Cheers to 2025
January 5, 2025
Every New Year holds promise, as though it is any different from the turn of
“What makes Connectologists different is not noise, status, or outward performance. In fact, many of them look completely ordinary. They are not always the loudest in the room, the richest at the table, or the most decorated on paper. Yet they carry an invisible force.”
Part Two · Approx. 3-minute read
If Part One was about recognising the gift, Part Two is about appreciating its variations. Not all Connectologists move the same way. Some are warm and expansive. Some are understated and strategic. Some are almost impossible to read until you watch what happens around them—how quickly resources move, how naturally trust gathers, and how effortlessly strangers become collaborators. That is what I have seen in Abiola Aloba and Abiola Adelana. They are very different personalities, yet both carry that rare human ability to move value through people.
Abiola Aloba brings an entirely different dimension to connection. He is, in the simplest and strongest sense, resourceful. I met Aloba within my first week of resumption at Sterling Bank, and it did not take long to notice that he was one of the wittiest and most intelligent gentlemen I had encountered. He speaks fast, carries a cheeky humour, and yet beneath that playful surface sits sound judgement and a strong moral centre. That combination is rare. Even rarer is what he does with it: he shares resources, connects people, and solves problems with a speed that can feel almost magical.
Connectologist | Defining gift | How the gift shows up |
**Abiola Aloba** | Resourcefulness with precision | He opens access to information, people, and practical solutions with unusual speed and clarity |
**Abiola Adelana** | Deliberate, high-trust social intelligence | She bridges commerce, culture, influence, and relationships with elegance and staying power |
The unique detail about Aloba is not merely that he knows people. Many people know people. His gift is that he can often provide the needed resources on a whim—information, insight, access, direction, or a timely bridge to the right human being. There is very little that feels completely out of reach when it falls within his circle of trust.
He guards his network closely, and perhaps that is one reason it remains so potent. He is deeply religious, charming with words, and unusually skilled at bringing complete strangers together as though they had met before. More impressively, he does not stop at the introduction. He often helps shape the conversation, draw out the value, and even clarify the action points. That is not casual networking; that is social architecture.
Publicly accessible information supports the impression of a man whose work has crossed sectors and platforms. He has been publicly identified as a former Head of Strategic Cost Management at Sterling Bank Plc, Lagos.[1] Another public profile presents him as a leader at the intersection of media and technology in Africa, describing him as one of Nigeria’s youngest independent TV producers, a co-creator of the Social Media Awards Africa, and a participant in building an electric-vehicle ecosystem spanning finance, sales, and charging infrastructure.[2]
Those details matter because they explain why he thinks and connects the way he does: not narrowly, but across industries, opportunities, and futures. For me, however, the formal achievements only confirm what I already knew personally—Aloba is my go-to person when difficult resourcing and social connection worries need a way through.
Then there is Abiola Adelana, the first female Connectologist on my list, and an exceptional one at that. I am always humbled by the way she connects people. She is deliberate. She is socially intelligent. She does it all with aplomb. In social and corporate spaces still too often dominated by men, she holds her own with quiet authority and without unnecessary performance.
What makes her even more remarkable to me is the contrast between origin and outcome: she began, by my recollection, as a very shy lady years ago, and yet those quiet years now seem like incubation years—years in which poise, discernment, and confidence were gathering force.
She is a force. I have watched her sustain an energy that is difficult not to admire. She moves as a social butterfly, but that phrase is too light for what she really does. Her network stretches across distinct social classes and professional worlds—celebrities, politicians, royalty, old money, business moguls, technocrats, NGOs, media figures, artists, and the broader creative community. Yet the network does not feel random.
It feels carefully built, painstakingly protected, and anchored in trust. What she does so brilliantly is connect people in ways that create value both for them and for the business she leads within Sterling Bank.
Publicly available reporting offers a concise explanation for that reach. Abiola Adelana has been profiled as a leader whose work blends finance, culture, and innovation, with over fifteen years of experience in banking and strategic development.[3] She has served as Tourism and Creative Arts Business Manager at Sterling Bank, where she has been credited with helping position the bank as the first financial institution in Nigeria to formally support the tourism sector through a specialised desk and targeted financial offerings.[3][4]
Public reports also link her to sector-building efforts in tourism financing, digital platforms for tourism products, and wider leadership roles across culture and enterprise.[3][4] In plain terms, she has built a career around connecting money to meaning, and commerce to culture.
We worked in the same division for three years, and I can confidently place her near the very top of my Connectologist list without blinking. There is something especially fascinating about the fact that we both passed through Obafemi Awolowo University at almost the same time and yet never met there. Life, it seems, sometimes delays introductions until character has matured enough for the meeting to matter.
If Aloba shows that a Connectologist can be resourceful, strategic, and almost impossibly helpful, Adelana shows that a Connectologist can also be elegant, deliberate, and institutionally consequential. Both remind me that connection is not small talk. It is not vanity. It is not simply who has the most phone numbers. At its highest form, it is the disciplined ability to link people to value, protect trust, and make opportunities travel farther than they otherwise would. And when that gift is carried by special people, the rest of us are fortunate just to witness it.
References
[1] Training Testimonials – Deon Binneman — https://www.deonbinneman.com/training-endorsements/
[2] Jury – newmediaconference.africa — https://newmediaconference.africa/jury/
[3] Meet Abiola Adelana – Co-Founder of Pashione and Champion of African Creativity — https://techeconomy.ng/abiola-adelana-joins-pashione-as-co-founder/
[4] ABIOLA ADELANA: Sterling Bank Committed to Funding, Building Digital Platforms to Impact Nigerian Tourism – New Telegraph — https://newtelegraphng.com/abiola-adelana-sterling-bank-committed-to-funding-building-digital-platforms-to-impact
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1 thought on “Connectologists, the Quiet Architects of Influence – Part 2”
A good read! Well done!