Sometimes, goodwill finds us through the people we love

There are people we would have judged from a distance, if they had not first shown kindness to someone close to our hearts.

I thought about this while watching Obasanjo’s interview with Isbae_u.

During the interview, Obasanjo was playing along. He was literally joking. He knew his role – to mirror the host and play the child. You could sense it when he said he had been to America and when he bragged about meeting Queen Elizabeth. That’s typical Obasanjo, witty and playful, always.

But while entertaining us, the host asked him about Charly Boy, and that changed everything.

Baba first continued with his witty reactions until he mentioned Charly Boy’s father, Justice Oputa. And for the first time in the interview, he became sober.

He talked about Justice Oputa with dignity and called him one of the best human beings he had ever met.

But that wasn’t my biggest takeaway.

My biggest takeaway was how Obasanjo talked about his relationship with Charly Boy areafada.

He started by describing Charly Boy as a jaga-jaga boy – a man who dressed like a woman. When he first visited Justice Oputa, he didn’t even know he was in Charly Boy’s house. Then he saw the power bike, and it seemed to confirm everything he had already assumed about Charly Boy.

But something happened that changed everything.

Baba saw how Charly treated his father, Justice Oputa, when the Chief Judge was sick. And it changed his perception of him.

You could hear the emotion in the way he talked about it. One would wonder what exactly Charly Boy did differently, but perhaps it was simply this: Obasanjo saw the son of a man he respected dedicate his time and himself to taking care of his father.

And suddenly, the jaga-jaga man he thought he knew had another side.

He went on to add that he asked Charly Boy about the bike, and Charly told him that it was for “chop money”; for his hustle.

It really got me.

Because it proves that two seemingly different sides of a person can exist in the same person. And when you see only one side and judge based on that, you may never fully know the person standing in front of you. There was Charly boy – the jaga jaga man; and there was Charles the son of Justice Oputa.

But there was something else in this story that stayed with me. Our goodwill can be inherited.

If not for the goodwill between Justice Oputa and Obasanjo, the mighty – like Obasanjo – might only have seen a man dressing like a woman and hanging bikes on his gate. He might never have looked closely enough to see the son who showed up for his father. The son who cared for the man he, Obasanjo, respected.

And perhaps that is one of the most interesting ways people enter our hearts: sometimes, not by what they do for us, but by how they treat the people we love.

I totally enjoyed every second of that 42-minute video, and this will be one of those stories that stays with me for a very long time.