Opinion
PROF. Olusegun Oludapo Sogbesan, the founder of Onitsha Business School, arrived in Onitsha in 1991 as a National Youth Corps Member from Osun State.
Before he left Osun State, his parents and relatives were worried about the so-called hostility of the Igbo living in the east to strangers and whether their son would be able to survive and thrive in such a hostile environment.
They couldn’t wait for the one-year compulsory national service to be over so their precious would come back to Osun State.
Expectedly, young Olusegun arrived in Anambra State with the mindset and skepticism that Igbo were hostile to non-Igbo.
However, his experience as a Youth Corps Member in Adazi Ani, Anaocha Local Government Area of Anambra State, was a different thing, different from what he was told before he arrived: he experienced a tribe welcoming to strangers and whose people go out of their way to make a stranger in their land feel at home and very comfortable.
With that mindset, he wrote a letter to his folks back home saying that his experience here was different from what they had told him, and that he actually loved it here.
It was during that period of his National Youth Service that Olusegun saw the need to have a business school in Onitsha.
But before then, Olusegun decided to go back to school. He was to obtain his Master’s degree and first PhD from the Federal University of Technology (FUTO) Owerri and later a second PhD from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka. He capped his academic effort with a third PhD from a UK university.
The Igbo are renowned all over the world for their trading prowess and ingenuity. However, some of their business models and ingenuity come from a place of native intelligence and brawn, not knowledge.
Onitsha appears to be the epic centre and the poster boy of Igbo business drive and the right place for this school to be sited.
That was where and how the dream Onitsha business school was born.
After his mandatory one-year service, Segun stayed back to refine his idea and to see how to harness it to see what comes to reality.
He passed out in 1992 but stayed back in Anambra owing to the fact that he wanted to empower the traders with the right information based on the gaps he identified from his many interactions with them.
Thus, he developed an academic program tailored towards business that provides a young Igbo apprentice that has completed Imu-Afia training with choices.
Prof. Segun believed that with the right exposure, information and training, these traders will live up to their highest potentials. Consequently, he established the Onitsha Business School, the first business school in Anambra.
The goal of this school was basically to empower traders with the right skills and tools for the 21st century. It should be emphasised that Prof. Olusegun Sogbesan’s Onitsha Business School has been a commercial success ever since it was founded by Segun
Most of the students who patronise Segun are Onitsha traders who are desperate to move to the next level.
Prof. Olusegun has lived in Anambra for 28 years; he has become more or less an indigene (he is married to an Umuoji woman), speaks not just Igbo but also many Igbo dialects. Nobody – neither individuals nor institutions – has discriminated against him because his name is Segun (the point must also be made that in March this year, the Anambra Governor, Professor Chukwuma Soludo appointed an Osun State indigene, one Bayo Ojeyinka, as a permanent secretary in the State Civil Service).
By virtue of being living and doing business in the South East, Segun owns a couple of properties in the zone by virtue of the school that he runs.
It may also be interesting for readers to note that the man who owns the largest shopping plaza per square-meter in the famous Onitsha Main Market is neither Emeka Offor nor Innoson but an Alhaji from Kano.
As a matter of fact, there is a thriving Yoruba business community in Onitsha. The Asoke section in the Main Market is probably as big as the Arena market in the famous Oshodi in Oshodi/Isolo Local Government of Lagos State. Add to that the fact that many of the big-time tailors in Onitsha are second to third-generation Yoruba whose parents returned to their base in Onitsha after the Civil War to continue plying their trade.
No property seller in Anambra or any other part of the South Eastfor that matter would stop selling to anyone, especially not to Olusegun, on account of his Yoruba origins.
It may interest readers to know again that the Shoprite Franchise in Enugu, built on a prime property in Eastern Nigeria’s former capital, is owned by a Yoruba and that one of the biggest hotels in the city on Okpara Avenue, the city’s ‘Main Street’, is owned by a Bini.
That is to say that Prof. Olusegun Oludapo Sogbesan is not an outlier: there are many Segun’s scattered all over the South East who are thriving and who are property owners as well.
When educated bigots like Reuben Abati, from whom much better is expected because of his level of exposure and education, wake up to start regurgitating stereotypes about Igbo, it makes one wonder what such high level of education and education actually amounts to, in the end.
You wonder what is going on, but history and examples have shown again and again that the Igbo are unfairly targeted by bigots like Reuben Abati (well, did the Nobel Laureate not also expose his own limited horizon with the anti-Igbo hogwash about Peter Obi?), they are certainly not what the Reuben Abatis of this world portray them to be.
We are a welcoming and inclusive society, as showing love to strangers is rooted in our DNA and who we are.
And this includes selling properties to anyone who indicates interest in buying them, regardless of where the person comes from or the language the prospective buyer speaks.
Culled from Daily Query
24th November, 2024.
C.E.
Tags: PROF. Olusegun Oludapo Sogbesan
