Legacy is a Relay

What ties these conversations together, for me, is the recognition that legacy is not a statement you issue or a script you write at the end. It is, as the day kept insisting, a life you live now, and it is built in the unglamorous places: the rule you write so that the institution can function without you, the seat you give up before you are required to, the younger colleague you choose to back, the system you build so that trust does not depend on any one person remaining in charge. The founders of WIMBIZ understood this twenty-five years ago. The proof is an organisation that no longer needs them, and is stronger for it.

I have been part of WIMBIZ from the very first conference, and became a volunteer soon after. Many of us came up that way and have since gone on to hold positions of responsibility at WIMBIZ and across business, finance and public life. As I looked around the room, it struck me that, without quite noticing, we had become the generation responsible for handing the torch on. Legacy, from that vantage point, does not look like a destination. It looks like a relay. You are always holding something that was handed to you, and always deciding how and when to pass it on.

Those of us in the middle of it carry a particular responsibility. We are close enough to the founding to remember what it cost, and close enough to the next generation to shape what we hand them. The question is not whether we have built something. It is whether we are building it in a way that we will be willing, and able, to let go of.

The conversation with Julia Middleton sharpened a different edge of the same theme. Asked whether she had been a good girl, she took the term apart. If being good meant being invisible, pleasing everyone but yourself, endlessly avoiding conflict, judging everything by someone else’s rules and never trusting your own insight, then she wanted no part of it. Many women are schooled in precisely that goodness, and it does its quiet work long before we reach any room of consequence.

She was just as impatient with the word wisdom, which she described as a concept designed to make us feel better about getting older, insisting that the young hold as much of it as anyone. And her point about leadership and language stayed with me. Most women, she observed, will refuse the noun. They will not say “I am a leader.” But ask whether they are leading, and they say yes, of course. The hierarchy, the title and the office have been so thoroughly coded as belonging to someone else that capable women decline the identity even while doing the work.

This connects to something I raised from the floor, and have thought about for some time: the pattern of accomplished women who quietly withdraw from power rather than lean into it. We tend to frame the problem as one of access, of getting women into the room. But a great deal of the loss happens after the room has been entered. Women arrive, take the measure of structures that were not built for them, and conclude that the cost of staying is higher than the value of the seat.

Julia’s answer, when I put this to her, was not to deny the exhaustion, which is real, but to insist that we are already doing more than we think. The small encouragements we are careless about, she said, stay with people for years; we are on our way, and the task now is to be kinder to ourselves and move faster. Withdrawal is understandable. But it is also a transfer of the field to people who are not weighing the cost at all, and that is the harder reason to stay.

Speaking from the floor, WIMBIZ London Conference, June 2026.

The most compelling ideas are rarely the most complicated. They are the ones we return to repeatedly, hearing them differently every time, not because they have changed, but because we have. Legacy proved to be one of those ideas at this year’s WIMBIZ London Conference. The conference theme, Meaningful Legacy: Power, Positioning and Influence in a Changing World, was not unfamiliar. Yet I found myself hearing it differently.

Ebisan Akisanya, Chair of our Board of Trustees, opened with a reflection that set the tone for everything that followed. Legacy, she reminded us, is what happens before history records it. It is a collective act, not a solitary one. And it is not something reserved for the end of a life or a career; it is what we are doing already, through the choices we make, the people we invest in, and the institutions we build.

Of the many conversations that followed, two have stayed with me, very different on the surface, yet each illuminating another dimension of what it means to build something that outlives us.

Ibukun Awosika brought this home with unusual force, precisely because she speaks from the founding generation of a consequential organisation like WIMBIZ. Describing a gap in women’s empowerment the founders couldn’t ignore, and referencing matter-of-factly the organisation’s metamorphosis into a formidable force on the continent, she pivoted to a poignant reflection on how the founders managed succession. She described the decision she and her co-founders made, only ten years in, that none of them would chair the organisation again. Thirteen founders, only five of whom had served as chair, and the others agreed to surrender their own right to lead so that the next generation could come through.

She called it stewardship, and the word matters. A steward holds something that is not theirs. The instinct to build past yourself, rather than around yourself, is the rarest discipline in institutional life, and the one that determines whether anything you start outlives you.

Serving across private and public institutions over the years, I have seen that organisations rarely fail because their founders lacked vision. More often, they falter at succession, where ego and habit make letting go feel like loss. But what the WIMBIZ founders also understood is that you cannot hand over power on the strength of goodwill alone. You hand it over on the strength of systems. Their standing rule that five members present at a meeting could bind all thirteen, whether or not you turned up to argue your case, was not bureaucratic housekeeping. It was the structure that made trust durable enough to survive disagreement, ambition and time. Vision is what people remember. Systems are what actually carry it forward.

"Vision is what people remember. Systems are what actually carry it forward."

Author

Aishah N. Ahmad explores how people, ideas and institutions shape the trajectory of societies over time. Drawing on history, philosophy, leadership and finance, her work uncovers the principles behind what endures, and how we might build better.

She is the founder of Bridgforte Centre for Global Impact and a former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria.

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