A Good Road

PGD must have been a spiritual person as he chose the name “Uzoma” for his first born, which means “a good road”. I often consider the motives behind his choice. Did he mean that he wanted his son to have a good path? Or perhaps to lay the path for those who were to come [so far, four more sons and plenty of grandchildren]?

Perhaps both.

What I can say on the subject is that I have certainly had an interesting journey on this road so far. I’ve had a great education, I’ve experienced many different cultures through travel and I’ve worked across a number of generations [including learning from and building alongside my own father]. In fact my exposure to so many different experiences has been an education in itself — far beyond traditional academia.

My own professional journey — the beginning of the road for me — was corporate banking. Learning the hard way. As I grew in experience and confidence, and saw how SMEs were being let down by Nigeria’s banking system, I was able to build new paths from the corporate banking road. I focused first on retail banking at Diamond Bank — taking banking to the people [virtually unheard of at that time] via Diamond Yello, which was groundbreaking at the time as it was the birth of the banking + telco partnership; harnessing the infrastructure a telco such as MTN for mobile banking services. Taking banking out of the banking halls into…