PASCAL DOZIE @80
Truth is I enjoy what I am doing. If you don’t enjoy what you are doing, then stop it. I always tell my staff, the day you think of going to work and your heart jumps, resign that job. You must have joy in whatever you are doing. Because what’s in this life
Happy birthday Sir. We are very impressed with how agile you look even at 80! What motivates you?
Well, you’ve answered the question you asked. What drives me is God. It is God who gives strength, who gives life therefore you take everything onboard, both the challenges and good times.
You are unarguably one of the most successful men in Nigeria What is your story?
I don’t know if I am one of the most successful men in Nigeria.
Nigeria is so big, we don’t have those statistics. But I wouldn’t say that God has not favoured me in a lot of places. I am blessed, both in terms of family, work and the energy he has given me to cope with the vicissitudes of life. Also in terms of difficulties. Some of God’s blessings come with difficulties, but it all ends well, provided you learn from those difficulties.
At the time you were growing your businesses, did you ever experience the fear of failure?
No, I have never feared for failure. When people talk about business, you talk about the ones that survive. There are also some businesses that survive and some that don’t survive, and that’s not even because they are not profitable. In those days, I used to run one of the very active economic consulting companies in the country. It was called African Development Consulting Group. It had various divisions. We did market research; we worked for food specialties, Nestle, Cadbury and
other multinationals. We were one of the companies that introduced media monitoring. For example, companies that advertised in THISDAY Newspapers and it wasn’t well presented, we had a division that monitored it and would then take it to the advertising agency and to make good of those advertisements. That was part of the market research. Then we also had the economic side of it that did the economic studies and all what nots. This was a thriving business. Actually, I would say it is the mother of Diamond bank. Once it was formed, it ran for some time but at the end of the day, it was sold off! Nobody remembers it. It was sold off to Capital Alliance. I also dabbled into transportation and in order to succeed with that, you have to face it full time. I thought of it as part of an investment but I didn’t manage it well. You have to be able to hand-hold everything. You have to be involved, but I didn’t have the time, because I was running my African Consulting Group. So, for me it was more or less like a hobby and the drivers dealt with me and I lost. We were into goods transportation. It just wasn’t my forte.
Can we talk about Diamond bank? Before the acquisition/merger, it was one of the fast-forward moving banks. What went wrong?
What went wrong? The merger was not because something went wrong. Diamond bank could still stand on its own. It started as a corporate, consumer and all of that. But right from the beginning, it was a bank that started out with automation, trying to automate everything with technology. Most of the technology in banks today emanated from Diamond bank – money transfers and debit cards. Then we decided to go into retail banking. Retail banking is a slow-growth in terms of revenue. We reached a stage in retail banking when, to getting sufficient funds to pay good dividends came in trickles, because you have so many customers. Diamond bank had about 13 million customers, the biggest number in the country.
But at a point in time in your growth, you will need a big balance sheet to continue the growth. We didn’t have that. So we needed a bank with a big balance sheet and a bank to go hand-in-hand with our retail banking. We needed a bank with corporate banking. Some of Diamond bank’s problems was some legacy loans developed into non-performing loans which, weighed down on the company, but not enough to kill it off. All Diamond bank required was funds to either revive these companies, or override by paying them off completely.
But we came to a point where we were not making sufficient amount of money to write such loans off. So, as a strategic move, we started looking for partners with mutual needs to merge with. And we found a perfect match with Access bank.
Before the merger, an investment consultant scanned the atmosphere for us. After studies, permutations, and combinations; we also looked at the cultures. It was a big study conducted by a company in London. The man who handled this project was the then CEO of Morgan Stanley when we listed on the London Stock Exchange. He knows Diamond Bank very well.
But some people perceive the union as an acquisition not a merger.
People have asked me why l allowed Diamond Bank to be acquired like this using ethnicity as everything is ethnicised in this country. But how can it be so when the shareholders are from all over Nigeria, some are
When meeting Pascal Dozie, one is struck by the air of youth, which belies his actual age - 80! Chairman MTN Nigeria, Founder of former Diamond Bank, co-founder of African Capital Alliance and Kunoch LTD, Pascal is undoubtedly one of the most successful businessmen to emerge from Nigeria. There’s a lot to admire about him - his principled nature, his vision to build a more sustainable future for Nigerians and the passion he exhibits for his work. In this interview with KONYE CHELSEA NWABOGOR, he shares the candid details of a lifetime of triumphs and failure, the Diamond /Access Bank merger, and the two recipes for success.
even from outside the country. That’s nonsense. We are yet to grow out of those things.
I asked one of them if he banked with Diamond bank, he said no, he did with UBA. I said, so how is Diamond your bank then?
After that , I brought out the draft agreement, one of the lawyers skimmed through and realized it was a merger.
Since 2006 when I left the bank, the board had sole responsibility so l did not interfere. And although some people said I pushed Uzoma my son to be the Chief Executive. When he was made the Deputy Managing Director, it was news to me. Why should I push him? When he came back to Nigeria, he started with GTBank, then went to Citizen before Diamond Bank. We gave him a post less than what he had at Citizen to get him well groomed not to take over Diamond bank, but to be trained as a real, robust professional that can work anywhere.
For me, two things are important: when I set up Diamond bank, it wasn’t for moneymaking. Yes, money will be made as a result of the services that we would give, but it was not just to make money. I tell people that all the things I wanted to achieve with Diamond bank, I achieved them. One was transforming the banking environment in this country. One of the things that made me start Diamond bank was the number of people being killed on the road carrying cash and being waylaid by armed robbers which was the core reason for creating automated transfer of funds. Diamond bank integrated banking system was a product that catered for such transactions across states. And that was how the electronic banking system was pioneered in this country.
But you see, the good thing is when you start something, other banks would follow suit and this is where competition is beautiful, because you alone cannot change the environment. All you have to do is be a catalyst.
Are you still actively involved with MTN?
I am actively involved on the board, not the company.
What has your experience the MTN been like?
Very challenging, interesting and amazing. We still have a lot of mileage to go. For example, when they talk about broadband, we haven’t started. We haven’t started in data in this country. We are still very low on the scale of other countries. But it will come. These things take time. What we have managed to achieve was to frog leap in communications. Before MTN and other Telcos came, what we had was NITEL, which had about 500,000 lines.
Even though MTN has managed to lead mobile telephony, when we started, that there was a lot of pentup demand. Some of us had our doubts, because one company already tried and failed. But, lo and behold, within the first month or two, we achieved more than our projections for three years, in terms of the number of customers. In that case, it was exciting. At that time there was only MTN and Vodafone. Now competition has come and everybody is struggling for customers.
Would you say it was easier running business back then, as opposed to now?
There are very different scenes. What you faced in those days and what you are facing now are two different things. For example, I can go to Abuja and come back today; I couldn’t do it those days. So in terms of infrastructure development, Nigeria is better than it was. Is it what it ought to be now? No. But in terms of what it was and now, it is better. The basic infrastructural development, things like the ease of doing business, are still hanging over us. There are a lot of loopholes regardless of what the government say. A businessperson does not mind risks. What he hates is uncertainty. There is till uncertainty in the economy of this country. An economy has to be predictable; if it is not predictable it becomes a little bit difficult to make decisions, to plan. We are all praying that both the government and it’s opposition will live up to their promises.
With the current situation in the country, how
would you advice a younger person about to start a business?
When some friends of mine from abroad and ask me this question, lI’d say “Steal, beg or borrow patience!” The process can be very intimidating. If you want to do something, you put in your effort but it takes time. You want progress , but there are all sorts of bottlenecks. Some of them can easily be solved. You go home, no light, you go to the office, no light, no water, some of the roads are bad. So you have debilitating infrastructural problems which we are still suffering from.
It is easy to quit but difficult to hang on and stay. One thing I always ask young men is that they have to differentiate between starting and finishing. It is easy to start any project. But what is important is finishing.
Will you finish that project? Will you see it from beginning to the end? From that beginning to where it blossoms is a lot of work. To achieve success, for me is an equation of two things, sweat and sacrifice which leads to success. You have to sweat, work hard and give up a lot of certain things. Not only that, instead of waiting to do something in a proper sequence, some people want to short-circuit the system. And when you do that, you create more problems for the economy. The difficulties we had earlier on is that the private sector wasn’t fully developed. So the associations we had were Trade associations like British Nigeria and Chambers of Commerce were very myopic in their approach to economic and industrial matters. They lacked talking about the Nigerian economy, and instead of helping each other in their various sectors, they became opponents forgetting that a rising tide lifts all boats.
When it comes to running a business, how important is a good educational background? You were exposed to excellent education as it was of a much higher standard them compared to the abysmal failure of the system today. But some uneducated people have good head for business. Your take on this ?
Education is important. But it is also the type of education. Is it paper qualification or what? Did you go to university or did the university go through you? What is the quality of your education? The certificate given says; those who have been found worthy in character and learning. Is that true of you ?
The value system has changed. And I mentioned this earlier when I said short-circuiting the system. We are now in a state when people have a sense of entitlement. You don’t have to work, but you expect to get
something. And you see somebody, Chairman of one company or the other and you want to be like him. So you look for deals. But are those success real successes? Where you have no known career but get up today and tomorrow you are wealthy. If you want to build a career in business, you have to work. God created man to work. Out of the sweat of their brows, thou shall eat. God created man to conquer the earth which you cannot do just by looking at it! When THISDAY Newspaper started, your Publisher wasn’t sitting down. He moved left, right and centre, to make it what it is today. Business Day is the same. But many other papers have started and crashed. For everyone that succeeded, you have about 20 that failed. In those days, people gave good quality service.
But now people are just interested in making money. There’s nothing wrong with that but the attitude and behavior of the philosophical underpinning of what you are trying to do will determine the outcome.
How do you think the youths of today can outgrow the get-rich quick culture?
You see, if anything has really destroyed this country, it is the lack of values. We have lost our values system. Now people brag they have money, they do exhibitionism, conspicuous consumption and all sort of things. These children look at it and they don’t know how they got there. I told some journalists the other day that they have failed this country as fourth realm of the estate because they never ask about the source of their wealth.
Children learn, not from what they are told, but from what they observe. A young man becomes chairman of a local government. He was previously trying to eke a living, but as chairman, he has built a house in such a short time.
Everybody now knows that politics is the most lucrative business which is why politicians keep recycling themselves. What is the difference between PDP and APC?
The role of governance is the welfare of the people. But how do we achieve that? Private sector or government or a combination of both? There are so many ways. But the question is, what is your philosophy? There is no differentiating value system. Nobody respects age again. When we were growing up, we would see our teacher coming and hide. Now, these days, it is the opposite.
These days, the family system has also collapsed. Let me pull your legs a bit, how many young girls know
how to cook? I know a lot of marriages that have broken because the wife cannot cook. The time for romance is there, but when the man comes home and there is no food, what happens?
Or somebody comes with a degree and yet when you ask him to write something, he writes nonsense. About four Christmases ago, my wife trained a young girl, with a 2.2, who could not read the first chapter of the beautifully bound project she spent almost N300k making! We talk about unemployment but many people are employable?
Our thinking process has to change. We have to go back to the basics, starting from the family, which is the first school where children learn values.
All these people who are killing, don’t they come from a family? What did their parents teach them? Everybody is praying, we are all religious; but are we spiritual? Every day you tune to the television, you see one pastor preaching and yet cracks abound.
In other climes, when go into politics to serve, you have to sacrifice many things because you cannot offer service without sacrificing your time, your leisure. Your reward may not just be in monetary terms, but the joy you offer in your service to the people.
What do you think the government can do to create an enabling society for upcoming youths?
I get nauseated when people talk about enabling environment. It’s becoming a clichè. I don’t like clichès. There was a time in Nigeria when we were very keen on sports; our clubs were thriving – you had Stationery Stores, Rangers. The only unifying thing we have, football, we haven’t even developed it. Now we save our energy for foreign clubs instead. One would think football would have been a way of keeping our boys engaged? And also readdressing guides, where you have values. We don’t even study history in schools anymore . I read somewhere about how parasitic our Ministers have become. Which one of them have given employment or done something of value elsewhere? Only very few.
You don’t look like you are slowing down. What’s a typical day like for you?
I am always resting. When I was working in the bank, I always told them that I do nothing. All I do is drink coffee and green tea leaves.
Truth is I enjoy what I am doing. If you don’t enjoy what you are doing, then stop it. I always tell my staff, the day you think of going to work and your heart jumps, resign that job. You must have joy in whatever you are doing. Because what’s in this life?
We must give joy to ourselves and to others. And how do you do it? Goodwill. Goodwill to yourself. Operate on the level of need rather than on wants. I am not saying you shouldn’t be ambitious, but if you want something, let it be something that is achievable.
God has given me a lot of blessings, including difficulties. Even those in itself are blessings.
Looking back, is there anything you wish you’d done differently?
So many. Relationships. First of all, I should have learnt more Nigerian languages. Because what builds or breaks difficulties in relationships is language. If you understand my language, it eases communication. And communication is the basis of relationships, so that you can maintain a healthy dialogue. Also it removes suspicion, because if you speak the language I understand and I speak the language you understand, it is easy for us to communicate. And once we can communicate, we can discuss issues. And once we can discuss issues, we can come to a solution.
To get married is easy, but to remain married, that’s difficult. We are still talking about beginning and finishing.
Any last words of wisdom for our readers?
Unto thyself be true
Truth is I enjoy what I am doing. If you don’t enjoy what you are doing, then stop it. I always tell my staff, the day you think of going to work and your heart jumps, resign that job. You must have joy in whatever you are doing. Because what’s in this life