Against all odds: Thomas Etuh’s triumph over adversity(3)

In part two of this thrilling but rare interview with the fertiliser baron Thomas Etuh, which was published yesterday, he spoke of his encounters with the late President Umaru Musa Yar’adua and how working for the government almost bankrupted his business. In today’s concluding part, the man of faith speaks about the death of his wife, selling TAK, his first meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari, his ties with Mafab, and 9Mobile, and closes with his belief that one day Nigeria will break through. “We are a praying people,” he said. Excerpt…

How did Notore appear on your radar then?

Notore for me happened in an interesting circumstance. Notore was seriously in debt, and we were approached from a receivership position. A banker came to me and asked if I was interested, and I said let me look at it. They were seriously in debt. So, I asked to know who the shareholders were at the time. I learnt that Gen. TY Danjuma was one of the major investors. So, I said I cannot go into any further discussion without approaching the General and hearing from him what his experience had been.

This is how I got involved in Notore. I did not go out looking for anything in Notore. A bank came to me. They know that I am into fertiliser and wanted to know if I would be interested. I went to General Danjuma because I would not enter his house from the back door. I promised him that we would work together to recover his investment in the company. I gave him my plan to rehabilitate the company, and the general promised to get back to me. Three days later, he called and asked me to return from London to see him. When I met him, he asked me to explain my turn-around plan for Notore to him. Then the general asked me, So what do you want from me? I said I want you to go in with me. I pleaded with him to leave the money he had put into the business instead of insisting that we pay him back. I said, Let’s go in together to resuscitate Notore. He stretched out his hand and said, Bring your hand. We shook hands, and he said, Let’s do it. I said done. So, we both put in the $150 million into an escrow account to show the people that the money was available. Then it was N700/$. Being a publicly quoted company, we were made to go through a bid process, and we won the bid. We had thought we would finish paperwork by February or March of last year, but we did not finish until this year.

“On her dying bed, she said to me, “I know there are challenges with the business but I have to ask you, you have to let go…. Then she said “take your pen and paper and write.”

What is the turnaround plan for Notore?What is the diamond you see in Notore?

The first is to revamp what met on the ground by doing a thorough turn-around maintenance. Not the type they have been doing before. So we are currently conducting technical due diligence with three different companies to see which one is the best that we will go with. The reports for two have come and we are now waiting for the last one. I am a true fertiliser person, and I am excited about Notore, which is a major source of raw material for me. Secondly, Notore’s product is exportable, and thirdly, we have our own power plant and also a jetty from where we can export from day one. In addition, the place is a free trade zone. So, the potential we see in Notore is huge. We hope to get the final report in September, and after that we will commence the process of RFP, and thereafter, we should get going with running the plant again eight to nine months thereafter. Some of the spare parts are not available on the shelf and have to be manufactured. That’s the challenge we will have, and we are looking into that already.

Read also: Against all odds: Thomas Etuh’s triumph over adversity (1)

Selling TAK and the experience of his wife’s battles with cancer

I did not go out to look for any telecoms opportunity. You see, when I lost my wife, I left and went out for three years to be with my children. My last boy was nine and a half years old when their mom passed. She had invested in these children and called them my project. She let me go out there to work and do my business. She said the two of us cannot go out because if we did, we would lose these children, so she will stay and take care of the home front. She was a very prayerful woman.

We were here, and she said to me, I know how busy you can be. Promise me that when I am gone, you will care for the children. It is the reason I left Unity Bank. Nobody knew then, but the doctors had given an indication of how long my wife would live. A lot of people did not know that we were fighting cancer for years, and she did not want anybody to pity her. The moment you say someone is suffering from cancer, some will put a death sentence on it, and she did not want all of that. People only knew when she passed, and then people said to me, Thomas, with all the battles in business, you were also battling with this? I said yes; I have been battling with this since 2010. We did not go anywhere with my wife. If money could have saved her, she would be alive. On her dying bed, she said to me, “I know there are challenges with the business, but I have to ask you; you have to let go.” We had been told by our spiritual father to go and sell whatever we could and pay our debt. And she said to me, Remember what we were told—if you pay your debts, the doors will open. So I know you are holding on to TAK, but please sell it. If anything happens to you, make sure you don’t leave any debt for these children. This you have to do for me. She said, I want you to set up a foundation in my honour. You have known my desires, my passion for rural women, and for girls’ education. This thing that I am going through even with all the money that God has blessed us with sees where I am. What happens to that rural woman who falls ill without any help? So you have to build six hospitals, one in each geopolitical zone. She said, So take your paper and pen to write. She told me she wanted one hospital in my village, in Kogi; she wanted one in her own village in Kaduna state, north central; and one in the north west; she asked for one in Ifewara, the home of our spiritual father, who has blessed us mercifully, and her friend that was helping us look after her in the hospital; she is from the southeast, so she said one hospital in her village in Imo State. She has another friend from Obubra in Cross River who passed away in childbearing, and she said one should be built in her village for the south. Then there is a guy who grew up in our dad’s house. We have adopted him as our senior brother. My parents sent him to school. He retired as a director in the civil service. My wife admired the relationship, and because of this, my wife treated all our domestic staff so well, and she will adopt them. So she said she wanted one hospital in our brother Joshua’s village in Tula, Gombe State. In Ifewara, she said you build a hospital and a skills acquisition centre, as well as in my village and her village. This way the most vulnerable women in these three places, especially widows, can find help with skill acquisition. This has been her passion, as has the issue of girls’ child education. Those who have lost their parents and cannot pay their way to school. She has been taking care of lots of them. So she said, That is all I want you to do in memory of me, and that’s all I would have wanted to do if I were alive, but now do this for me. I told her I would do it. And then she passed away. Now we have built six hospitals. The last one was commissioned on the 10th of July this year. (Thomas did not say this, but we learnt that each hospital cost his foundation about $5 million to build and equip.)

In every location, we seek out the strongest people that have run a hospital before, and we hand them over to them. The first six months we pay them 100 percent for the cost of running it to be able to stabilise them. Then after that, we give them grants, and we maintain the equipment. In each hospital, we must put a mammogram machine for breast cancer and equipment for screening for cervical cancer and prostate. My wife specifically told me that in these rural areas, the people cannot afford these things. So, we hand the hospitals over, and they take over. We support them with annual grants, but if they have any challenges, they come to us. We sit on their boards through the foundation so we are able to know promptly when and if they have a challenge. We also have a foundation office located at each hospital to give us feedback, and this way we can be agile in our response and we do not have to wait until the system collapses. And when there is a serious case that they cannot handle or afford, the hospital will make a representation to the foundation office at the hospital, and we will step in. Sometimes there will be critical cases that we have to take out and help. Another thing the foundation does is that every year, we conduct medical outreaches in the six locations and we bring in leading doctors from everywhere. Since we started, we have done over 57,000 medical interventions. That is how the hospitals are run. My wife told me whatever would have been her dividend, pass it on to this foundation. She only left one piece of jewellery each for the sons to pass on to their future wives. Nothing else. What I have done is to create an endowment, and the proceeds from long-term eurobonds, gilts in the UK, and other investments, like in TAK, where the foundation owns 9 percent, go to support this initiative, and we also continue to grant scholarships for girls and do our widows outreach as well. In all six locations, when we go for the medical outreach, we first start with a widows’ outreach; sometimes 1000, sometimes 1500; they all come from the communities. We have some people who will come, hold crusades, and help the people.

“Nigeria’s food belt has been ravaged; the farmers are afraid and traumatised and many have abandoned their farms”

Etuh leaves the board of Unity Bank, and not long after, opportunity in Mafab beckons.

So I resigned from Unity Bank in 2017. I resigned from most of the boards I was on, and by the time she passed away, I resigned from all. I left the board and came to London to stay with the children, and I set up a family office operating out of London and Nigeria. From 2018, I tried to sell TAK as my wife had challenged me, but it was taking time because in 2019, the discussion with Indorama for the sale of TAK slowed when COVID-19 came. Even in the middle of COVID, they came to London to see me when we had a small opening to travel. The conversation continued, and we eventually closed the deal in 2022. Indorama took 51 percent with management. They paid me good money, and I put that money into the family office. 40 percent was given to my four boys, ten percent each, and the remaining nine percent is owned by her foundation. So after some time I went visiting Nigeria, and Colonel Sani Bello gave me a call and said he wanted me to meet with somebody. He and I are in mainstream energy together. He told me that a mutual friend would bring somebody to me, and he wanted me to listen to him. He said the government was about to sell two 5G licences and that I should take the people through the model we used to raise money for Mainstream Energy. The guy came and met me at home and spoke to me, and I said, personally, I have stopped doing investments and that now my money I put in bonds. What do I need? Nothing. I wanted to focus on my children. So they left, and two days later, the Colonel called and asked to see me. He came with this same guy, the chap that started Mafab, and said we should work with him, but I said, sir, I am not doing it again. He promised that Mainstream will invest. I then promised to get my investment firm, Lighthouse Capital, along with the MD of my family office to help them raise the capital they needed. Then Mafab gave them the mandate to raise the funds but insisted that they must underwrite 30 percent of the offer, which was $300 million. I gave them the assurance to proceed. They did the bid for the licence and won along with MTN. So this is the story of Mafab and my affair with telecoms. You know the reserve price was $197 million for the 5G licence, and for the bid, you had to put up 10 percent of that in cash, not simply a guarantee. We needed to raise $19.7 million for the bid. We went far and wide and, in the process, pooled forces together, and we were able to raise the funds to make the payment of the 10 percent before the expiration of the deadline given by NCC. After winning the bid, we had 90 days to make the balance payment of more than $250 million. The auction process closed in December, and in January we launched the first of the six hospitals I built in my wife’s memory and in my village. People gathered, but for me, this was not the place or time to talk business. But after some time had passed, we resumed searching for the capital with meetings in Abuja. My group offered to put in $100m as contained in the underwriting we pledged. We began to raise funds through a retail offer to investors, and soon we got pledges for $340 million, with AFC also coming in to put in a good amount. The bid for the licence was $273.6m, and of this we had paid $19.9m. To the glory of God, we raised the money in 72 hours. There was a lot of credibility that came from people hearing that I was involved. We had a line from a bank to fund the balance; I pledged my eurobond to pick up some lines from the banks. Remember that Airtel was the reserve bidder, and they were sure Mafaab would not be able to pay, so they were ready and waiting to pounce. However, in the end we raised more than was required and had to return more than $100m that came in from retail investors mobilised through my investment banking firm. The rationale was that it will be better to have institutional investors like AFC with us instead of hundreds of retail investors. We were oversubscribed, and at this point, I insisted that the refund must be made before we made the payment to NCC so these retail investors don’t accuse us of using their fund to pay for the licence. The refund was made promptly.

When we had made the payment for the licence, we returned to a strategy meeting in my study with representatives of the key investors. At this meeting, I suggested that 5G penetration even in South Africa was very low at three percent and that by itself this 5G licence cannot provide the value and the return for our investment for many years. I made the partners aware that we will need to raise fresh capital of about $1bn to create real value in Mafab. Later, I was bought out of Mafab. Then, not long after, I got this call from Keystone Bank after they learnt that we had successfully paid for the 5G licence. I had borrowed money from them against my eurobond for the licence, so they were aware of my involvement in Mafab. They introduced 9Mobile to me and said there was an opportunity for a sale. The bankers advised me to take out the owners who were owing the banks and others, including suppliers, the NCC, and the federal government, through the FIRS. I was told that 9Mobile shareholders could not pay the huge debt, so they told me, Why not take them out so the bank can get back its money? So again, as you can see, my interest in 9Mobile was by default. Days later, we had a meeting in Abuja where I asked to know who the major investors in 9Mobile were and how much exposure was involved. The bank people said it was a lot and that, on top of their heads, we should be talking about about $800 million. We then agreed to go in. I said, Let’s bring all the key people together and make an offer. The plan that we sketched in Mafab was that we would raise another $1bn after paying for the 5G licence that Mafab won, but things were not going very smoothly among the investors. At this point, I was bought out. I got in because they insisted that we underwrite 30 percent of the offer, and when it seemed things were not going smoothly, I left. Growing up, my father had warned us about two things that we should not fight over—money and women. I quickly moved on. I have a habit of going on a prayer walk at a park when I am here. One day I was on this prayer walk, and a word dropped in me about all I had been through—the crisis of debt and all that. I caught the vision, and this led me in a particular direction. Like Lazarus, we believe the dead shall rise again. So the next day, I took a flight and headed to Abuja. While back, I opened substantive discussions with Keystone Bank and others involved in 9Mobile. I first wanted to know what the issues were, why things were not going well, why 9Mobile was owing so much, and how much it was owing.

To cut a long story short, I began contacts with creditors, with the government for the spectrum and the backlog of taxes, with the syndicate of Nigerian banks, and with Afreximbank. After we learnt that it was Afreximbank who had the charge on the shares in the company, we flew to Cairo to meet with them. So Afrexim says, Mr. Etuh, if you can succeed in sorting out the matter of the 9Mobile’s lapsed spectrum licence and its outstanding obligations to the government and creditors, we will hand you a change of control. A few months later, I went to Afrexim and showed them proof that I have the spectrum back, and the following day, Afrexim gave me authority to take over 9Mobile. Then I met with the 13 syndicate banks in a town hall style, but my proposal could not be progressed. When I realised we were not going anywhere with this approach, I reached out to the late Herbert Wigwe and pleaded with him to help set up another meeting of First Bank, UBA, GT Bank, Access, and Zenith. One Saturday, Herbert called and said the meeting with the banks and their lawyers, Aluko Oyebode, Paul Usoro, Pan African Capital, and consultants BCG, had been fixed in his office the following day, which was a Sunday. You know Herbert, I said to him, Herbert, who will fix a business meeting on a Sunday, and he retorted, Is it not money you are looking for? That is the only time we can come together. This was April of last year. It was agreed that we needed to close the deal quickly, especially now that there was a serious offer on the table from a man who had done what all 13 of them could not achieve. When some of the banks pushed hard against the haircut I had demanded, I walked away, but one of the bank MDs came to bring me back to the room. When all the bank MDs were reminded of the effort that had gone in and the results achieved, they calmed down and asked me, So what do you want? I said, You have to accept the haircut, and Herbert jumped in and spoke of how the CBN had cut the heads of the banks and that now they did not even have any hair to offer. Herbert was the one helping to push this, but as you know, Herbert has passed away. So, we are still in discussion, but I am confident we will reach a landing soon. We are having to start afresh with 9Mobile. There is massive equipment refurbishing to be done. So far, my group has put in a massive amount of money, and there is more money to be put in, but I believe it is doable. I see a good future for 9Mobile, although people have asked me why you are doing this. And I say if we have to set up a new company today to compete against MTN, Airtel, and Glo with more than 100 million subscribers, imagine what it will cost to achieve the 11 million subscribers that 9Mobile had under Boye Olusanya, and they were generating more than N45 billion every month. I always tell people, I don’t come into a market to kill anybody; I collaborate. That is how I survived in my fertiliser business. People were asking me then, Why are you helping these blending plants to rise again, and I will say, beyond the profit we will make, let’s also consider the jobs we can create for our people. We took the number of fertiliser-blending plants in the country to over 74. Now look at the business and the jobs we have created; look at the value chain.

Read also: Against all odds: Thomas Etuh’s triumph over adversity (2)

Finally, where is agriculture headed in Nigeria in the face of food scarcity and the recent youth protests in the country?

You know we gained some momentum in the last six years; we increased our rice production, we raised maize production, and we took up sorghum cultivation and beans and millet. But we ignored something very central, which started like a small fire—that is, banditry, and it has worsened. Today, everywhere there is hunger. Nigeria’s food belt has been ravaged; the farmers are afraid and traumatised, and many have left their farms. The major bean-producing states in Nigeria—Borno and Yobe—are under attack. Zamfara used to be my biggest market for fertiliser in the north. I was doing more than 70,000 tonnes there. They had some of the wealthiest farmers in Zamfara. In the last three years, I could not sell even one truck in Zamfara. There is nobody going to the farm anymore. Come to southern Katsina, where you had another large farming belt; it is the same story. You had big grain markets. Today that is all gone too. Bandits are rampaging. A time was when we lived peacefully together, but a lot has changed since then. I believe this government has seen the challenge very clearly, and we are dealing with someone that understands power.

Are you hopeful for Nigeria?

Yes, I am. I am very hopeful because we are praying for people and we have to speak positively. We are hopeful that one day Nigeria will make it.