NewzBy BEN MURRAY-BRUCE There is a scene I return to more often than I should. One of those evenings where the guest list is the story. Standing in front of my host, waiting patiently for a word, is a mayor of a city.
And pressed to my host’s ear is a telephone, and on the other end of that telephone is the president of a country, calling not to exchange pleasantries but to ask a question. He wanted to know what Gilbert thought. I remember watching this and understanding, with some force, that I was in the room with something rare.
Gilbert Chagoury was born in Lagos. So were his brothers, Ronald and Jack. They were educated in Nigeria, among us, alongside us, in the same classrooms and the same climate and the same country that produced ten million other boys with ambitions.
That is the first thing anyone writing about them has to sit with. Nothing in the inputs explains the output. Where Ronald sees the piece, Gilbert sees the puzzle, and, more importantly, sees how the pieces lock.
The one who understands that capital is the easy part, that the hard part is people, and sequence, and timing, and the patience to hold a thing together long enough for it to become inevitable. He is also the reason the telephone rings. Presidents, prime ministers, cardinals, and ministers of state have called that man for counsel on domestic policy, foreign policy, and war.
Because over fifty years he became a person whose judgment was worth the call. A businessman of ferocious intelligence and zero patience for decoration, the sort of mind that sees a balance sheet the way a chess master sees a board, several moves ahead and already bored with your opening. He is, and I mean this as the highest compliment available to me, a gambler.
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