Tom Ilube (Iluobe), a member of the PDP/POI Campaign Committee on Diaspora headed by Paul Nosa Ogiehor, has been named Britain’s most powerful black person.
A panel chaired by Dame Linda Dobbs, the first black woman in Britain to be appointed a judge, have decided that out of the hundreds of thousands of people of African and African-Caribbean people living and working in the UK, this unassuming, softly spoken man who looks a bit like your maths teacher is the most influential of them all.
No one is more perplexed by this year’s choice than Ilube himself. “I think what I said was, ‘Are you running low on black people?’” he says with a huge laugh. “It’s a huge honour, if not a bit of a surprise.”
His humble response, however genuine, hugely undersells his achievements. While it might be the first time he’s topped the Powerlist, a magazine founded by former newspaper editor Michael Eboda 10 years ago to highlight black success stories, it’s not the first time Ilube has appeared in its ranks.
