Code Of Existence - Taiwo Akinlami Academy

Faith in God

In Him, we live; we move and have our being. The truth is that without Him we can do nothing. We can also do all things with Christ, who strengthens us. He is sovereign in all things and His will is superior to the plan of the smartest of men. He rules in the affairs of men and His presence in our lives makes all the difference. Remove Him from the equation, then the entire thing collapses.

Respect for Man

We believe that man is made in the image and likeness of God. We therefore have faith in man as God’s creature, a ‘unique being with infinite possibilities and limitless choices.’ We believe that we are always a right man away from our breakthrough as a person, family, organisation, nation and continent. We have faith in the good of man, believing that it is the side of man you see that is manifested to you daily. This is not faith in naivety or throwing caution into the wind, but a rule against unnecessary suspicion of a fellow man, irrespective of our past and present personal experiences.

The standpoint is to have faith in every man we come across and be ready to give him equal opportunity. We share the philosophy of Bishop Desmond Tutu that ‘a person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.’

Belief in the Sanctity of the Family Institution

We believe that the family institution is the foundation we must actively lay for the collective peace of our society. The truth of the matter today is that many of us have misplaced priority. We focus more on other businesses at the expense our families. We claim that our labour is to enable us to provide for our families. Few of us sincerely believe that we must labour for our family at the expense of spending qualitative time with them. To such people we offer these few words of a renowned family counsellor, he said, ‘when we give up our relationship with our family today, in pursuit of career, there is nothing we will give to them tomorrow that will make up for today’s neglect.’

We share the instructive words of Dr. Nelson Mandela after 27 years in prison and literally gaining the whole world. He said at one of his daughter’s weddings, ‘when your life is the struggle, like mine was, there is little room left for family. That has always been my greatest regret, and the most painful aspect of the choice I made. We watched our children grow without our guidance…To be the father of a nation is a great honour, but to be the father of a family is a greater joy. But it was a joy I had far little of.’

Belief in Love and Service to Humanity

We believe that love and service to humanity are inseparable factors. Someone said, ‘you can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving.’ Love is equal to genuine service. Love is active and therefore, it is the foundation of an enduring service to humanity. Theodore Roosevelt said, ‘nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.’ We also believe that God does not care how much you know until he knows how much you care. Thus, He tested Abraham to see his heart. A sage once said, ‘knowledge puffs up, but love edifies.’

Therefore, we must establish our heart in love, which is the foundation of selflessness toward humanity. ‘No man is an island,’ thus as the earth remains, we will need someone to lean on and someone will need to lean on us. Thus, we must always think of how we can be of use to humanity with our talents, expertise, experience, financial resources in order to leave the world a better place than we met it. We share the philosophy in the words of Dolly Patton that ‘If you want to change the world, you must roll up your sleeves, and go out there and work. We never can do enough but we can do something.’

Hope for Possibilities

A sage said, ‘all things are possible to him that believes.’ A sage also said, ‘a living dog is better than a dead lion.’ We have hope for a better world. We have hope for better parenting. We have hope for better teaching practices in our public and private spheres. We have seen too many seemingly insurmountable situations turned around.

Hope is a constant ingredient for living, we have embraced it. ‘No’ is an opinion of a person, place or thing.’ We can choose to say ‘no’ to every hopeless ‘no’ and present a contrary opinion. We have seen hope at work countless times in our daily work so that it is impossible for us to embrace hopelessness as the final answer. We just keep pushing as long as we keep breathing, the pace notwithstanding. We share the faith of Clare Boothe, who said, ‘there are no hopeless situations. There are only hopeless people.’ According to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”

Faith in Mercy

We must be ready to remove the log in our eyes, before we attempt to remove the speck in our brother’s eyes. We believe in showing mercy because, we have been shown mercy. It is by His mercies that we are not consumed. We give people the benefit of the doubt.

We believe that man may once or twice in a lifetime find himself in situations where every available fact will throw him up as the guilty party, his innocence will only be known to God, himself, and a few close friends. We have therefore concluded that nothing is as it first appears. There are situations where the vindication of a man belongs to God. We have concluded that we are too limited and weak to fight my own battles as man. We have learnt to commit all to Him, who is able to keep that which we have committed to His hands.

Commitment to Character

Character is who we are in thoughts, words and deeds; character is who we are when we are alone with our creator. Our belief in character does not exclude the inevitability of human foibles or frailties. That is the proof that we are men. But we must, despite the ever-present thorn-in-the-flesh of human foibles, make conscious and disciplined efforts to live an unimpeachable life in the final analysis.

Loyalty to a Cause

Loyalty is simply unalloyed faithfulness to our commitments. It means dependability. It means whatever we pledge to do as a person or organisation to other; we must do it to details. It is not anything near sycophancy or bootlicking.

Commitment to Responsibility

The operating system of all the principles we hold dear is responsibility. Responsibility is the deliberate engagement of the will of man in the direction of tangibly contributing to personal and corporate peace. We have no stomach for buck passing. The buck stops at our table. This understanding flush bitterness out of man and relieves him of the struggle with forgiveness, even where he has suffered the worst of abuse. We cannot take responsibility for the actions and omissions of the authors of our abuses and pain. We cannot.

We must however take responsibility for the impact of their actions and omissions in carrying out the responsibility of seeking healing. What we must not allow is the cycle of abusive experience to continue. We share Elmer G. Letterman’s philosophy that “a man may fall many times, but he won’t be a failure until he says someone pushed him.’ He also wrote a book with a very interesting title, ‘The Sale Begins When the Customer Says No.’

Commitment to the Triple C Principle

As Social Service Providers, we are committed as indispensable principles compassion for the people, which the primary motivation for embarking on a noble cause; conviction to a cause, which the fuel the keep the fire of sustainability burning in the heart of a crusaders; commitment to a sense of mission, which is the driver of credible and enduring results, the dividends of a social intervention.