Benjamin Ola Akande was born in 1962 in Nigeria, the only son among five children of Rev. Dr. Samuel T. Ola Akande, a widely respected Baptist minister with ancestral ties to Awe town in Oyo state, and Comfort Olalonpe Akande, in a household that prized ambition long before Akande had the means to reach for it. He would go on to become an economist, a three-time college president, and the first Nigerian-born person ever to lead a traditional liberal arts college in the United States, a life spent proving that the distance between a lantern-lit living room in Ibadan and the presidency of a 165-year-old American institution is closer than it looks for anyone willing to keep climbing.

He is Senior Vice President and Chief Corporate Responsibility Officer at Stifel Financial Corp, a 130-year-old wealth management and investment banking firm headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, and the former President of Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, and of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, the institution where, in 2015, he became both its first Black president and the first African-born president of a liberal arts college anywhere in America. His story is not simply a record of degrees and titles; it is the story of a man who carried an Ibadan boy’s discipline into American classrooms and boardrooms and who built, along the way, a governing philosophy that Fortune 500 companies and struggling institutions alike now turn to him for.

Where It All Began: The Roots That Shaped His Journey 

Growing up in 1970s Nigeria, where power cuts left the family in darkness five nights out of every seven, Akande and his four sisters had little television or radio to occupy their evenings. What they had instead was their father, a gifted and prolific storyteller who filled the darkness with African folktales and nursery rhymes among them, the story of Humpty Dumpty, which Akande would later turn into a lifelong metaphor for risk, failure, and the courage to try again. His mother, quieter but no less formidable, held the household to a standard of conduct the children were never permitted to forget. He attended Comprehensive High School, Aiyetoro, in Ogun State, a school modelled on American secondary education by visiting Harvard professors, graduating in 1978, a year before he left Nigeria for the United States at seventeen years old.

“Both of my parents influenced me, not one greater than the other.”

— Benjamin Akande, on his parents’ shared influence

The Educational Journey That Led to Oxford 

Akande arrived in Plainview, Texas, on August 23, 1979, to study business administration at Wayland Baptist University, the same small Baptist school his father had once attended. He proceeded to the University of Oklahoma in Norman, where he earned master’s degrees in Public Administration and Economics, and in 1995 a Ph.D. in Economics with a focus on economic development, public policy, and energy, a specialisation chosen with a plan to eventually return home and help shape Nigeria’s energy policy. That plan changed when his published critiques of Nigeria’s military government made a safe return unlikely, and Akande built the rest of his career in the United States instead, later completing postdoctoral studies at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and Oxford’s Saïd Business School. He credits his doctoral advisor at Oklahoma, the economist Alex Kondonassis, with instilling the intellectual courage that would come to define his leadership.

“Dr. K taught me that as difference-makers, we should not be afraid to challenge the status quo.”

— Benjamin Akande, on his doctoral mentor at the University of Oklahoma

From Nigeria to America: A Career Without Borders 

In 1995, Akande returned to Wayland Baptist as Chief Academic Officer and chair of its Division of Business Administration. In 2000, he was named Professor of Economics and Dean of Webster University’s George Herbert Walker School of Business and Technology in St. Louis, a post he held for fifteen years while also leading the university’s Office of Corporate Partnerships and helping secure a $10 million naming gift, the largest in the institution’s history. In 2015, he was named the 21st President of Westminster College, the Fulton, Missouri institution where Winston Churchill delivered his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, becoming its first Black president and the first African-born president of a liberal arts college in America. He resigned in 2017 to pursue other opportunities, later directing Washington University in St. Louis’s Africa Initiative from 2018 to 2020 before becoming, in April 2020, the ninth President of Champlain College in Vermont, where undergraduate applications doubled during his tenure. He joined Stifel Financial in May 2021 as Senior Vice President and Chief Corporate Responsibility Officer, a role in which he now leads the firm’s companywide ESG strategy.

“Westminster College will achieve greater significance by empowering learning communities, creating landmark academic programmes, and embracing global opportunities.”

— Benjamin Akande, inaugural address as Westminster College’s 21st president

Leadership and Governance

Across two decades of board service at Argent Capital, Enterprise Bank & Trust, Ralcorp Holdings, the Danforth Plant Science Center Leadership Council, and Brazil’s Fundação Dom Cabral, among others, Akande has developed a consistent governance philosophy: institutions fail not from a lack of resources but from comfort. He describes stagnant organisations as sitting in what he calls ‘organizational hospice,’ technically alive but no longer growing, and argues that boards and leadership must actively seek disruption before competitors impose it on them. As co-author of ‘Effective Nonprofit Governance: Lessons Learned’ for the National Association of Corporate Directors, he has argued that trust extended before it is earned, resilience that treats failure as real-time feedback, and what he calls ‘constructive impatience’ are qualities business schools rarely teach and urgently should. It is a philosophy forged across three college presidencies and now applied inside a Fortune 500 boardroom.

“Many companies are in a state of organizational hospice.”

— Benjamin Akande, on complacent corporate leadership

Beyond the Career: Love, Family and Bola 

Akande met Bola Taiwo-Akande, a fellow Nigerian, at a party in Norman, Oklahoma, while he was still a graduate student. They danced to George Michael’s ‘Careless Whisper,’ but when the song ended, Bola left the party without giving him her number insisting, instead, on taking his. The call never came. It took five years, a chance encounter between Akande’s cousin and Bola at a baby-naming ceremony in Dallas, and a two-and-a-half-hour drive straight through the night, before the two were reunited. This time, they stayed together. Bola, now a pharmacist and entrepreneur, and Benjamin have been married for decades and have three daughters, Moyosola, Anjola, and Reni. Akande has often described the years-long search for Bola as proof that fate and persistence, together, tend to find their way.

“When you find your true love, you always know, and you never let it go.”

— Benjamin Akande, on meeting his wife, Bola, in Oklahoma

Recognition Well Earned

Akande’s honours include Wayland Baptist University’s Distinguished Alumnus of the Year in 2008 and the Clayton Chamber of Commerce’s Pillar of the Community Award in 2012. Between 2007 and 2012, the St. Louis Business Journal repeatedly named him one of the city’s Most Influential Leaders. He wrote the foreword to Cameroonian nuclear physicist Martin Niboh’s book Dear Sons and Daughters of Africa and became a regular economic commentator for CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, CBS Evening News, NPR’s Marketplace, USA Today, and the Financial Times, carrying an African immigrant perspective into American newsrooms on subjects ranging from the Boko Haram kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls to the fastest-growing economies on the continent.

A Heritage That Runs Deep 

Though his career has flourished largely in the United States, Akande’s ties to Nigeria, and to Oyo State in particular, have never loosened. As Westminster College’s president, he brokered an academic partnership between the college and Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomoso, announced at his own installation by then-Governor Abiola Ajimobi, who told the gathered crowd that the appointment was “a proud moment for those of us from Oyo State, from Awe, Dr. Akande’s ancestral hometown, and it is a proud moment for all Nigerians.”

“Throughout Nigeria, Dr. Benjamin Olayinka Akande is becoming a household name, a symbol of excellence, an emblem of the endurance of the American Dream, and its willingness to embrace and reward anyone who is willing to work hard and excel.”

— Late Abiola Ajimobi, then-Governor of Oyo State, at Akande’s installation as Westminster’s 21st president

Akande returns to Nigeria most years, and by his own account, not as a college president but as ‘that good old boy’ reclaiming the ground that shaped him,  putting on traditional dress, seeking out childhood friends, and shedding, for a moment, every title he has earned abroad. He insists that preparation must always precede opportunity and that relationships built long before they are needed remain the most transferable currency a young professional can carry.

“Networking is about developing friendships that will last forever.”

— Benjamin Akande, on building relationships that outlast opportunity

Conclusion

Benjamin Ola Akande was born in a home with no electricity most nights of the week, in a Nigeria that offered him little reason to expect a career spent moving between American college presidencies, national television studios, and the executive suite of a century-old Wall Street firm. Today, he is the first Nigerian-born president a traditional American liberal arts college has ever had, a governance voice trusted by boards across sectors, and a husband and father whose own love story took five years and a cross-state drive to complete. For the young men and women of Southwest Nigeria watching institutions at home search for the discipline and trust that Akande has spent a career building elsewhere, his life stands as evidence that the walls worth climbing are rarely comfortable, and rarely climbed alone.

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