As a baby, I wept for three months non-stop —Ibe

Professor Gregory Ikechukwu Ibe, administrator, academic and businessman is the Founder and Chancellor of Gregory University, Uturu, Abia State. He shares the story of his life with TUNDE ADELEKE.

Your name, Ikechukwu, means God’s power; can you recount the circumstances of your birth that informed the name?

Well, it’s a reported thing I am going to tell you because nobody knows any information, but it was in Kaduna around 3pm and a white doctor wondered why a child should come by 3pm as most births came by evening or early morning. But this one was in the hot afternoon on a December 10. Somehow, it wasn’t funny because for three months, I wept!  You can confirm from my parents, they are alive; my father is 99 years old and my mother is 76 years old. My father is the king and is in his house there.

So, they said I wept for three months and that gave them a lot of concern. Instead of being happy, I was crying continuously every day. It was linked to the fact that my mother had had a baby girl at 15 who died. So, my mother was 19 and had me and I started crying. So, they felt it was like ‘ogbanje’ or what the Yoruba call ‘abiku’.

So, they tried many things to see that I should not equally die. I have a lot of marks on me, but none worked! It was in Zaria they (my parents) met with some people, some traditionalists, who told them there was something that happened in the past; that I just reincarnated from a pain that happened before and that whenever they get to our village, they should make out time to find out what happened. They said that the man had come back to do great things; that he suffered in the past world and that’s why he was crying. They said that after what they were going to do, I would calm down because they now recognised the fact that they should appease my conscience as a child and welcome me, to a new chapter. So, that was how that thing (crying) stopped.

Can you let me into your background?

I have no background…

(Cuts in) Everybody does…

My background is that my father was a tailor and my mother, a seamstress. My father left a shop for my mother and joined the police to help establish police tailoring department in Kaduna. About the time I was born, the issue of Biafra had started creeping in. I was two years when the Biafra matter started, and by the end of the war, I was five years old. So, you can imagine; I had no childhood. That’s why everybody should discourage anything about war.

In a war situation, nobody carries the children and embarks on any running or saving of life; you have to save your own head first. If the child is lucky, the mother can keep the child (somewhere) and run to safety. It’s not good for anybody to go into war or talk about war.

My mother kept me under a big tree with taproot and hid me there and ran for dear life when the bombs and shelling were hitting everywhere. Sometimes, she would keep us and go and look for food from wherever to bring to us. According to her, she would come back to find us surrounded by reptiles, giving protection to us. So, she has a belief that snakes or reptiles don’t kill; they only play with children.

When the war ended, somehow, somebody came and appeared; they said Papa Iyke had returned from the war. So, I didn’t know who my dad was and if he had died like others who served; their children would not know their parents again. Before I was six years old, he came back to take me to Enugu to live with him. It became the first exposure to life, but I was totally timid and I got acculturated from the culture shock of living inside the thick forest. The boys in Enugu had seen a little bit of the light. I was coming from the darkest part. We later got a room and my mother and siblings joined us and I developed skills.

I sold bread and fried ‘akara’ (bean cake), washed the beans with my mother. I went to bakeries around Enugu to buy bread and sell at Police College, Enugu. I polished shoes of police officers, their berets and belts, with Kiwi polish while keeping the bread by my side and selling. So, all these businesses I did and yet, I was the first son, trying to make sure I combined all. It took a lot of distance to fetch water because after the war, everything broke down; there was no access to anything. It was painful! I would go to railway quarters in Owerri to fetch buckets of water. I often trekked about four kilometres stretch, to fetch drinking water.

We also used it to wash beans and clothes. So, we really suffered in Enugu growing up and it also affected my education because at Christ’s Church, I always got to school late because I had to fry akara first in the morning and the teacher would send me away. So, I changed school to Ogbete Primary School. Whenever I came to class late, they would deal with me. So, I left that school in Primary III and changed to St. Peter’s, the one closer to the market. It’s not easy to be an akara seller during the rainy season because your eyeballs will bulge out.

And during the rainy season, if you live in one room with your parents, where will you keep your firewood? It’s beside the house and in the morning, you need to ignite it to fry the akara and the technique about it is if you put too much kerosene the oil will pick the smell, and would start smelling like kerosene.

So, how did you always get round it?

It means you must be professional in using the small kerosene to ignite the small aspect of it and use your mouth to blow, so that the firewood would warm up and give you a better fire to fry the akara. And if your oil was not hot enough, the akara would get soaked with oil. So, it’s a kind of ingenuity on its own to be able to fry akara good enough to buy. So, we fried akara and did a lot of menial jobs and commercial caring for children of people who brought their children to me to run a crèche. Some families came with milk and ‘akamu’ (pap) while some didn’t have milk, but they had akamu; some didn’t even have akamu.

So, all I did was to make sure I spread the ones that had milk and the ones that didn’t have at all and ensure that I fed the three categories with whatever, was kept with me. Those who didn’t have at all would have to wait, till the women who had would have given me their children and would put them on the mat. So, the ones who didn’t have would tell me, ‘’Iyke, take care of these babies, I am coming”. So, I made sure I took care of all, and most of them grew up well and behaved like me as well. That was the story until I was sent back home to serve my uncle and I lived in Uturu here. I was preparing farmland, tilling the ground, planting cassava, soaking it in water and preparing ‘fufu’ and washing it and sending it to the market.

Youths of our time would go to families to offer services of making heaps for yam. That was how we did communal efforts to help our parents. I continued that way until I became sick. The East-Central State had been split and we had Imo State and we heard the news that my parents had moved to Owerri. I was so sick that I had to trace where they were and I got them at Owerri Police Barracks. My father’s accommodation was a ‘bacha’ (room and parlour). So, with all my siblings we were living there.

From there, I got into scouting; from scouting, I became troop leader. I provided leadership in the scout and then, all commissioners’ children, I was trying to bring discipline because they were lazing away. They allowed their parents pay for gardeners. The parents would say “You’re always helping our children, what do you need?” I would tell them to buy us scissors to cut the grass to maintain cleanliness of the compound. So, the parents so much loved me.

At that time I also fried groundnuts that my mother would sell, with other articles like biscuit and soft drink and banana at the High Court, and those children when they would come in the evening in the barracks area where we lived in a bacha, you would see up to seven, eight cars, all commissioners’ children whose fathers had attached them to me. So, if I was cutting the firewood, or any other job, you would see them helping me doing my job while learning. That’s what scouting is all about. That brought discipline into their lives and that changed their concept of life because we worked together.

What about your education, Sir?

It’s a kind of self-made education and I thank God Almighty who saw me through. You’ll be very surprised, the same way I had a disjointed economic background, the same way, was my education.

Immediately after the war in Enugu, my father didn’t go to school; he was a tailor and police people didn’t take him more than a tailor. So, at a point, he was transferred to general duty and I was barely in Class III. My father would be waiting for a certain man to help him write his diaries and report. I saw him in pains, while soliloquizing, saying “One should not even allow one’s enemy not to have education…”

So, when the man would eventually come around, I would wait to know what the man wrote for my dad. So, from Class III, I started writing for my father on his police report sheets, and my father stopped bringing the man who caused him pains.

After a while, I had no option but to go back to Owerri, and I went to a commercial school because that was what was available to manage and I did all the courses – typing, shorthand, book keeping and statistics. I finished classes I and II. I was about going to the final class when I went to Enugu on holidays to see one of our big brothers who was a big tailor. From there, I got to know that all my mates that I used to beat in school were in CIC (City of Immanuel Conception). So, when they asked me, I said I was also in CIC branch in Owerri (my own was City Institute of Commerce). So, the young boys thought I was really in CIC, but inside me, I lied! I came back and decided to go back to secondary school, and started all over again. By the time I finished, they seized our results – another inhibition! I wrote GCE and used the result to enter School of Accountancy. I tried; I had Ordinary National Diploma (OND). And then, I also had Advanced Level. I gathered all my papers and entered into ACCA as accountant trainee and Accountant Technician of London, and I started writing foreign examinations from Nigeria.

Your career must be a bit balanced.

I worked in different capacities at various times. With my qualifications in accounting, I started managing, sending applications as accountant trainee. At the end of the day, I landed a job commencing from 9th December, 1985. I continued with that job until I was transferred when we completed Abia State University. Then, we started Imo Airport and then finished all the structures and waiting for money to deepen the runway light and about N32m was required from the state governor. So, by the time I was in Imo Airport, I was transferred to Abuja as Area Manager. And then, I continued with that International Industrial Construction. We built Ita Osin Market, Abeokuta and Gateway Hotel, Ota, in Ogun State; NTA Alausa, Lagos.

Later, I worked for Dizengoff. I was doing extremely well. I lost N12m in Port Harcourt in my personal project when I started my own company at 26. My partner cornered my money and attempted to take my life, but God gave me life and they took my project. Then I wrote a petition to Schlumberger’s foreign office, the guy involved got sacked for colluding with others to take my money from me. I lost the N12m and moved to Dizengoff, became divisional coordinator and later general manager and started opening branches in West Africa and then came Victoria Garden City. There was another World Bank project. I took a leave for one month because I did not go on leave for the few years I had been there.

I came back and did a World Bank project for 20 federal universities and their laboratories and studied and taught them how to use the equipment. So, that gave me another sense that I could be an engineer because I had learnt electrical fittings, I had done land survey, did tailoring, carpentry and welding. With all those skills, it was easy for me to adapt to any scenario and make ends meet. So, with my exploit in VGC, Federal Government and the World Bank projects, I used the opportunity effectively and then continued. By 1998 when General Sani Abacha died, there was nothing anybody could do; it was an act of God. I gathered myself again and continued with National Planning and UNDP to provide the much-needed downstream sector approach. So, that led me into producing 42 training modules for 42 skills, which we used after the NEEDS assessment in the 774 local government areas. UNDP gave us money to set it up. We succeeded with 500 and later President Olusegun Obasanjo identified 47 restive areas.

In Dizengoff, I felt that apart from having my ACCA Part II, I was half-educated. So, I decided to go back to school. I took all my papers and got into Enugu State University of Technology and got my B. Sc. By 1999, I left for overseas to do my master’s and then did my Ph.D. So, by the time I finished, I started consulting for the Federal Government formations in all sectors of Nigeria.

That is quite a journey…

Yes, really. President Obasanjo adopted me and my brain. So, that’s how he called me to serve Nigeria, working with him directly. Like I said, half education is a terrible thing. By the time I laboured to Enugu to continue schooling, nobody knew that I was closer to anything. They thought I was just a young boy looking for education. I was already married at 23 with kids, yet I wanted education. So when I started working with Obasanjo, I was writing and looking for a research to make Nigeria great. That was how I provided my services and I made a lot of landmarks in the Nigerian system. One of the gains of Obasanjo’s government got derailed, because in every reformation, you must try to use it for a period of four years. Anything below four years, your successor would derail the programme. That was why everything that was used to make Nigeria stable got derailed because they only tried it for two years and somebody else came in.

So as an advocate of third term in Nigerian politics, if Nigerians understood it then, they should have allowed Obasanjo to do the reformation for four years. Then, everybody would know it as a norm. Since he left, is there anything that has not received battering? And we got it wrong eventually!

When I was done with schooling, I wanted to keep exercising myself. So I became a lecturer in Abia State University as a senior lecturer; I taught there for four years and became deputy director, Entrepreneurship. You can imagine because my Ph.D was majorly in Entrepreneurship; that gave me an added impetus because in that area, I want to be part of what makes 99% of the populace busy – small business. So, I am a professor of Entrepreneurship. Don’t forget that phrase: ‘Don’t let your enemy not have education.’ Do everything for your enemy to be educated because if not, you are living in a big mess. My father is alive today to see that the education he never had, we are pioneering, making sure our friends and enemies get education. You can abandon whatever you are doing at any stage to acquire education and sharpen yourself. When you have education, your horizon changes, your perception changes, the way you view another person changes. So, books take you away from primitive thinking and then bring you back to normal life, so that you can reason among equals.

Has your background influenced your disposition to life?

What I normally do is turn my disadvantaged position to strength. I don’t recognise egocentricity at all; not for me, not for anybody. I recognise normal life because all we have is given to us by God. So, I try to be a free child of God who lives a normal life that has no encumbrances because all we have, the One that gives watches.

What about your love life?

I got married at 23 and I have five kids from my first wife before I got divorced, though she died after six years. I remarried, and I have six kids.

It’s been a nice outing being loved and loving somebody. The products are all doing well. I cherish people around me. I like people who work hard. I like people who identify goals to make another person great. And people that love God are my people.

How do you find time for the family in view of your tight schedule?

Well, those things were done when I was young. God gave me marriage at 23 when I was still working. Then, there was no major financial resource. I went into the market, baked cakes for their birthdays; I cooked in my house on their birthdays. So, I had all the time in the world. They are now mature and living well. So, I am now donated to the world, to make other people better.

How do you relax?

I love reggae and I sing. I still teach in my university and I still teach my students that you can be multi-talented and do whatever you can do to promote human existence. We are zero before God Almighty and our joy is to keep on being loyal, not only to Almighty God, but also to human beings.

How do you relate with your childhood friends and do you still see them?

Oh! I do, anywhere I go. I still go to our street; I trace most of them to their various homes. I do keep in touch, I can’t stop. Some of my secondary school mates here in Owerri, I see them. I also know my primary school mates there. Some are in the USA. So, I have my touch with everybody.

How do you feel if you see some of your mates living in poverty?

In this journey of life, there are things you cannot question. But the good thing is that once you are positioned by God, it is not just for you alone. He didn’t give it to you alone, but because of other people. So, it’s best to harmonise the haves and the have-nots so that people will have hope and faith in God. It is not easy to live in an environment of poverty. I don’t want people to go back to where we were coming from; that’s why I normally watch and observe and I don’t want to carry myself beyond myself. When somebody is down-to-earth, I always want to help.

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