He was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was mighty in words and in deeds. Yes, he attended the Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge of the era as Pharoah’s house had the best thinkers, astrologers and educators. He learned administration, governance, communication, strategy, and the mechanics of empire. Moses is a case study of consequential leadership. Providence placed him inside the very system he would later confront, not to assimilate him, but to equip him. Leadership, it turns out, is often prepared in places that look contradictory to destiny.
Simply, Moses’ origin story itself is layered with irony and intent. Pharaoh’s daughter found him as a baby, hidden in a basket among the reeds of the Nile, moved by compassion despite her father’s decree to destroy Hebrew boys. She drew him from the water and named him Moses. What looked like abandonment became adoption; what appeared like displacement became positioning. In modern terms, Moses was sent to a “faraway branch” of a bank where many might have expected him to fade quietly.
Instead, that distance became an accelerator. He learned how power works, how institutions think, and how complex systems are governed. When the moment came to lead, Moses did not confront Pharaoh as a novice; he spoke the language of the palace because he had been trained there. Yet all he learned in Pharaoh’s house was not enough. Another layer was added as Moses spent 40 years in the wilderness of Midian as a shepherd following his flight from Egypt, a period of preparation, humility, and transformation before leading the Israelites. It was there that he was called at the burning bush to deliver his people.
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This pattern repeats itself beyond scripture, including in business and personal journeys. I saw this firsthand during my NYSC year, when I was posted to Northern Nigeria. At the time, I did not want to go. I saw no opportunity in it. Yet that year fundamentally reshaped how I understand Nigeria, its people, its diversity, its tensions, and its possibilities. The perspective gained from that “faraway posting” continues to compound. Like Moses in Pharaoh’s house, what felt like being sent away became exposure to knowledge and context that no classroom could have provided.
Moses needed Egypt to lead Israel. I needed NYSC in Northern Nigeria to better understand Nigeria. And that bank manager in the faraway branch needs that exposure to understand the full composite of the business, ahead of his elevation.
In today’s context, the preparation of Moses might look like sending you to Harvard for an MBA, only for you to return to Nigeria and be assigned to run a small bank in my Ovim village rather than in Abuja or Lagos. It may feel misplaced, even unfair. Yet it is often in that quiet, overlooked setting, far from the spotlight, that you truly learn the business. And then, one day, the call comes from Lagos, not because you waited at the center, but because you mastered leadership at the margins.
And the lesson: what has living in that “Pharoah’s house taught you”?
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The lesson is for us to stop sabotaging the very things that could help unlock answers to numerous mysteries we are facing in the country. A national service where the kids or their parents choose where they are to serve is no longer a national service, but it’s prevalent today. We can cite our usual refrain of ‘insecurity’, but that is also why we have become so incapable of addressing any problem confronting us as a people. We hate or discriminate against people we haven’t lived with or seen from close range, but we still arrogantly assume and thunder that we know them and how they think.
Post a teacher to a rural area, and he will find his way back to the crowded places we call cities. We forget that kids in the rural areas also need education and inspiration, but in our all knowing selfishness, none of such things features when we make decisions.
Why do we avoid or run away from difficulty and uncomfortable things but still desire a great future? We cannot point to where it has happened before, but we still think it’s not our lot to suffer, and in trying to avoid suffering, our own sufferings become permanent.
The future is designed in the present, now you know the future that awaits…