Abacha - Nigeria

Abacha is not loud or flashy; he doesn't dominate a room or a conversation; he is not an authoritarian manager. Instead, he listens, he considers, he speaks when he has something important to say (which means people always listen when he talks), and he gains the respect of others by being a person they want to follow. I worked with Abacha in Nigeria from 2014-2016, and I quickly came to esteem him. When asked why he wanted to work with our program, he told us stories of family and friends who had been killed by Boko Haram. He had been personally affected and considered it his personal obligation to do whatever he could to help his community resist. We hired him as a community liaison, but rapidly saw his management skills and promoted him to lead his state team. He continues to lead the team adeptly, not least of all because he cares about his team members, he cares about his state, and he cares about the future of his country. Abacha is one of the most inspiring and wise people I've had the honor to work with - his commitment to his community in the face of danger was one of the things that helped me get out of bed in the morning on the tough days. If he could do it, I certainly could. For this reason, he and his team will always hold a special place in my heart. Abacha is married, has three daughters, and his life is a demonstration of commitment and sacrifice to resist extremism in all forms.

"I always cherish the political philosophy upon which the United States of America is put together - 'that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness - That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.'  In the current war against terrorism and countering violent extremism, some people see Islam as a threat to peace, and Muslims as intolerant to pluralism and the dynamics of the human race. I think people with such a perception need to learn the religion and not rely on the myopic interpretations or acts of a few. The British Prime Minister, Theresa May, said, 'We should always be careful to distinguish between extreme and hateful ideology, and the peaceful religion of Islam and the hundreds of millions of its adherents…who are so often the first victims of this ideology’s terror... Their actions have absolutely no basis in anything written in the Quran. What they believe has no resemblance whatsoever to the beliefs of more than a billion Muslims all over the world.'”