling to fix the car, he asked him, “What’s the problem?” The old man said, well, my car has refused to start. The stranger told the man to give a minute. The man initially refused saying who is this old man to fix what I have been working on for hours.

On second thought, he said, what will I lose if I give him a chance. He decided to listen to the old man who told him to give me a minute to check out the car. This stranger didn’t do much, he just touched a particular side of the engine and told the old man to start the car, and immediately the car cranked back to her life. The man was surprised and asked him, who are you? ” The stranger said, “I am Henry Ford, the owner of Ford Motors.

The moral of this story is, Henry Ford, the founder of Ford motors, knows his car more than everyone. So, if a mere mortal can know much, how much about the creator who will not know about our purpose?

When you find your purpose, you find your why, but when you find your why you must find your purpose.

The final question I asked: “Who are you? To answer these questions, I need you to focus on the inmate quality you are blessed with as opposed to what people think about you. What people think about you is your reputation, but who you are is your character.  Some people associate titles to who they are. I think that’s the wrong interpretation. One might be a doctor, lawyer, Chief Operating Officer, professor, or even the governor or president, but that doesn’t make them good people with good traits, qualities, values and charismatic inmate abilities.

To lead one must have empathy, compassion, and heart of service. It is through these traits; one can see who a person really is and not the cloth of title they are showing the world.

So, to find one’s calling, here’s my sample suggestion: ask your creator (God), inquire what makes you happy, what you love to do, what do people compliment you on, what do you do with relative ease if you are woken from sleep? What is one thing you can do for free?

In conclusion, finding one’s calling is the best thing that can happen to anyone. The day you find your calling is the day you will begin to live your best life because you will begin to bless the world with your calling.

Henry Ukazu writes from New York. He works with the New York City Department of Correction as the Legal Coordinator. He’s the founder of Gloemi. He’s a Transformative Human Capacity and Mindset coach. He is also a public speaker, youth advocate, creative writer, and author of Design Your Destiny- Actualizing Your Birthright to Success, Unleash Your Destiny, and The Six Pillars of Success. He can be reached via info@gloemi.com

By Henry Ukazu

Dear Destiny Friends,

One of life’s most misunderstood concepts is the relationship between process and failure. When some people fail, they think they have done something wrong, but it could be that the person is experiencing the process, or their season has not yet come.

To understand this concept, let’s explain the two terms. A process is a series of structured actions, steps, or decisions taken in a specific order to transform input into a desired output or goal. Here are the key elements of a process

• Inputs: The raw materials, data, or starting requirements (such as ingredients, customer requests, or raw code).
• Activities/Steps: The specific tasks or decisions performed by people, tools, or machines.
• Trigger: An event or demand that kicks off the process (like submitting an order or launching an app).
• Output: The result, product, or delivered service.
• Owner: The person or role accountable for the outcome.

Failure, on the other hand, is the state or condition of not meeting a desirable, required, or intended objective. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, failure can result from any of the following:

• Omission or Neglect: Failing to perform an action that was promised, owed, or expected (such as a failure to pay on time or submit a report).
• System or Organ Malfunction: A situation where a machine, computer, engine, or bodily organ stops working properly (such as engine failure or kidney failure).
• Insolvency: A financial state of bankruptcy, such as the failure of a business or bank.

Having stated the above terms, one can decipher that process is a necessary tool for success. When a process is lacking, failure is inevitable.

I recently listened to a sermon by a Nigerian Pastor. According to the pastor, there’s something that looks like failure, but in a real sense, it is not failure; it is process. Sometimes in life, when we fail in business, examinations, careers, marriage, or even when our health fails us, the reason why they all happen is that we have failed to do the needful, or we need to go through a process.

Let me explain. Let’s say one has a business; if one has not taken the time to learn the trade very well, the person might fail for not learning a necessary skill required for the business, acquiring formal or informal education, or having a form of apprenticeship from a mentor, which might be all that’s necessary for the entrepreneur to succeed. This is what is called a process.

Also, a student will need to read, research, and do assignments to pass an examination. An employee will have to learn a job as an entry-level employee and work his way through to become the Chief Executive Officer. All this involves a process.

Marriage is not an exception. There’s no successful marriage without a form of mentoring or training.  A man/woman must undergo a process of marriage counseling to learn about how to win in marriage. In this training, they will learn about communication in marriage, money in marriage, sex in marriage, money in marriage, and personalities in marriage

I strongly believe that there’s time for everything. There is an appointed time for everything. When something is not in its season, don’t expect to deliver.  When one puts pressure, it’s bound to fail.

I can vividly remember what my most revered mentor, Dr. Yomi Garnett, counseled me on the importance of patience. A little background about the case: at that time, I had no job. I was working as a security officer. I tried to use my connections to secure a decent job, but it was very challenging. I reached out to Dr. Yomi, whom I call the sage because of his scintillating and rational wisdom. After ranting to him about my litany of problems, he said to me, “Henry, if you like, meet President Obama, Trump, etc.; if God is not ready to give you a job, you won’t get a job”. He went further to say, you can’t rush God. When the time is ready, God will align everything for you.

According to my mentors, there’s something God and the universe want me to learn. I must go through some process of refining for the task ahead.  These refining processes might be preparing for the greater task by learning what needs to be learned, or it could be a case of God teaching me wisdom or something of value that will be useful to me in the near future which I may not be able to see now.

When I look back in retrospect, I can authoritatively say my mentor was right.

Sometimes in life, we prepare for the opportunities, while sometimes, we don’t prepare. We just learn on the job. But I honestly think it’s good to prepare before one embarks on any journey. That preparation is called a process.

To understand how the process works, do you know that if you plant corn in the season that is not the rainy season, you will believe it’s a bad seed, but no, that’s not the case because you planted the corn in the wrong season. Even the bible says there’s a time for everything.

Also, someone might finish university and become frustrated because he doesn’t have a job. What the person might not know is that their season is yet to manifest. It could also be that the student might need refinement, which comes with the process.

It’s instructive to note that when your season comes, nothing can stop it; there will be alignment, and the universe will work for you. What you did many years ago that failed to attract attention will begin to attract attention and draw you in.

Today, I pray, may you command attention in your season, not after your season.

Henry Ukazu writes from New York. He works with the New York City Department of Correction as the Legal Coordinator. He’s the founder of Gloemi. He’s a Transformative Human Capacity and Mindset coach. He is also a public speaker, youth advocate, creative writer and author of Design Your Destiny- Actualizing Your Birthright to Success, Unleash Your Destiny and The Six Pillars of Success . He can be reached via info@gloemi.com

By Tolulope A. Adegoke

“The cradle of humankind is also its destiny, and Africa, I dare say, is the future of the world.” — William Ruto, President of Kenya

The proposition that Africa’s destiny will be determined by Africans who understand that destiny is not a slogan of convenience. It is a demographic, ecological, and strategic reality that the twenty-first century is already forcing into view. With a population projected to rise from roughly 1.4 billion today to as many as 2.5 billion by mid-century, Africa will hold an unprecedented concentration of young talent: an estimated 830 million people aged 15 to 35 . By 2050, Africans will constitute approximately one-third of the global labor force. These figures are frequently recited, but their implications are rarely confronted with the seriousness they demand. A world that is aging in Europe, East Asia, and North America cannot indefinitely rely on a shrinking base of workers to sustain production, innovation, and care. The future of the global economy, the future of food, and the future of medicine are being shaped, whether the world acknowledges it or not, by what happens on the African continent. But the direction of that shaping is not predetermined. The destiny of the world may lie in Africa; whether it is a destiny of shared prosperity or of deepening fragility will be decided in Africa by Africans.

The Agricultural Imperative: Potential Unrealized, Provision Deferred

Africa’s agricultural endowment is without parallel. The continent holds more than 60 percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land, a reserve of productive capacity that no other region can match. Yet this abundance coexists with a paradox that should unsettle any serious observer: Africa imports nearly $115 billion worth of food products annually. The continent irrigates only about 6 percent of its arable land, leaving the vast majority of its productive potential dependent on rainfall that climate change is making increasingly erratic. This is not a story of natural scarcity. It is a story of underinvestment, inadequate infrastructure, and policy frameworks that have too often treated agriculture as a residual sector rather than as the foundation of sovereignty.

The transformation required is both technical and institutional, and the continent’s own institutions have begun to articulate it with clarity. The Kampala CAADP Declaration, adopted by the African Union in January 2025, commits member states to increasing agri-food output by 45 percent by 2035, reducing post-harvest losses by 50 percent, tripling intra-African trade in agri-food products, and raising the share of locally processed food to 35 percent of agri-food GDP. The declaration also sets a financing target of $100 billion in public and private investment in African agri-food systems by 2035. These are not modest ambitions. They require the strengthening of seed systems, soil health management, water infrastructure, and agricultural research and extension services—the unglamorous foundations upon which productivity rests. They require the integration of emerging technologies, including biotechnology, artificial intelligence, digital platforms, and precision agriculture, into farming systems that have too often been left behind by the global technological frontier. And they require a deliberate effort to integrate smallholder farmers, women, and youth into value chains and regional markets, not as passive beneficiaries but as participants with equitable claims on the returns.

The stakes extend beyond Africa’s borders. Global food demand is projected to rise substantially as the world’s population approaches 9.8 billion by 2050, and the consequences of failing to meet that demand will not be confined to any single region. Africa’s capacity to transform its potential into production is therefore a matter of global stability, not merely continental development. Yet the transformation will not occur through the passive operation of market forces. It will occur only if African governments, entrepreneurs, and communities make deliberate choices to invest in the continent’s own productive capacity rather than relying on imports that drain foreign exchange and leave populations vulnerable to price shocks they did not create.

Medicine and the Wealth of Indigenous Knowledge

Africa’s contribution to global medicine has been systematically undervalued, in part because the continent’s pharmacopoeia has been treated as folklore rather than as a scientific resource. The botanical wealth of sub-Saharan Africa is extraordinary: over 50,000 distinct plant species are known to occur in the region, and more than a quarter of these have been used for centuries in traditional medicine. This is not a curiosity of ethnographic interest. It is a repository of therapeutic knowledge that modern pharmacology has barely begun to investigate with the rigor it deserves.

The evidence of commercial and clinical significance is already substantial. Prunus africana, harvested from the bark of a tree native to African highlands, is used in the treatment of prostate gland hypertrophy and has been exported in quantities valued at millions of dollars annually, with the pharmaceutical industry capturing the overwhelming share of the final product’s value. Voacanga africana, whose seeds are rich in the alkaloid tabersonine, has been used as a central nervous system depressant in geriatric patients. Rauvolfia vomitoria yields reserpine and yohimbine, compounds with established applications in the management of hypertension and related conditions. These are not isolated examples. They are indicative of a broader pattern in which African biological resources are extracted, processed elsewhere, and returned to the continent—if they return at all—as expensive finished products.

The challenge is not merely scientific but political and ethical. Transforming traditional knowledge into validated therapeutics without exploiting the communities that preserved that knowledge requires robust intellectual property protections, equitable benefit-sharing mechanisms, and genuine collaboration among traditional healers, ethno-botanists, pharmacologists, and regulators. Africa must move from being a supplier of raw materials for global pharmaceutical research to an innovator in its own right, with the infrastructure, funding, and political will to conduct research, develop products, and retain a fair share of the value created. The continent’s biodiversity is not a resource to be exported in its raw state. It is a foundation upon which to build scientific capacity that serves African patients first.

Beyond Agriculture and Medicine: The Strategic Resources of the Future

The destiny of the world is increasingly tied to the minerals that power clean energy, digital infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing. Africa holds approximately 30 percent of global critical mineral reserves, including cobalt, lithium, manganese, and copper. The Democratic Republic of Congo alone supplies 72 percent of globally mined cobalt. These minerals are indispensable to the technologies that will define the coming decades: electric vehicles, energy storage systems, defense technologies, medical devices, and the hardware upon which artificial intelligence depends.

Yet Africa’s share of global revenues from these minerals stands at just 10 percent. The continent captures a fraction of the value that its resources create, while the processing and refining that generate the highest returns occur elsewhere. China controls 87 percent of global refined rare earth production, and the infrastructure gaps in African power, logistics, and refining make the cost of mining on the continent approximately 250 percent higher than the global average. Revenue leakage through tax avoidance costs African nations between $470 million and $730 million annually. These are not inevitable features of the resource economy. They are the consequences of negotiating positions, contractual arrangements, and industrial policies that have favored extraction over transformation.

The African Union’s Agenda 2063 recognizes this imbalance through its African Commodities Strategy, which aims to enable African countries to add value, extract higher rents, integrate into global value chains, and promote diversification anchored in local content development. The strategy’s stated purpose is to transform Africa from a raw materials supplier for the rest of the world into a continent that actively uses its own resources for the economic development of Africans. This is the correct ambition, but its realization depends on collective action. The formation of an association of critical mineral-producing countries, referenced in the African Union’s own progress assessments, represents a potential mechanism for coordinating bargaining positions and capturing a fairer share of resource rents. The alternative—continued fragmentation, bilateral deals negotiated from positions of weakness, and the export of unprocessed materials—will perpetuate a pattern that has benefited others for more than a century.

The Destiny Decided by Africans

The recurring theme across agriculture, medicine, and mineral resources is agency. Africa’s future will not be determined by the goodwill of external partners, however constructive their intentions. It will be determined by the choices that Africans make about how to use the assets they possess. The continent’s young population is not merely a demographic fact; it is a responsibility. Sub-Saharan Africa needs to integrate approximately 20 million new labor market entrants annually, yet only about 25 percent of these entrants secure formal employment. The remainder find work in low-paid, insecure informal jobs that offer little prospect of advancement. A demographic dividend is not automatic. It is earned through investment in health, education, skills, and the creation of economies dynamic enough to absorb the energies of a generation.

The African Continental Free Trade Area, with its vision of a single market of 1.3 billion people and a combined GDP of approximately $3.4 trillion, represents one of the most significant institutional expressions of this agency. Its full implementation could boost intra-African trade by more than 50 percent and fundamentally reshape industrialization and regional value chains. But the AfCFTA is a framework, not an outcome. Its benefits will materialize only if governments remove non-tariff barriers, invest in the infrastructure that connects producers to markets, and resist the temptation to treat regional integration as a rhetorical commitment rather than a practical one.

The destiny of the world may indeed lie in Africa. The continent’s land, its biodiversity, its minerals, and above all its people are indispensable to a sustainable and stable global future. But the world’s hope in Africa is not a sentiment of charity. It is a recognition of interdependence. A continent that feeds itself, heals its people through both modern and indigenous knowledge, and manages its resources for the benefit of its citizens is a continent that stabilizes the world. That outcome will not arrive through the passage of time or the operation of impersonal forces. It will be decided in Africa, by Africans who understand that their destiny is not something to be received but something to be built—and who act accordingly, with urgency and with the confidence that comes from knowing that the future belongs to those who prepare for it.

Dr. Tolulope A. Adegoke, AMBP-UN, is a globally recognized scholar-practitioner and thought leader at the nexus of security, governance, and strategic leadership. His mission is dedicated to advancing ethical governance, strategic human capital development, resilient nation-building, and global peace. He bridges the worlds of academic rigor and practical application, contributing to leadership discourse at the highest levels of policy and practice. He can be reached via: tolulopeadegoke01@gmail.com, globalstageimpacts@gmail.com