Untold story of the entrepreneur

After serving as the chief executive officer of a major multi-national organisation, Mazi Sam Ohuabunwa went on to form one of Nigeria’s leading pharmaceutical entities, Neimeth International, through a buy-out deal from the same company, Pfizer International, where he started his career and rose through the ranks to sit on the management seat. He spoke with RITA OHAI on the dynamics of running a publicly quoted establishment and his time in the Biafran army.

He comes across as a strict disciplinarian who does not settle for less than the standard. This puts him head and shoulders above his contemporaries in a world where double-dealing is the order of the day.

The modest design of his home in one of the sprawling estates in Lagos is a clear reflection of the values he holds dear- simplicity, integrity and hard work. This probably stems from his deep spiritual inclinations after serving as a minister of the gospel at the Full Gospel Men’s Fellowship.

Although he is renowned for the success he recorded while heading one of the country’s vibrant globally acclaimed establishments, Sam’s childhood was not one filled with silver spoon and roses, rather, it’s been a hard ride to victory.

As he began to share sound wisdom from some of the memorable moments he had lived through, first as a war veteran and then as a business executive, it became evident that this was a story worth sharing with the world. Here it goes:

 His early years

 I was born in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, even though my parents come from Abia State. It was also there that I had my primary and secondary education, which was interrupted by the Biafran war.

At independence, I was 10 years old and was quite politically conscious and active.

I remember we were on the field with my small Nigerian flags, marching and listening to the various declarations by Nnamdi Azikiwe who was governor general and Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the prime minister.

In those days, television sets were not common, so we heard them over the radio and we were buoyed with hope for a nation that was going to be a major force that would lead Africa.

After the war, I went to the University of Ife where I studied Pharmacy and then did my Youth Service programme in Sokoto after which I started working with Pfizer and rose through the ranks in 1978 till 1993 when I became the CEO of the company and also in charge of West Africa.

Life as a Biafran soldier

 It was a very traumatising experience. It was such a terrible thing to be exposed to the training of a soldier and also to be involved in the conflict where your life was constantly in danger and you had to protect yourself by shooting at other people. The war was forced on us and that was our position as Biafrans.

I was in the hospital recovering from a gunshot wound on my leg when I heard the war was over. The injury occurred in December and the war was called off in January. We were the last set of people who tried to defend what was left of the war; after the gunshot incident occurred we couldn’t find a place to get treatment because each hospital we went to had been sacked or had closed shop completely. We kept moving from one treatment centre to the other until we could find one that took us in.

 If anybody looks at the civil war logically, it was as if the rest of the country was saying that we were not wanted and we were being pushed away. And then we decided to stay on our own, but it was as if they wanted to force us to stay in the position where they would just be killing us and we couldn’t have that.

It was difficult to understand but I guess it was the price that we needed to pay for the unity of Nigeria because it looked like we got independence from the British too easily, without much hassle and blood was not shed. The civil war was probably the opportunity that we needed to really fight for the independence, to show we needed each other and that every part of the country mattered. With all the misunderstanding, we felt we were still better together than separate.

His opinion on Odumegwu-Ojukwu’s abdication to Cote d’Ivoire

With the benefit of hindsight maybe it was good because nobody knows what would have happened. If he was killed at the time, maybe the reconciliation and the integration of the Igbo and others who fought with us may not have been as smooth as it was.

Why I say so is, I remember the day the war ended; the Biafran soldiers immediately started throwing their military garments into the bush. Initially, I thought it was wrong but later realised it was flawed thinking on my part because if any Biafran soldier (young or old) was found with any form of the uniform in his bag, the Nigerian soldiers would shoot that person immediately.

If you extrapolate that, in the heat of the passion, if Ojukwu had stayed he may have been shot.

You find that when Ojukwu died, he was given a hero’s burial and today when we talk about strengthening our federation, we go back to what is called the Aburi Accord which was advocating for ways to strengthen the country by shifting power from the centre to the federating units.

If that Accord had been accepted, maybe the Biafran war wouldn’t have happened.

His experiences as an entrepreneur

My biggest hurdle was financing our operations because when we divested it was an exclusive multi-national company that we bought with bank loans.

Let me tell you something that happened. The very next day after we had bought over Pfizer which then became Neimeth International, I and all the other board members sat round the table in the conference room and we were worried because we didn’t have a single kobo left. We were praying for a miracle. Imagine if the company which we just bought a day before closes up one day after. It was so bad that at the end of our first financial year we posted a loss. I then asked my accountants to stretch the date for the year ending till March to see if we could even close with some profit but we posted an even bigger loss.

I had to put all my assets on sale so that the company could continue running. In fact, I even put my current house on the market. The day I did that I came home and saw my children playing in the living room and I just thought to myself that by tomorrow, these kids do not know that they will not have a home. But I prayed and God saw me through. Not long after, we started to get access to capital.

And these financial issues are the norm but we tried to deal with it through seeking additional equity in the market through debentures and advance options, but there was another challenge with the very high interest rates and devaluation so at the end we didn’t have enough money to give to shareholders.

For me, amongst all the challenges I faced, it was keeping the funding of the company right that was the biggest. Many of us were treating the vision as missionaries, hoping that someday we would finally get paid especially since we were investors.

As for penetrating the market, one of the first things we did was to study the target group. Based on the pyramid, you have more people at the base. So, we looked at how we could meet the needs of those people that the big multinationals were not interested in catering to.

Number two, we were locals who had a bit of the understanding of the market so we could penetrate farther than those who were not indigenes.

Thirdly, we were also able to put some advocacy to the government asking them to look at us and the effort we were making to create jobs and wealth which caused them to enact the Public Procurement Law which gave local producers some advantage.

So it was a combination of that local knowledge of the market by understanding their needs of the greater majority of the people and to influence patronage that has helped us to keep afloat.

Coping with low quality employees

I’m more interested in the efforts the private sector can make in determining the quality of graduates they will eventually have to employ. This is what has caused companies to start recruiting unfinished products and then start retraining people all over again. But if they started participating in the development of the undergraduates at an earlier stage by granting them scholarships or working out a system where there can be true interaction between students and real life, things would have been a lot better.

The internship programmes and industrial training should be taken more seriously. I’m scandalised that even more people that are sent to those companies are rejected and nothing is done to help these people! I don’t understand it; it doesn’t show a serious country. If we are serious enough, the industry will push the programme so that when the guys are graduating, the industry knows that they are already fitted for purpose; so that is what we should go with.

The next is to take people that come into the company as staff should have value-added to their lives because they are human capital. When people come out of school and join your organisation, they leave with some level of experience. Human beings who work for you are capital until you make investments into their lives and upgrade them through investments in skills acquisitions and training.

I know that companies are usually worried about making investments into their staff because they do not want a scenario where they train a person and the person becomes ripe for the competition; but a counter argument is that if all of us were investing in our staff, we would all have people who have some level of competence.

Another thing I believe is that we should also begin to take a hard look at the remuneration system in place. Young employees are culpable all over except those who got into places like banks and the oil sectors, the rest in the privately owned entities pay peanuts and we need to do something so that we can keep the vital ones for longer periods of time.

 The problem with Nigerian manufacturing sector

 The critical thing is the problem of competitiveness. Since Nigeria signed on to the World Trade Organisation, the imperatives of competitiveness became fostered on us but unfortunately the conditions of industrial activity in the country were faulty in two basic dimensions.

We had the challenge of infrastructure and secondly, there was the issue of industrial ideology which was a poor substitution. We had core raw materials but instead we imported knocked-down parts, assembled them here and employed labour. This kept us dependent on importation, so if the Naira is devalued, you were in trouble, if there was scarcity of power, you were in trouble and we also had the issues with energy deficiencies as a result, and the manufacturing sector wasn’t essentially organic or indigenous. There were also a lot of governmental policies at the time I served as the president of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria that didn’t seem to be recognised in the real sector which was besought with job creation; as such policies were either skewed or unstable. There was smooth flow from oil, government could dispense the money to sort out a few things but it wasn’t investment expenditures that could create more jobs. So when they began to run out of funds, they began to feel the pain of the problems confronting us and started thinking of ways to support the manufacturing sector. However, in the past, it was very difficult to get them to listen to our plea to instill best practices and provide certain cushions to make us competitive so that our products would not be underpriced.

There’s also the challenge of people not doing their duties with due diligence, those who had corruptive influences and were able to bend the rules in their favour causing them to produce cheaper commodities with lower quality.