Patriarchal Notions Made Me Work Harder to Prove Women Are Also Capable
Mrs. Funmi Babington-Ashaye is a preeminent figure in insurance. Judged either as a talented practitioner or as a prodigious achiever, she is one of the insurance industry’s greatest successes. Early in life, Babington-Ashaye, chic and blasé, made it to t
It’s 2pm on a hot Monday afternoon in Lagos. Inside the plush Park View estate in Ikoyi, the wind is calm and gentle. But Mrs. Funmi Babington-Ashaye is working on a tight schedule. She has to give an interview and do her hair in preparation for a busy week. She’ll kill two birds with one stone by doing them both in one trip to the salon. Life in Lagos is in the fast lane.
The busy lifestyle and Lagos’ uniquely competitive route to success really typify the make-up of the former managing director and chief executive of Cornerstone Insurance Plc and NICON Insurance Plc.
“I find it difficult to cope with people that are not very smart, people who don’t do things quickly. You take your time, I don’t have that patience,” she says. “But with time and maturity, I have realised that people are not the same. I have realised that in a team, do need everybody. You need the slow worker – they’re more reliable – you need the sharp ones, you need everybody to make a success of whatever thing you are doing.”
Baby-faced and confident, BabingtonAshaye is willing to do almost anything for the sake of excellence. She is, “Very innovative,” and says, “I love to do things differently.”
She has an abiding desire to disprove negative notions about the feminine gender in Nigeria’s typically patriarchal socio-cultural setting. And this has been the spur that challenges her to do things better and aim for excellence.
“I’m sure you realise that before a woman can get to a particular level, she would do four, five times what a man can do,” she says. “I went through what I can call tribulations. Sometimes, there was this feeling, a woman cannot do it, and they would bring somebody from outside as your head. But with time they would realise the person is even worse. Those were the challenges that toughened me. When they say a woman cannot do it, you want to prove them wrong, that a woman can even do it better, and I was able to prove that.” accolades from players in the insurance industry for the feat of quickly reversing what looked like an irreversible descent into bankruptcy.
But, perhaps, her most significant achievement in that assignment was her ability to stick resolutely to professionalism throughout the job. Which is why she and Ibrahim have remained friends since the completion of the NICON turnaround.
“As we speak, Jimoh and I are good friends,” the first female managing director of a publicly quoted insurance company in Nigeria, states. “You hardly see an entrepreneur that was asked to step aside becoming friends with somebody that actually drove him away. It means he was able to see value when he came back, and nothing got missing. Thank God for that opportunity.”
But the celebrated insurance expert also has weird passions. Human beings are generally wont to have such, one way or the other. “I love to be alone, and sometimes I feel it is odd. Just be on my own and think, I enjoy it a lot. I can say it is odd, but it gives me the opportunity to think and do so many things.”
She says, “People feel that I’m very tough, but I have a different perspective about myself. I don’t see myself that way. I see myself as an introvert. If I find myself in a situation where I have to do something, I get it done.”
At the peak of her career, the renowned insurance expert hardly remembers anything, professionally, she would have loved to do, which she didn’t have the opportunity of doing. “It’s difficult to remember because God has been very good to me. I became managing director of one of the largest insurance companies, NICON Insurance, in my early 40s. I’ve been running my own company now for about 10 years and I’ve never looked back,” she says.
Babington-Ashaye began her career in 1987 at Royal Exchange Assurance Nigeria. She left in 1991 and joined Cornerstone Insurance Plc, which she recapitalised by about 80 per cent in roughly one year.
She is a Fellow of the Chartered Insurance Institute, UK; Fellow, Chartered Insurance Institute of Nigeria; Fellow, Chartered Insurance Brokers, and an alumnus of the Lagos Business School.
She compares insurance practice in Nigeria with what obtains in the Western world. “Over there,” she says, “it is well structured, and there is a lot of government support for insurance through