Biography
Bọ́lá Abímbọ́lá, LLB, BL
17 November 1963 — 11 August 2026
Bola Abimbola was an information systems audit and security professional whose career took an unusual route: he arrived at IT governance not through engineering, but through the courtroom. He was also, by long habit, a man who never did only one thing at a time.
He held an LLB and was called to the Nigerian Bar as a Barrister at Law, beginning his legal career in 1988 as a Legal Advisor at the Ministry of Justice in Kano. There he drafted pleadings, affidavits, discovery requests and summary judgment motions, handled real estate and commercial transactions, and developed a specialty in dismantling expert reports — finding the weak joint in an argument that looked, on the surface, entirely sound.
In 1989 he moved into private practice at Abimbola, Aluko & Abimbola in Lagos, where he spent the better part of seven years. He litigated contract disputes, conducted research across product liability, matrimonial, corporate and labour law, examined and cross-examined fact and expert witnesses, and managed the firm as a business — recruiting and supervising staff, controlling costs, and carrying accountability for profit and loss. Eight years of legal practice left him with two durable habits: a demand for evidence, and an instinct for where controls fail.
In 1997 he moved to the United States and changed direction. He worked as an Oracle Financials consultant, leading AP, AR and GL implementations at Equity Trust & Value, with responsibility for Conference Room Pilot testing, multi-org setup, module configuration, legacy data conversion, integration and user acceptance testing, Financial Statement Generator design, and end-user training. He then joined BankBoston in Massachusetts, where he handled the full configuration of the General Ledger module and the conversion of data from a COBOL-based legacy platform to Oracle Applications 11i — designing the chart of accounts, defining the key flexfield structure and set of books, and writing the PL/SQL procedures that carried the data across.
Those American years were not single-track. While still based in the United States, he took on a separate contract engagement as IS Audit Consultant and Project Manager on a fifty-million-dollar multi-org, multi-currency implementation for the Lagos State Government, running business process design, CRP testing and risk analysis across the project lifecycle while managing delivery to time, cost and quality — a project on another continent, carried alongside a full workload at home.
In 2000 he moved to Canada. By 2002 he had become part of the wave of specialists brought in to meet the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance deadline — the U.S. federal law enacted on 30 July 2002 in response to the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals. He worked IT general and application controls at Union Gas, then at Ford Motor Company, where he built test plans for the MFG/Pro ERP system and tested controls across purchasing, sales, inventory, payables, receivables and the general ledger. At TD Canada Trust he advised on SOX financial controls, participated in the year-end systems audit alongside E&Y, and took responsibility for the design and testing of business continuity plans for critical technology functions. He led IT strategy and security for the Ontario Ministry of Finance, managed IT compliance for corporate information security at Rogers — including Payment Card Industry assessment and remediation — and consulted on IT audit engagements with KPMG’s Risk Advisory Services practice.
And all the while he was building for himself. Alongside the corporate work he founded Batotech, and then AfroMedia TV; and when the COVID-19 pandemic closed sanctuary doors across two continents, he built VivoMeetings, which became one of the most widely used meeting platforms among independent African churches in North America. Congregations that had no way to gather found, in his work, a way to keep gathering.
He was a member of ISACA, an A+ Certified Technician and a Microsoft Certified Professional, and pursued CISA and CISSP certification alongside a Master’s programme in Information Systems Security Management. Just weeks before his transition, he was scheduled to defend his PhD in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Oviedo, Spain. His dissertation was titled Using Machine Learning To Enable the Semantic Analysis of Canadian Maritime Case Law — a work that closed the circle of his life, bringing the machine intelligence of his last decades to bear on the case law of his first.
What no biography can show is the condition under which all of it was built. For almost thirty of his sixty-two years — very nearly half his life, and the whole of the career set down above — Bola Abimbola lived with cancer. He carried it through BankBoston, the SOX deadlines and the boardrooms of Ford and TD; through the founding of three companies and the writing of a doctoral dissertation in a language and a discipline not his first. He did not describe himself as a survivor, and he did not ask for the allowance the word invites. He simply kept working, kept building, kept enrolling in the next programme, kept booking the next defence — as though the horizon were as long for him as for anyone. That is the measure of the man: not that he endured those years, but that he refused to spend a single one of them waiting. He was scheduled to defend his doctoral dissertation in Artificial Intelligence just weeks before he transitioned. There is no better summary of a life than that. He was still beginning things.