Pastor Dimgba Igwe was scheduled to deliver this keynote address on Igbere Economic  and Cultural Renaissance on the day he died.

It is not true that this remark is to be taken as the keynote address. I had reached a private understanding with the organiz­ers of this event that since we are blessed to have an array of highly respected and most eminently qualified speakers on the bill, I should not really interrupt the intellectual flow by presuming to deliver a keynote ad­dress. Consider these remarks more like the appetizer before the main course which will come both from the three eminent speakers we have today and the highly experienced discussants who should rightly be seen as repository of residual knowledge of Igbere, spanning different eras.

Since we are here to examine the subject of Igbere Economic and Cultural Renaissance, an attempt at a definition would not be out o f place. Let’s start with what is culture. There is a sense in which the word, “culture” strikes a dissonance, especially with the spiritually sensitive people and those at the frontiers of modernity. That is often when culture becomes a vehicle or a pretext to revisit or evoke aspects of our primordial past that are either better forgotten or no longer add value to our present realities.
Yet, culture, like our own shadows, is not something we can necessarily escape. It depends on how we look at it. There are many complicated definition of culture by scholars generally but I prefer the simplified version that says:
Culture is a way of life of a group of people—the behaviours, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next. (source: www.tamu.edu/ faculty/choudhury/culture.html )
Renaissance, on the other hand, is a French word that simply means re-birth. Renaissance in itself started as a cultural movement between the 14th and 17th century and over the period spread its tributaries into different facets of life in diverse nations—from economic to political, to humanism, to historicity, to art, to science, to religion (remember the Protestant Reformation), to Enlightenment, etc.
Put together, our topic today seems to be asking us to examine the re-birth of Igbere people’s economic and cultural life. If there is a re-birth, it is only because there was an existing economy and culture that needed renewal.
Of course, man is an economic animal. For as long as we are alive, we will act in ways that guarantee our economic survival. And we would do so within the context of our way of life—our culture. In that sense, the organizers were right in linking the economy of a people with their culture—their way of life.
Surely, you must have heard of the famous Japanese work ethics that is derived from their religious and philosophical traditions rooted in Shintoism. This tradition places so much premium on hard work and honour that if a Japanese makes a commitment and found he cannot keep his word, he would rather commit suicide. Yet, it is this economic and cultural mix that produced the stunning Japanese economic miracle that so outpaced American corporate competition that in the early 1980s, there was an outcry against the “Japanning of America” in the media.
We must also be familiar with the fact that American capitalism was built on the spirit of Protestant Ethics as argued by famous sociologist, Max Weber, in his classic work, Protestant Ethics and Spirit of Capitalism.
Perhaps, one good thing that came out of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China is that despite all the evils unleashed on those unfortunate to be the targets, it inspired confidence in the Chinese to believe in themselves and their products. That nearly 50-year down the line, China is now a global economic superpower second only to the United States economy is evidence that economic progress is not an accident but rather a strategic process based on careful planning.
The lesson from the above is simple: success is not accident. Even when you make allowance for occasional luck, you still need a strategy to sustain it. And strategy must leave a pattern, a discernible pattern. Any time you see a system working and producing result, look carefully: There is a strategy behind it. And, that in my view, is what strategy is all about—a deliberate, orchestrated plan or pattern of events, often driven by vision, that deliver consistent results on long term basis. Of course, I leave our distinguished speakers here to give you a more holistic definition of strategy beyond my rule-of-the thumb attempt here!
Somebody might say, but Igbere is not a nation like Japan, America or China whose economic and cultural renaissance you’ve briefly identified. And, my response is, really? Here is Africa’s global authority, Chinua Achebe’s take on the matter in his book, Home and Exile, his powerful collection of essays:
The Igbo nation in precolonial times was not quite like any nation most people are familiar with. It did not have the apparatus of centralized government but a conglomeration of hundreds of independent towns and villages each of which shared the running of its affairs among its menfolk and according to title, age, occupation, etc.; and its womenfolk who had domestic responsibilities, as well as the management of the scores of four-day and eight-day markets that bound the entire region and its neighbours in a network of daily exchange of goods and news, from far and near.
It is difficult to argue that Igbere represents a fundamental departure from the picture Achebe painted above. Indeed, much of Igboland, Igbere not exempted, is still ruled by such republican spirit which breeds acute individualism. As Cletus Ibeto told us in our forthcoming book, Nigeria’s Corporate Czars, such individualism is a double edged sword. On the one hand, it meant that the Igbo have the highest dispersal of wealth among the widest spectrum of people in Nigeria. You are likely to find the highest number of average millionaires in Igboland than you will find among other tribes in Nigeria—but please, note that such dispersal of wealth should not be mistaken for control of substantial percentage of national wealth. That honour probably goes to the Yoruba. Who still dominate the commanding heights of our economy. But on the other hand, the attitude is also destructive.
Ibeto explained:
In Igboland today, we have a problem. We don’t work together. That has destroyed us. Both the entrepreneurs and the ordinary people. We have a slogan which says, “Do you give me food? Who are you? We have a lot of champions among us. Among the Igbos, everybody is a champion in his own house. This kind of attitude will continue to destroy the Igbo man. It wasn’t there before. It came after the war. Before the war, we know ourselves, we bonded. Once an Igbo man comes to an office, he brings his brother .Today, it is not so. Rather, if you come into an office and speak Igbo, he won’t even look at you.
Here is a poser: Are we encountering these attributes articulated by Achebe and Ibeto among Igbere people? If so, that is perhaps, where to start the consideration of Igbere’s economic and cultural renaissance. For the situation presents us with both economic and cultural possibilities as well as obstacles that are largely attitudinal—a product of cultural orientation.
In considering Igbere’s economic and cultural renaissance, the apposite question should be: where do we start? Since I was born in the 50s, it seems easy for me to consider the pre-and post-Civil War economy of Igbere and from there project into the contemporary. The pre-Civil War economy of my experience was largely agrarian but with much of our city dwellers engaged in merely basic commercial ventures, largely retail trading. A few sprinkling of our people worked mostly teaching, clerical or administrative positions in the civil service with no deep involvement in the private sector.
These endeavors didn’t deliver huge material wealth, to be sure, but people met their basic needs. Those needs were not vast in the first place. The cultural expectation of success was not ostentatious as we have today, but more realistic. People lived mostly in yards, which meant that families lived in room or two rooms and shared common kitchen, toilets and bathroom. Somehow, they found high index of satisfaction in such lifestyle without feeling deprived. The more successful ones either built yards or, perhaps, even a storey building, and some others own a plot of land or two in the cities. At Igbere then, there were a sprinkling of brick and zink houses built by successful city dwellers. A person who attained these heights represented the epitome of success.
After the Civil War though, everybody started from ground zero. With the lesson of abandoned property edict and other huge loss assets in various parts of the country, Igbere people, like other Igbo now looked inward. Post-war economic recovery was gradual and the key indicators among the successful ones began with buying stereo players, CD 90 motorcycle followed by the popular CD 175, and so on.
A few decades later, an emergent nouveau riche class became noticeable, evidenced by state of the art luxury homes built in Igbere. But in Nigeria, like in many third world nations, development of any community is linked to tide of political power. In our case, Igbere was lucky to have produced three state governors, two of them governors of our state, in the persons of Cmdr Amadi Ikwechegh who governed the old Imo State comprising Abia, Imo and Ebonyi states, Wing Commander Ukaegbu who was a Military Administrator of Enugu State and then our own inimitable Dr. Orji Uzor Kalu who governed Abia State for eight years.
Both in infrastructural development, empowerment of individual and wealth creation, these powerful personalities had in no small measure impacted the overall economy of Igbere positively, ushering us from rural community to a fledgling urbanization. In some ways, Igbere has dwarfed our noisy neighbours who used to flaunt themselves as “small London” and the bastion of economic progress.
But urbanization of Igbere is coming with its own challenges. We’ve built magnificient houses in Igbere where we hardly spend more than two weeks in a year. Some economists may see this as a store of dormant assets wasting away. Coupled with that is that the rapid urbanization of our community is coming at another price: our rural village dwellers who are now confined in our ancestral homes, the ime ezis, are subjected to rapid economic dislocation as they lack the economic wherewithal to confront, least of all, survive the onslaught of modern economy where so many things are monetized, even for subsistence farmers who are merely eking a living. So for this segment of our society, cost of basic survival has become the new existential crisis. Once again, permit me to throw these as challenges to our eminent speakers here to guide us on the way out.
For me then, this conflict of imperatives of urban and rural lifestyle highlights the critical missing link in our economic development. It seems to me that while we have transformed Igbere into an urban setting with all the architectural masterpieces, we have not invested in direct wealth creation which can only come from establishment of industrial and commercial activities. In effect, we have an urban community without commensurate economic wealth-creation dynamics to sustain its status.
This then is where a master plan comes in. Having relatively transformed Igbere into an urbanized town, how do we usher in economic activities to sustain it? This is where we may be borrow a leaf from one of Africa’s most successfully urbanized communities, Nnewi, in Anambra State, a city that is home to more billionaires than any other community in Africa. How did they do it?
Chief O. N. Chukwu here once told me a story of how Nnewi leaders were so incensed by the negative attitude of Onitsha peole, 15-kilometres away from Nnewi, that they took a strategic decision to start developing and investing in their own market, Nkwo Nnewi, rather than Onitsha. This decision took place in the mid-70s.
I found the narrative so striking that in the last couple of years, I have decided to do further research for a book Mike Awoyinfa and I are working on. We’ve been interviewing some of the industrial kingpins of Nnewi to gain further insight. Many Nnewi-based spare parts dealers like Cletus Ibeto opened their shops in Nkwo Nnewi around the mid-70s.
In 1982, a Harvard educated engineer Gilbert Obiajulu Uzordike opened electrical wires and cable company, Cutix Plc, in Nnewi. He chose Nnewi to cite the company, despite the discouragement from many experts, because of two reasons. First, he has easy access to land and secondly, he discovered from his experience with foreign companies that any time a European had opportunity to establish international division of any multinational corporation, they always took it to their home town or region.
Around the same year, Ibeto set up Kings Palace Hotel, 60 room hotel plus 6 suites, and the success of the hotel opened the eyes of other investors that Nnewi is a profitable destination for hospitality industry. Ibeto followed the success of the hotel with other companies based in Nnewi: Odoh Holdings, a property company established in 1985; Ibeto Industries Limited, a photo laboratory processing plant set up in 1985; Union Autoparts Manufacturing Industry Limited, manufacturers of Union Battery and auto friction accessories set up in 1987; Union Recycling Plant that recycle used batteries to extract leads; Ibeto Petrochemicals Limited, set up in 1996 and a proposed five-star 250 room Ibeto Hotels set to be established by him in Nnewi.
But the pioneer’s honour goes to Chief James Edokwe who in 1966 set up an aluminium plant in Nnewi. According to a research work by three scholars, Professor Udunna Nwafor Orizu, Dr. Kate Omenugha and Dr. Eric Omazu, the sequence of Nnewi industrialization by its indigenes were as follows:
Centus International was established in 1983 to manufacture plastic auto accessories and batteries. That signaled the emergence of new industries in Nnewi. In 1984, Ibeto photo processing was established. Cutix Plc and Adswitch Plc (both quoted in the second-tier securities market of the Nigerian Stock Exchange) came in 1984 to manufacture Electric cables and Electric Switchgear respectively. Ebunso came up in 1985 for the design and manufacture of process equipment. S and M, a soap, toiletries, disinfectant manufacturer came up in 1986. 1987 saw the following: John White (fan belts), Uru (brake cables), Edison (brake pads, shoes and linings), Armak (Rice and maize processing), OCE filters (oil filters), Godwin-Kris (Rubber auto parts) and Ibeto (Batteries, accessories, brake pads, linings) and shoes and clutch fibres (1990). Dewaco (industrial moulds) was set up in 1989, while Ifebi Farms (poultry, etc) came up in 1991.
You will notice here that we have not mentioned any of the famous Nnewi transporters. Because that list stopped in 1991, it did not, for instance, include the fact that Nigeria’s first motor manufacturing (not assembly!) plant, Innoson Motors Manufacturing Company, owned by an Nnewi indigene, Innocent Chukwuma, is based in Nnewi.
In our interview with Chukwuma, he added a new dimension to the story when he mentioned the great mentoring role Ibeto has played in raising other billionaires in Nnewi. Ibeto is so comfortable in his skin that he does not want to be the only iroko in the forest; he actively wants to raise other Nnewi billionaires. According to Chukwuma, there is none of the successful Nnewi business who ran into financial problems and ran to Ibeto and does not get helped by him.
We discovered why. In 1990, Ibeto set up a microfinance bank in Nnewi called Ibeto Microfinance. It was the second microfinance bank in the country and now the oldest since the first microfinance bank based in Kaduna had since collapsed. He opened the account of his muti-billionaire naira manufacturing ventures in this bank, making it very liquid. The fact then is that any of the Nnewi business tycoons can access easy loans from this bank up to N500 million, a fact, which explains Innocent Chukwuma’s encomiums on Ibeto.
Today, Nnewi has the highest collection of billionaires in Africa but even among these billionaires, people like Ibeto, Chicason, Dozie, Cosmas Maduka still stand out as the first among equals.
In this Nnewi narrative, did you notice a pattern indicating a strategy? If you go back to my layman’s definition of strategy, you will notice that the Nnewi economic success was not an accident—it was a long-term strategy which involved both attitudinal change (culture) and deliberate investment decisions that are now yielding great economic dividend.
That, in my view, is what it takes to achieve economic and cultural renaissance either in Igbere or any society for that matter. Obviously, for Igbere to achieve economic and cultural renaissance, our people may need to develop a large heart that wants each other to succeed; we may need to cultivate the right business ethics that places high premium on integrity in the market place and ultimately, we may need to envision a long term industrialization strategy that delivers mutual benefits to all the stakeholders—the investors, the society and the people.

THE SPEECH HE NEVER DELIVERED