Fiftyfaces Focus Nigerian and Ghanaian Voices Podcast

Uche Orji is CEO of the Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority, based in Abuja, Nigeria. A native of Nigeria, he has had over 20 years experience in various financial roles including semiconductor analyst in Europe and the US, before returning to Nigeria just over 8 years ago. He also holds a number of Board roles.

Our conversation starts with Uche's early career in investment banking and particularly semiconductor research. We hear about his swift rise to prominence in this area, and his global vantage point in this dynamic industry. We then move to what motivated his move home to Nigeria when he answered the call to take on a role at the Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority. This was a huge move - both in terms of responsibility and life direction but it was something he felt had immense sense of purpose and he committed to giving it all of his energy.

We discuss what is at the forefront of his mind in his current role - from portfolio diversification to investing locally in the emerging technology sector across all of Africa. We discuss some misperceptions that abound about investor interest in Africa and why these misperceptions persist.

Finally we reflect on people and organizations that have been influential and inspirational for Uche over his career so far. It is an enlightening conversation.

This podcast series is brought to you with the kind support of:

Romco Metals, producers of truly green aluminium, copper, and other non-ferrous metals from the African continent, dedicated to decarbonising supply chains across the globe by recycling our way to a sustainable future. Romco: Invest, Reduce, & Grow; and

Mbuyu Capital Partners, an investment company focusing exclusively on Africa, managing portfolios of funds and direct investments for institutional clients and impact investors.

Arthur Olunwa is an investment professional based in Chicago, whom I got to know when he worked as a senior fixed income allocator at a large corporate pension plan there. Prior to this he spent time in fixed income risk management as well as a portfolio manager in a multi-asset team. He sits on the advisory committee of the CFA Society of Chicago and is the Chairperson of the Chicago Investment Group as well as a Partner and Mentor of Youth Guidance.

Our conversation traces Arthur's career journey from Nigeria, through the United Kingdom and on to US, and discusses his experience in moving through different disciplines to his investment role. Arthur shares why he believes persistence is essential to developing a network, and why just "making the call" and going the extra mile to show a commitment to an opportunity pays dividends.

This podcast series is brought to you with the kind support of:

Romco Metals, producers of truly green aluminium, copper, and other non-ferrous metals from the African continent, dedicated to decarbonising supply chains across the globe by recycling our way to a sustainable future. Romco: Invest, Reduce, & Grow; and

Mbuyu Capital Partners, an investment company focusing exclusively on Africa, managing portfolios of funds and direct investments for institutional clients and impact investors.

Bridget Uku is Group Manager Treasury & Investments at a UK local authority, where she has spent over 14 years, and she previously worked as Investments and Insurance Finance Manager at the Greater London Authority. She is frequent participant on the local government conference circuit, which is where we met.

We talk about Bridget's upbringing in Nigeria, and her time at boarding school in the UK with her sisters and the cultural shift that that involved. We then move to how she overcame her aversion to maths to embrace a role that involved quite a lot of numbers - and discuss how having a family increased her drive to advance through her career and pursue promotions.

Finally, we look back to the family and other industry figures that inspired her and her approach to taking on new challenges and reach assignments.

This podcast series is brought to you with the kind support of:

Romco Metals, producers of truly green aluminium, copper, and other non-ferrous metals from the African continent, dedicated to decarbonising supply chains across the globe by recycling our way to a sustainable future. Romco: Invest, Reduce, & Grow; and

Mbuyu Capital Partners, an investment company focusing exclusively on Africa, managing portfolios of funds and direct investments for institutional clients and impact investors.

Yele Aluko is Chief Medical Officer at EY, a role he has held for close to 4 years.

He is Co-Chair, Health Equity Advisory, at the international Well Building Institute, an Advisory Board Member at the Children’s National Hospital and a Board Member at the Wake Forest University School of Business.

He has worked as a Cardiologist in hospital settings for over 30 years. Yele was born in Nigeria and we start with when he first realized his calling to be a doctor.

We trace his journey to the US and how at the beginning he went through a difficult integration into life there - with little social capital locally and few relationships.

We move to his journey to cardiology and his experience in hospital settings, and ultimately to what led him to move away from bedside medicine into matters of medical policy. True to the mission of this podcast series we examine the issue of diversity in medicine, and Yele discusses the concepts of "missing persons" in medicine - the gap in representation of people of color at every level of medicine and the trickle down effects that this causes in terms of access to health care, trust in medical professionals and healthcare equity.

We discuss initiatives to eliminate bias, and whether they work, and why they often lack sufficient "buy in".

This podcast series is brought to you with the kind support of:

Romco Metals, producers of truly green aluminium, copper, and other non-ferrous metals from the African continent, dedicated to decarbonising supply chains across the globe by recycling our way to a sustainable future. Romco: Invest, Reduce, & Grow; and

Mbuyu Capital Partners, an investment company focusing exclusively on Africa, managing portfolios of funds and direct investments for institutional clients and impact investors.

Toyin Oluwole's last role was as a Senior Strategy Manager with Royal London. She previously worked in a range of financial and marketing roles at Standard Life and Moody Monday. She recently left Scotland and  returned to her home country of Nigeria, and it was a moving Linked In post that she wrote that led me to her.

Our conversation starts with Toyin's upbringing in Nigeria and what led her to university and the first part of her career in the UK.  She describes how she settled there and eventually made Scotland her home.  We talk about graduating with an engineering degree into a bleak job market and how she stumbled upon a career in finance and investing almost by accident.  We discuss the ups and downs of a career in finance, the importance of seizing opportunities and the need to be flexible and adaptable as the industry's opportunities ebb and flow.

Moving then to what prompted her move back to Nigeria just this summer, we learn of the confluence of professional and personal opportunities that enabled it and Toyin's initial impressions of returning to Nigeria as a professional and her assessment of the opportunities in store. We take a short detour into another one of Toyin's passions - interior design - what sparked that and how it may be more and more relevant to how we build our workplaces going forward.

Finally we turn to what inspires her - to a discussion of her parents and other key people (including many women) who have inspired her in the workplace.  We refer to a creed, which is "whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might", which captures Toyin's commitment to doing her best at whatever she finds in front of her.  It is an uplifting and life-affirming message.

This podcast series is brought to you with the kind support of:

Romco Metals, producers of truly green aluminium, copper, and other non-ferrous metals from the African continent, dedicated to decarbonising supply chains across the globe by recycling our way to a sustainable future. Romco: Invest, Reduce, & Grow; and

Mbuyu Capital Partners, an investment company focusing exclusively on Africa, managing portfolios of funds and direct investments for institutional clients and impact investors.

Raymond Onovwigun is founder and CEO at Romco Group, which trades and processes non-ferrous metal. Founded in 2015, it now employs over 180 people in Nigeria, over 50 in Ghana, and another 15 in the UK and is on track to have revenues of £40m by the end of this year. Ray has a fascinating journey that has taken him from South London, to founding a successful plumbing business while still at university to his current quest to help to close the sustainability gap in Africa.

Our conversation starts with his Nigerian heritage, how he learned the meaning of hard work through following his mother around in her cleaning business in London, what interested in him in plumbing and how he perceived a business opportunity.  This was his gateway into waste management as he saw the massive amount of waste in the business and that there were means to solve this problem sustainably.

He saw the opportunity to recycle scrap metal in Nigeria on a trip there and his business started on a small patch of land behind a gas station belonging to his aunt.  The start was slow, and we hear how plans were briefly derailed by a near fatal bout of typhoid and malaria.  This setback motivated him to raise capital in London in order to properly build out the business, which he did starting from that small patch of land and ultimately expanding it.

We start about how he built this business through winning the trust and support of backers who saw his drive and ultimately who identified with the vision statement.  We talk about the importance of having a vision or a charter and set of values that is an anchor as to how a business will be run, and the value system which includes integrity, efficiency, boldness and sustainability.

We move to discuss Africa and why Raymond believes that is it the biggest gap in sustainability infrastructure, and the huge potential that the continent holds in terms recycling. We speak about the lack of capital flowing to African ventures, and how perceptions of the investment opportunity can get distorted.

We ultimately talk about why this business marries each of the E the S and the G - the environmental impact of a sustainable recycling business, with the Social impact of the employment created and the business provided to a generation of African entrepreneurs and the Governance impact of a business that is values driven.

This podcast series is brought to you with the kind support of:

Romco Metals, producers of truly green aluminium, copper, and other non-ferrous metals from the African continent, dedicated to decarbonising supply chains across the globe by recycling our way to a sustainable future. Romco: Invest, Reduce, & Grow; and

Mbuyu Capital Partners, an investment company focusing exclusively on Africa, managing portfolios of funds and direct investments for institutional clients and impact investors.

Obi Ozor is Founder of Kobo360, a privately owned, pan-African technology company disrupting the African third-party logistics industry.  Kobo360 was named one of the Top 100 SMEs in Africa in 2018 by Business Day and Disruptor of the Year at the Africa CEO Forum on 2019.  The company uses big data and agile technology to reduce friction and scale efficiency in the African logistics ecosystem. He previously held positions at Uber, JP Morgan and Bezmo Global, an international, socially-minded investment firm focused on the African continent.

In this discussion we trace Obi's journey from investment banking to Uber, and ultimately what led him to develop the genesis of Kobo360, which seeks to Brin data and technology to innovate in the African third-party logistics industry.  We talk about the problem Obi identified that needed to be solved, and how he devised a business model to do that.

The challenges in establishing a business in Nigeria were enormous - from challenges in recruiting talent, to navigating regulation to implementing technology to setbacks due to Covid, which turned out to have a silver linking in the push it gave to digitization. Starting a business in a challenging environment also enabled Kobo360 and its founding team to build resilience, to anticipate challenges and to fortify itself for expansion into other regions.

Obi is a student of business theory and shares his love of constant, lifelong learning as well as his brief that is is not strategy but implementation where leaders should focus - strategy alone not being executable. There is more information about Kobo360 on the following link:

https://www.kobo360.com/NG/en/

This podcast series is brought to you with the kind support of:

Romco Metals, producers of truly green aluminium, copper, and other non-ferrous metals from the African continent, dedicated to decarbonising supply chains across the globe by recycling our way to a sustainable future. Romco: Invest, Reduce, & Grow; and

Mbuyu Capital Partners, an investment company focusing exclusively on Africa, managing portfolios of funds and direct investments for institutional clients and impact investors.

Eric Idiahi is co-founder and a partner of Verod Capital, a private equity firm based in Lagos, which he founded in 2008. He is Chairman of the Board of Tangerine Africa as well as Eleva Group and holds a number of Non Executive Director positions. He was previously a Managing Parter of FountainHead Media Group as well as a Financial Derivatives Company. 

Our conversation traces Eric's move to the US where he completed his high school and university education and what drove his decision to move back to Nigeria. This was an exciting time, and we look at some of the surprising aspects of re-integration - and how the fact that he wasn't married initially was relevant.

We chart the investment landscape in Nigeria, where the opportunity lay then (in 2005) and how it evolved, and how connections and social capital are important in different ways. He speaks about the explosion of technology investment opportunities in Africa and the enormous potential that leapfrogging traditional infrastructure has enabled. We also discuss how ESG considerations can now be considered at the outset of investments.

As the co-founder of a Nigeria-based private equity firm, Eric has "at the coalface" experience in raising capital and explaining the African investment opportunity to outside investors.  This picture has evolved too and our relatively efficient and brief conversation is packed with nuance and insight.

This podcast series is brought to you with the kind support of:

Romco Metals, producers of truly green aluminium, copper, and other non-ferrous metals from the African continent, dedicated to decarbonising supply chains across the globe by recycling our way to a sustainable future. Romco: Invest, Reduce, & Grow; and

Mbuyu Capital Partners, an investment company focusing exclusively on Africa, managing portfolios of funds and direct investments for institutional clients and impact investors.

Since we launched the Fiftyfaces Podcast in August 2020 some of our most popular episodes were those featuring guests from the Nigerian diaspora and in this first Fiftyfaces Focus Nigerian Voices podcast series we have assembled a set of ten interviews of different professionals each with fascinating stories of accomplishments and career paths. Also, watch this space with a follow-up 4 part Ghanaian voices series to continue our West African focus immediately after this one.  In this trailer hear from each of our 10 guests about our recurring themes of immigration, adjustment, integration, re-integration upon the return home and what opportunities Nigeria holds in terms of investment and business. We hear from Yele Aluko about his isolation amid the foreignness of US winters, but how he channeled his energy into building a leading cardiology practice and is now a prominent advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion in medicine.  We hear from Shalom Lloyd, founder of eMQT and Naturally Tribal,about her own roots in pharmacy, and how she now runs not one but two businesses – one focused on clinical trials in Africa and the other a cosmetics business that creates significant impact and employment in the Kingdom of Esan.  Impact is also core to Raymond Onovwigun’s RomCom, which has created over 300 jobs across Nigeria and Ghana through the recycling of scrap metal.  Hear why he believes that Africa is an essential missing link in building the global sustainability infrastructure and why “procrastination is the killer of all dreams”. Eric Idiahi of Verod Capital shares his success story of starting an investment firm, and his belief in the opportunity that Africa and Nigeria hold particularly with respect to technology.  Obi Ozor of Kobo360 has the same conviction, and, while he is realistic about the challenges of setting up a company in Nigeria, he believes that it is the ultimate proving ground – his own version of “if you can make it there you can make it anywhere.”  Uche Orji shares his vantage point from the helm of the Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority about not just the opportunity for tech in Africa but also for ESG to be integrated from the outset in new investments. Toyin Alalade is another returnee to Lagos, after building her career in England and then Scotland, and she shares what motivated her to return and the opportunity that she sees. Bridget Uku took the inspiration of her parents to build a career in the UK where she now holds a role as an allocator of a public pension fund.  Arthur Olunwa, one of our original Nigerian voices from the very earliest Fiftyfaces Podcast shares the secrets of his success, never accepting failure and not being daunted by a “no” when networking.  Andrew Oseyami advises us not to focus on “No” but to focus on “earning your yes”, which he has done time and time career, through a career pivot from trading to the creation of a Netflix series “Meet the Adebanjos”. 

 We hope you enjoy these exhilerating stories of struggle, resilience and triumph that capture both the energy of Nigeria and its hustler spirit as well as its values, wisdom and charm.  The guests in the first series of the Nigerian voices special are: Toyin Alalade whose last role was as a Senior Strategy Manager with Royal London. She previously worked in a range of financial roles at Standard Life and Moody Monday. She recently left Scotland returned to her home country of Nigeria, and it was a moving Linked In post that she wrote there that led me to her.

Yele Aluko, who is Chief Medical Officer at EY, a role he has held for close to 4 years.  He is Co-Chair, Health Equity Advisory, at the international Well Building Institute, an Advisory Board Member at the Children’s National Hospital and a Board Member at the Wake Forest University School of Business.  He has worked as a cardiologist in hospital settings for over 30 years. 

Eric Idiahi who is Co-founder and a Partner of Verod Capital based in Lagos, which he founded in 2008. He is Chairman of the Board of Tangerine Africa as well as Eleva Group and holds a number of Non Executive Director positions/. He was previously a Managing Parter of FountainHead Media Group as well as a Financial Derivatives Company.

Shalom Lloyd, who after a career of over 20 years in the pharmaceutical industry has gone on to found two businesses - she is the founder of Naturally Tribal skincare, a beauty line based on traditional remedies including shea butter, which she developed initially to cure her son’s eczema. She is also the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of eMQT, described as “the Bridge between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Africa” which facilitates clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies in Africa. She has been a keynote speaker on the topic of innovation and was a fellow of the Start-Up Leadership Program in London until 2020.

Arthur Olunwa, whom I got to know when he worked as a senior fixed income allocator at a large corporate pension plan based in Chicago.  Prior to this he spent time in fixed income risk management as well as a portfolio manager in a multi-asset team. He sits on the advisory committee of the CFA Society of Committee and the Chairperson of the Chicago Investment Group as well as a Partner and Mentor of Youth Guidance.

Raymond Onovwigun, who is founder and CEO at Romco Group, which trades and processes non-ferrous metal. Founded in 2015, it now employs more than 180 people in Nigeria, 50 in Ghana, and another 15 in the UK and is on track to have revenues of £40m by the end of this year. Raymond has a fascinating journey that has taken him from South London, to founding a successful plumbing business while still at university to his current quest to help to close the sustainability gap in Africa.

Uche Orji who is CEO of the Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority, based in Abuja.  A native of Nigeria, he has had over 20 years experience in various financial roles including semiconductor analyst in Europe and the US, before returning to Nigeria just over 8 years ago. He also holds a number of Board roles.  

Andrew Oseyami who is a specialist diversity recruiter at Rare Recruitment and the creator of the Netflix TV show Meet the Abebanjos.  He started his career as a city trader and then took the plunge into starting a TV production company, MTA productions – although, as he claims he did not “know anything about TV”. He is the author of the book “How my Disastrous Teenage Love Life Will Get You Your Dream Job”.

Obi Ozor who is Founder of Kobo360, a privately owned, pan-African technology company disrupting the African third-party logistics industry. The company uses big data and agile technology to reduce friction and scale efficiency in the African logistics ecosystem. He previously held positions at Uber, JP Morgan and Bezmo Global, an international, socially-minded investment firm focused on the African continent.

Bridget Uku, who is Group Manager Treasury & Investments at the UK local authority, where she has spent over 14 years, and she previously worked as Investments and Insurance Finance Manager at the Greater London Authority.  She is frequent participant on the local government conference circuit, which is where we met

This podcast series is brought to you with the kind support of:

Romco Metals, producers of truly green aluminium, copper, and other non-ferrous metals from the African continent, dedicated to decarbonising supply chains across the globe by recycling our way to a sustainable future. Romco: Invest, Reduce, & Grow; and

Mbuyu Capital Partners, an investment company focusing exclusively on Africa, managing portfolios of funds and direct investments for institutional clients and impact investors.