Reflections on Ayodele Ashiata Kadiri’s The First Five Years: From Book-Smart to Streetwise
Ayodele has written a relatable book chronicling the first five years of her legal career. With engaging prose, The First Five Years (TFFY) tells a captivating story of an unassuming star who picks through the burden of her background and demeanour as she navigates life in a fast-paced environment.
Through Ayodele’s honest narration, we walk with her past the mirrors of the childhood of many young, dutiful students from middle-income families who attended boarding schools with privileged kids, made good grades and studied respectable courses like law or engineering before stepping onto the concourse for a life-defining career journey in an interesting city like Lagos. Ayodele is however also unlike many of her peers. Though she missed out on a first class grade at undergraduate level, she bagged a first class grade from the Nigerian Law School (NLS) as one of only 26 out of 5,515 students who sat for the Bar Final examinations in August 2016. For good measure, Ayodele emerged the Best Graduating Student in that class, a title thousands of lawyers can only dream of.
Intriguingly, TFFY is not exactly about Ayodele’s brilliance, or her understating of it. It is rather the unfiltered story of her struggles and triumphs in the first five years of her legal career, with detours to Queen’s College, the University of Lagos (UNILAG) and her family home for insight into some of the quirks that mark her personality.
In ‘Serendipity’, the first chapter of the book, we see how chance and choice play a role in career decisions. As Ayodele explores peer pressure, traditional notions of what constitutes brilliance and choices students are expected to make based on their grades in certain subjects, we see that our outstanding lawyer could also have become a veterinary doctor and that she was a math champion (an uncommon trait for most lawyers).
TFFY picks up pace in the second chapter, ‘Strictly Black and White’ as Ayodele walks us through her quest for a first class grade at UNILAG and eventual triumph at NLS. It is a light-hearted chapter but the narration on the role of her faith as an anchor for her academic pursuits as well as her negotiations with God surely provide some material for a debate between agnostics, fervent churchgoers and the atheists.
In subsequent chapters, Ayodele takes us behind the scenes of her service year, internship at a firm in London (a reward for emerging best graduating student at NLS), tech entrepreneurship and working at a top law firm in Lagos. The author is vulnerable enough to share about her growth as a lawyer and the insecurities she dealt with. We also see her nuanced confrontation with the prospect of relocating abroad and the outcome of her different attempts, to which many young Nigerians can relate.
The author’s reflections on each year of the first five years of her career hold many important lessons for young lawyers and other professionals looking to re-evaluate and assess their career choices, challenges and future plans. Her handling of the topic of specialisation in legal practice and the opportunity cost is grounded in reality – transparent without being prescriptive – and a major reason every new/ young lawyer should read the book.
By the end of TFFY, Ayodele had come into her own though still needing to ask herself questions about her aspirations. We also get a sneak peak into her experience with dating and investing, enough to move the reader to the edge of the seat and hoping for a sequel.
Ayodele has written a brilliant book about brilliance, becoming and culture, one in which she occasionally exhales about the frustrations caused by how we do things in Nigeria without holding on to sanctimony. Her writing sings with a fairly casual note yet packs quite the punch. It is a book for everyone on the path to discovery.
