President Yinka answers the call

Shaped by his native land, the 2026-27 president carries the dynamic spirit of Nigeria with him to Rotary leadership 

By Diana Schoberg

Olayinka H. Babalola makes his way to the front row. This is it. It’s showtime, the moment that Yinka, as he’s called — the 2026-27 Rotary International president, the second from Nigeria, the second from all of Africa for that matter — will make his debut to the Rotary world.  

It’s the first morning of Rotary’s International Assembly, a training event for incoming district governors held every winter in Orlando, Florida. Babalola’s already miked up for the speech he’ll give, the session’s main event. But first, he prepares to participate in the opening flag ceremony, a tradition at Rotary events. 

He joins 2025-26 RI President Francesco Arezzo of Italy and Larry Lunsford of the United States, who will serve after Babalola. The three walk onstage, hoisting their countries’ flags. A singer belts out the U.S. national anthem. Then, the Italian district governors-elect join Arezzo onstage to sing “Il Canto degli Italiani.” 

Finally, it’s Babalola’s turn. He steps forward and stands taller, his glittery green-and-white striped hat matching his country’s flag. Peace Udoka Anyira, a Nigerian Canadian Rotarian, steps onstage and sings:  

Nigeria, we hail thee, 
Our own dear native land, 
Though tribes and tongues may differ, 
In brotherhood we stand 
Nigerians all, are proud to serve 
Our sovereign Motherland. 

Babalola sings along too, and as he does, a tear rolls down his cheek. 

“You hear a lot of bad stories about Nigeria, but today, the story is not a bad story,” he says afterward, choking up with emotion. He takes off his glasses and wipes his eyes. “The flag of this country is being raised amongst people of goodwill — good people from more than 100 countries, for a good cause.” 

As of 1 July, Babalola will lead them.  

A born leader 

Babalola’s leadership journey began early. The eldest of six children, he was born in Ibadan, one of the largest cities in Nigeria. His mother was a teacher and his father an accountant. “From my part of the world, when you’re the first child, that has some leadership responsibilities,” he says.  

He went to college at what was then called the Federal University of Technology in Bauchi, an ethnically diverse city in the north where Nigeria’s savanna woodlands begin to give way to the semiarid Sahel on the edge of the Sahara. The school’s public image director, a member of the Rotary Club of Bauchi, asked him during his second year if he’d help organize a Rotaract club. Babalola became the club’s charter president.

After earning his degree in electronics engineering, Babalola completed a year in the National Youth Service Corps. Aiming to bridge ethnic and religious divides, members of the corps serve in states other than their own. Babalola was posted to Port Harcourt in Rivers state, where the French tire manufacturer Michelin had requested electronics engineering graduates to help retool its equipment. 

Before arriving in Port Harcourt, Babalola joined other newly mobilized corps members at an orientation camp. He figured since they were all fresh out of university, there must be Rotaractors among them. He posted a notice and gathered everybody together. “We started a mini Rotaract fellowship while in camp,” he recalls. 

Then in Port Harcourt, Babalola joined the Rotaract Club of Trans Amadi, an industrial area of the city where Michelin was located. With other Rotaract corps members, he volunteered at a facility for children with disabilities that was supported by the Rotary Club of Port Harcourt. 

When his mandatory service was over, Babalola landed a job with the Nigerian branch of the Shell oil company. Only in his mid-20s, he was beginning to outgrow his Rotaract club; his job gave him the privilege of a better income than others his age. The next logical step, he thought, was to join Rotary, where he could find inspiration from successful older members. “I wanted to be in a place where I could aspire to other things,” he says. 

But when he went to a meeting of the Rotary Club of Trans Amadi and said he wanted to join, club members were stunned. One Rotarian erupted: “What’s wrong with this young man? You think this is how you join Rotary?” But another Rotarian volunteered to be his sponsor, later becoming a mentor. “If that man hadn’t spoken up for me, maybe I wouldn’t be here,” Babalola reflects. “I may have left the place and never considered joining Rotary, and that would have been the end of it.” 

In Rotary, Babalola found career mentors, including the chief operating officer of Shell Nigeria. “There are some people who when you see their signature on a letter addressed to you, it means only two things: You’ve been promoted or you’ve been sacked,” he says. “That’s the kind of person he was.” Another executive in the Nigerian oil industry also took Babalola under his wing when his father died. 

But most of all, he found a place to grow up. “At 27, you have some money in your pocket, you’re single, you’re a boy, you can imagine the kind of things that will be on your mind,” he says. “But because I was in Rotary, that didn’t happen for me. People are talking about taxation; they’re talking about the budget. They’re talking about real estate, about investment opportunities, and suddenly somebody is telling you what you need to do with your money.” 

Through Rotary, Babalola also met his wife, Precy, the first female president of her university’s Rotaract club in Port Harcourt. She pulled back from Rotary when their children were young, rejoining in 2018. Today she is a lawyer and a member of the Rotary Club of Port Harcourt Passport.

“Our stories as members may be different, but Rotary impacts us in many ways — our careers, our businesses, our family lives,” Yinka Babalola says. “I think if you talk to any Rotarian, you will find they have a story, something that made them stay.”

Hands-on approach

It’s midday and a dozen or so district governors-elect ring a conference table. The Florida sunshine streams in as they exchange business cards and wait for Babalola. These governors-elect are from the last remaining districts battling polio, places like Pakistan, where, along with neighboring Afghanistan, wild poliovirus is still endemic, along with some districts in Africa, including Babalola’s Nigeria, that are still suppressing outbreaks. 

Babalola enters and walks around the table, shaking hands with everybody. This is his hype meeting, where he wants to rally these governors-elect and show them just how serious he is about polio eradication. 

As the meeting starts, he speaks in such hushed tones that one must lean in to hear him. Once he has everyone’s full attention, his voice grows stronger, more animated. He taps his fingers on the table, asking for a demonstration of their commitment. 

“Imagine,” Babalola tells them, “being at the Rotary Convention and they’re announcing that we’ve reached zero cases of polio — that this district governor class was the one to get us there.”

The room bubbles with enthusiasm afterward. “We’re excited for him being our president,” says Shahzad Sabir, governor-elect of District 3271 (Pakistan). “He knows what’s a problem on the ground. He knows what commitment means. He knows what we need.” 

International PolioPlus Committee Chair Michael K. McGovern, who sat in on the meeting, echoes Sabir’s sentiments. “We have never had a president who has come into the role who has more background on the day-to-day work of eradicating polio in a country, working closely with Rotarians, working with the governments, and working with others,” he says. “We couldn’t have a better leader.” 

In 2012, wild poliovirus was still endemic in Nigeria. Cases were surging, particularly in the northeast of the country, home to the militant group Boko Haram. Babalola, a 2011-12 district governor, was summoned to a meeting to discuss the country’s polio eradication efforts. Rotary leaders wanted the past and current district governors gathered to each adopt one of Nigeria’s 36 states and work with local governments and partners there to ensure immunization ran smoothly. “People’s hands started going up,” Babalola recalls, “and nobody agreed to go to the northeast.” 

But Babalola had gone to college in the region. It’s where he had gotten his start in Rotary. It was a place he knew. He raised his hand. “People turned and looked at me, thinking this guy must be crazy,” he remembers. 

Salma Ibrahim Anas, the commissioner of health in the northeastern state of Borno from 2011 to 2015, recalls one time when Babalola met her in her office in the state capital, Maiduguri. She told him she’d be traveling to a remote community several hundred kilometers away to launch an immunization campaign. There was a security lockdown; civil society partners were not traveling because of the risks. But, says Anas, now the special adviser on health to the Nigerian president, she couldn’t believe it when the next day she saw Babalola in that same remote community delivering vaccines. “I was speechless,” she recalls. “This was the highest level of dedication, commitment, and trust. He sacrificed whatever he had for these children in remote communities despite the security challenges of Boko Haram."

Within the decade, in 2020, the World Health Organization certified Nigeria — and with it the entire African region — free of wild poliovirus, largely thanks to the efforts of Rotary members.

From his time as a district governor, Babalola quickly rose through the Rotary ranks. “I could see then that he was an up-and-comer — he had that talent,” says Bryn Styles, who met Babalola when he was a governor and Styles was an RI director-elect. He is now serving as Babalola’s presidential aide. “I was so impressed with him that I wrote a note to the sitting RI president and president-elect saying this is someone that we have to move along.”

In 2017, Babalola was preparing to serve as an RI director himself. His term was to coincide with the year that Sam F. Owori of Uganda was to serve as Rotary president. But the unthinkable happened: Owori died of complications from surgery before he could take office.

Refusing to believe it, Babalola tried to call Owori, whose wife answered and confirmed the news. He called Past RI President Jonathan Majiyagbe and Past Director Sam Okudzeto, among the only living senior leaders from Africa at the time, to ask them what to do. Both deferred to Babalola as the leader now. As he pondered that, he got a call from Ugandan Rotarians asking him what’s next. “Suddenly it dawned on me,” he says. “I said to myself, ‘Yinka, your role has changed. This whole continent is looking in your direction, and you need to step up.’”

Babalola and Owori had already discussed plans for their time together on the RI Board. Now, it fell to Babalola to execute them. “It was not an easy time,” he says, “but it was a serious moment of growth.”

One of those plans involved membership growth on the continent, an area that Babalola had excelled at during his time as club president and district governor. When Owori died, Africa was home to 29,000 Rotarians. Today, there are 48,000.

“There’s something about Yinka and membership,” says Virginia Major, a past district governor from Port Harcourt and one of many whom Babalola has mentored. “Oh, my goodness. He almost drives you crazy because of membership. He gives you figures. ‘This is where we need to be.’ ‘We need to do this, and we can.’ I call him the father of membership in Africa.”

Create lasting impact

After the flag ceremony, Babalola hustles backstage to wait while Styles, his aide, introduces him. Babalola swaps his green-and-white hat for one in the same fabric as the presidential ties and scarves the district governors-elect will receive after the morning session. Someone fortuitously tracks down a pocket square in the same fabric and Babalola tucks it in just as Styles is announcing his name. With that, he strides onstage.

The audience applauds as Babalola tells the story of how he was finally able to join Rotary. He talks about the impact of Together for Healthy Families in Nigeria, a massive maternal and child health program funded by The Rotary Foundation. And he dramatically announces this year’s presidential message, Create Lasting Impact, while spreading his arms wide and soaking in the enthusiasm of the crowd, which is standing and taking photos. 

Babalola may be only the second president from Nigeria, the second from Africa. But true to Rotary’s values, he will build peace as he travels, promoting understanding of the people of a country, beyond the headlines. He himself will be creating lasting impact, on Rotary, on the world.

This story originally appeared in the July 2026 issue of Rotary magazine.