The Life and Times

The Life and Times of Bola Abimbola
17 November 1963 — 11 August 2026

Prologue: A Note on the Genre

A biography tells you what a man did. It is constitutionally incapable of telling you why, or what it cost him, or what he was thinking on the flight over. This document attempts to supply the rest. It also attempts something a biography would never dare, which is to say plainly that the life recorded below — every deadline, every company, every conversion, every courtroom — was carried by a man who was ill for almost thirty of his sixty-two years. That fact does not belong in a footnote. It belongs at the front, so that the reader keeps it in view through every word that follows and understands, at each turn, the mind of Bọ́lánlé Abímbọ́lá — DJ.

Kano, 1988 — The Young Advocate

Bola arrived at the Ministry of Justice in Kano with an LLB, a call to the Nigerian Bar, and the particular confidence of a man who had not yet lost a case. Bolanle Abimbola on the certificates; Bola to most people; DJ to the ones who knew him best.

The work was unglamorous in the way that formative work usually is: pleadings, affidavits, discovery requests, motions to compel, motions to dismiss. Real estate transactions. Commercial transactions. And, quietly, the skill that would outlast the wig and gown — reading expert reports and finding the exact point at which a confident argument stops being supported by anything.

It is worth pausing on that last habit, because it is the through-line of everything after. Fifteen years later he would be paid a great deal of money by banks and utilities and motor companies to do precisely the same thing to a control environment: to read the confident account, and locate the joint where it stops holding.

Lagos, 1989–1995 — Abimbola, Aluko & Abimbola

Six years in private practice: contract disputes litigated, fact and expert witnesses examined and cross-examined, separation agreements drafted, living wills and trusts prepared, insurance subrogation files managed. Research across product liability, matrimonial law, corporate law, labour law — which is to say, whatever came through the door.

And underneath all of it, the part they do not teach in law school: running the place. Payroll. Clerical staff. Costs. Revenue targets. Profit and loss. A young barrister discovered that a law firm is a small business wearing a robe — and, more to the point, discovered that he was rather good at the business half.

Seven years of legal practice in Nigeria left him with two durable habits: a demand for evidence, and an instinct for where controls fail. He would spend the next three decades being paid for both.

1997 — America, and the Oracle Years

In 1997 he moved to the United States, and what began as a change of direction became a career. He started as an Oracle Financials consultant and team lead on AP, AR and GL implementations at Equity Trust & Value: business requirements definition, Conference Room Pilots, multi-org setup, module configuration, legacy data conversion, integration testing, user acceptance testing, Financial Statement Generator design, end-user training. He learned the discipline properly and from the ground up, which was the only way he ever learned anything.

Then BankBoston, in Massachusetts — the full configuration of the General Ledger module, and the conversion of a COBOL-based legacy platform to Oracle Applications 11i. He designed the chart of accounts, defined the key flexfield structure and the set of books, wrote the PL/SQL procedures that carried the data across, and ran the journal import until the errors stopped.

He also collected, along the way, a Microsoft systems engineering course, an NT administration course, and a web development and e-commerce qualification from Clark University in Framingham. The man was clearly not sleeping. This would become a pattern, and eventually it would become the point.

2000–2007 — Canada, and the SOX Circuit

In July 2002 the United States Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a response to Enron and WorldCom, and in doing so created — overnight and by statute — a global shortage of people who could look at a computer system and say, with evidence, whether it could be trusted. There were not many such people. One of them was a former Lagos barrister living in Ontario.

Union Gas. Ford Motor Company — twice, first on general controls, then on the MFG/Pro ERP application controls, testing purchasing, sales, inventory, payables, receivables and general ledger, documenting the gaps, recommending the remediation, and then coming back to re-test whether anyone had actually done it. TD Canada Trust, where he advised on SOX financial controls, sat with E&Y on the year-end systems audit, and took responsibility for the design and testing of business continuity plans for the bank’s critical technology functions. The Ontario Ministry of Finance, running IT security strategy, PKI, two-factor authentication and a three-year roadmap. Rogers, managing corporate information security compliance and the Payment Card Industry assessment and remediation. Then KPMG Risk Advisory Services, which is where consultants go when they have finally been recognised as consultants.

Somewhere in the middle of all this he completed courses in business process mapping, powerful business writing and ITIL, because of course he did.

The wheel had turned full circle. A man spends seven years learning to cross-examine witnesses, and ends up with a career testing whether systems can substantiate their claims. He never really left the law. He simply changed the defendant.

Edmonton and Beyond

And then Alberta. EPCOR Utilities, IT CSOX Advisor for Compliance and Sustainment: security metrics, remediation tracking, the CSOX Working Committee, teams of control professionals to manage, and a standing brief to identify which controls could be automated so that fewer human beings had to do this by hand. After a dozen years of movement — Lagos, Boston, Toronto, Windsor, Toronto again — a permanent role, a house of his own, and a city where winter is a serious proposition.

Alongside the corporate work he founded Batotech, and then AfroMedia TV. And when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived and 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.

Consider what that means. At a moment when congregations that had held together for decades were being told they could not gather, a man in Edmonton — working, as always, on several things at once — built the thing that let them keep gathering. There are people who worshipped through those years, on two continents, inside software he wrote. Most of them will never know his name. He would almost certainly have preferred it that way.

Bọ́lá — DJ — was also known as Asaph. Notwithstanding the cancer of the thymus gland, he taught himself to play the saxophone, took charge of the music at his local church, and released two Gospel Jazz albums as Asaph. Out of all the musical instruments in the world, he deliberately chose to master the saxophone twenty years ago precisely because the wind instrument required deep breathing and throat resonance.

A Doctorate in Artificial Intelligence — All But the Viva

He was a member of ISACA, an A+ Certified Technician and a Microsoft Certified Professional. He pursued CISA and CISSP certification alongside a Master’s programme in Information Systems Security Management. And then, not content with any of that, he went and started a doctorate.

Just weeks before his transition, Bola Abimbola was scheduled to defend his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Oviedo, in Spain. The dissertation was titled Using Machine Learning To Enable the Semantic Analysis of Canadian Maritime Case Law.

Read that title again slowly, because it is the whole man in a single line. Machine learning — the newest thing in the world, taken up in his late fifties. Canadian — the country that became home. Maritime case law — the courtroom, still there, thirty years after he was supposed to have left it.

He spent his final years teaching a machine to read the law, which is to say he spent them building a successor to the young advocate from Kano. The courtroom he walked out of in 1995 never really let him go; he had only found a longer way back into it. He had seen where the law was going, and he spent three decades mastering, building, upgrading and finally assembling the instrument that would prove him right.

Epilogue: The Background to the Forefront

Kano and Lagos, the partnership and the emigration. Boston and the COBOL conversion. Ford Motor Company, TD Canada Trust, the Ontario Ministry of Finance, Rogers and KPMG. Three companies founded, including a platform that kept churches together through a pandemic. A doctorate in artificial intelligence begun in his late fifties. Edmonton, Alberta, and its long winters. All of it was done by a man living with cancer of the thymus gland.

But all of this misses three things in the making of Bola. First, the business mind. He wasn’t called “DJ” for nothing. His first venture came in his mid-teens on the campus of the University of Ifẹ̀ — in partnership with “Godfather,” a mixtape vendor in Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Bola had the latest from the Commodores, Shalamar, Third World, Fela Kuti, and Michael Jackson within forty-eight hours of release. DJ kept the party going. Second, the sportsman. We were the Red Rovers. DJ, Bayo, Wale, Goke, and I formed the team in our teens at Ifẹ̀, and DJ played right winger. He was fast — so fast that no one could catch him. He came within a few hundredths of a second of qualifying for the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow. Third, Bose Lampejo, Bola’s wife. They met in their first year of university in Nigeria, forty-three years ago. Bose and their sons, Tunde and Larry, are the unsung heroes of Bola’s journey. Through every surgery, every course of radiation, every chemotherapy session, they were with him — never wavering, never giving up, all of them carried by the same unusual, anti-defeatist, forever-positive outlook.

Not at the end. Not as a final chapter. For about thirty of his sixty-two years: very nearly half his life, and the whole of the career recorded above. The young barrister in Kano and the doctoral candidate at Oviedo were the same man carrying the same thing, three decades apart.

He did not call himself a survivor, and he did not ask for the allowance the word invites. He did not slow down, or scale back, or take the smaller role. He kept working. He kept building. He kept enrolling in the next programme and booking the next flight and starting the next company, as though the horizon in front of him were as long as anybody else’s — and by simply refusing to behave as though it were shorter, he very nearly made that true.

Hope, confidence, cheerfulness, and a stubborn refusal to be discouraged: these are the measures of the man. Not that he endured thirty years — which would have been remarkable enough — but that he declined to spend a single one of them waiting.

A man does not schedule a doctoral defence unless he intends to be there. Bola Abimbola had a viva in the diary, a dissertation finished, and plans for what came after. He was sixty-two years old, thirty years into an illness that would have been a full-time occupation for most people, and he was still beginning things.

Resilient optimism. That is how Bola Abimbola — DJ — should be remembered. Never by what took him, but by the sheer, stubborn, unreasonable quantity of what he made of his life while the cancer tried. In the end it took a body, but it failed entirely to take the thing that mattered: the shining example of what it means to be a good man.

Kọ́lá Abímbọ́lá, Ph.D.