You just emerged as president, Rotary club Ibadan Jericho Metro, what are your plans for the club and how do you intend to carry out these plans?
Every president of Rotary International have their goals, programmes which the district must key into it. That does not mean we can’t have our own local programmes that we can implement during the course of the year but it must not be out of Rotary and must be within the Rotary core values otherwise it won’t be recognised as a Rotary work.
Our long range goal as a club is to have contributed a minimum of $100,000 to Rotary Foundation. Last Rotary year, about 11 people contributed $1,000 each to Rotary Foundation. We have plans of making our club a polaris fellow club where every individual must have contributed at least $1,000 each to Rotarys foundation.
And also membership, we hope that at the end of the Rotary year, we would have had a net range of 15 new members.
When I came in as the president, our member strength was 50 and right now, we have inducted five new members so we have 10 more to go .
What are the challenges you foresee before you came onboard as the president and how do you intend to overcome these challenges?
Rotary is a well organised humanitarian organisation where we have a very good succession plan that all other organisation, even Nigeria should follow. We already have a president who will take over from me.
In December 2020, we will be having another election to have president nominees to take over from the president who have not even taken over from me. These nominees are given the opportunity to learn from the current president.
There are always challenges when you work with people and as a Rotary president; you have to be very patient. I see those challenges as what would make me a better person.
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Do you get any funds from the international body?
We have some projects we want to execute for the Rotary year, some of the projects are implementation in five Rotary community as a community service project. We are also looking at having an international community project which is a project that will attract a lot of money.
We can access either the district ground or global ground. If it is just the local community projects which our club can accommodate, we don’t need to disturb them for that because most of the money we are contributing is actually meant for project.
We have to write to Rotary International to tell them what we want to do. Rotarians access a global ground through Rotary Foundation to do projects especially any big projects that will be seen as an international project .
Recently, there was a report claiming Rotary spent $276m to kick out polio in Nigeria, where was the fund gotten from?
There are a lot of things that make Rotary International different from all other humanitarian organisations, this is only the humanitarian organisation that has a member status at the United Nations. As I have said, at our local clubs, every member contributes every month, annually.
Have you embarked on any project since you emerged as the president?
Yes, when I came onboard as a president, the first thing we dealt with was COVID-19. We have done some programmes to create more awareness and educate people on the preventive measures.
We also donated facemasks to organisations, modern hand washing equipment, created jingles to educate people more on the pandemic.
We also donated books to media houses and schools to celebrate world literacy day.
What legacy would you like to leave behind after your tenure?
I will like to take the Rotary Club to a greater heights, sustain the standards I met and in terms of project, I want to embark on meaningful projects that will affect the lives of the less privileged positively.
Also, I am hoping to grow our membership strength to make our club from 55 members to a mega-club, a club that has up to 100 members.
I will also put more efforts on leadership development and trainings to help members know their roles, functions and responsibilities. Before the end of my tenure, my club will be a full Polaris club which means every member must have contributed $1000 to Rotary Foundation.
and then