Ugbe: Success Comes by Doing What You Love

Nigeria Nsukka and Wits University in South Africa. We run joint programmes and with our sister company, Supersports. What we do is to take people from the Nigerian Sports Commission and send them for training on sports management, for instance. It is a big field and there are many discoveries to be made. I was delighted, for instance, to see the relay team win gold medals recently. We were also very proud when for the very first time Nigeria qualified for the basketball in the Olympics. There have been a number of events in the Olympics where Nigeria had no representation. Yet, you have Nigerians all over the world coming to represent other countries at the Olympics. So what is needed is the right structure to nurture the talents and you would see that we have not even started in terms of the opportunities that are available to be explored. So for us, we are in for a long haul and what we say to ourselves is that now is a good time to sacrifice profit and continue to invest in the relevant areas in the in the industry . Given the experience of Multichoice here, what would be your advice to any foreign company trying to set up a base here?

I once said somewhere that to be in Nigeria, you really have to be in Nigeria. By that I meant that you have to be on the ground to feel Nigeria before developing any business plan; otherwise you would be met with a lot of unpleasant surprises. It is good to have a good business plan, but the best suggestion I can offer is that it makes a lot of sense to be on the ground first before you start to make elaborate plans. Most of the great things we have done in Nigeria came after we have been on the ground for years. Nigeria is a country that has its unique nuances. If you do a business plan, for instance, without taking into consideration the fact that you may have to be responsible for generating your own electricity and possibly some other infrastructure that are ordinarily taken for granted in other countries, you would be in for big surprises and frustrations. Consider this, for example: Let us say you want to set up a terrestrial base station in the UK. You probably have an existing fibre backbone that has been set up, you already have transmission infrastructure already set up. Here in Nigeria, you would have to start everything from the scratch with little or no back up. So you should be prepared to take care of certain expenses that are ordinarily taken for granted in other developed economies. That is why I say it would make sense to be on the ground first and feel things so that you can make personal decisions on what you are willing to overlook and on others that you have to probably take vital investment decisions. That is the way it has always worked. But that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to provide services. That is not what I am saying. I am simply suggesting that you take all those gaps into consideration. Of course, there are many opportunities in Nigeria that those who are smart can take advantage of. A friend of mine who has lived in the UK for some time told me the other time that he wanted to relocate to Nigeria and I asked him why. He said because of traffic. I was curious and wanted to know why he would take such a critical decision based on the traffic situation. His answer appeared a bit funny but there was truth in it. He said the reason he said traffic was that whatever those people in traffic are looking for, he wanted to be the one to supply them. This is a humourous way of playing up the population advantage of Nigeria. When we launched our mobile TV here, we were ahead of the developed market for about two years but it has been a phenomenal success because a lot of people are in the traffic all the time. Some of them would like to watch Champions’ Leagues which take place around 7.30p.m; so they have the opportunity to catch up with their favourite matches. That is what I am saying, and most of those concepts and ideas came while on the ground. Would you say your educational background prepared you for the role you are playing now?

Largely, yes! The truth is that you cannot remove engineering from entertainment. So I would state that my engineering and computer background gave me a headstart for the career I have found myself. Again, learning on the job has made a great deal of difference. I have played so many roles here and each of the roles had required and necessitated acquiring new and sometimes different skills. Multichoice is a very open organisation that makes it possible for you to move from one part of the organisation to another. So that helps a lot. This also couple with the fact that I have a personal interest in what I am doing. How did you develop interest in engineering? Was it suggested to you or you just stumble on it?

I would say that I was probably on my way to becoming an Electronic Engineer right from when I was in class two in the secondary school. I loved fiddling with things and also doing a lot of drawings and building things. It was obvious I would either end up as an engineer or an artist. Also, I grew up with a father who loves books. I got used to books on Engineering and some encyclopaedia while I was in the secondary school. Indeed, I discovered that I had read most of the books that were recommended when I was in the university. I got exposed to all manner of books on electronics . And as soon as I got introduced to the computer, I just got sucked in; the rest, as they would say, is history. What has been your experience managing Multichoice Nigeria, compared with the counterpart in South Africa?

It has been a tough job. When a lot of people see me outside, they say something like hey, this is the man who has been collecting our money through the huge subscriptions. The interesting thing is that what people see is the subscription aspect, not the huge complexity of managing those subscriptions. That is where the real job is. Without sounding praising , I want to suggest that ours is about the best subscription service in the country. It is almost unheard off to see a paying subscriber just waking up to find out the system is not working. It takes a lot of behind-the-scene works to make this possible. Relatively, what we have to contend with to get the job done here may not be an issue in South Africa or any other country where Multichoice operates. If you look at the share number of channels we have and the fact that some of them come from different and far continents, you would agree with me that it takes a lot infrastructure, planning and co to put those things together. Like I said in Nigeria there are a lot of complexities that you don’t have in most of the other countries but then that is why we call ourselves a local company. As a local company, you do not go about complaining about what is not working . Our job is to identify what is not working and making sure it works. Our job is not to give excuses to our subscribers by saying, for instance, because there is no light, DSTV would offer two hours of service every day. That would be irresponsible. We are in the market to make things work. We have to provide the same type of quality service that our subscribers would get if they were patronising us from the US. Could you use your subscription information to predict where the entertainment industry in Nigeria is headed in the next few years?

I can tell you this, it has been an evolution. When we first started, the approach was to beam foreign contents on our channels. But as time went on we discovered that a lot of our subscribers were actually interested in local content so that gave us the opportunity to begin to shape things. We started shaping the development of local content starting with local music and we discovered that there are a lot of talents on ground. Then, we moved to the movie aspect when we discovered what people were watching. So I can tell you based on the viewing information at our disposal that there will be a lot of interest in the local stuff. You can see the rapid success of the African magic series. And people are insisting that this local stuff should not come to them at low quality; so we are shaping that now. So you will see a lot of quality local programming in the years to come on lighting, sound, production and all other aspects that would enhance the quality of what we serve to our subscribers. We are shaping that with a lot of commissioning of local content and we are also pushing money into a lot of in-house productions. How did your relationship with Nollywood start?

About two years ago, Nollywood celebrated its 20 years of entertainment just about the same time we also celebrated our 20 years of operations in the country. So I would say it has been 20 years of a close partnership. We have developed programmes together. Just a few weeks ago, we launched “African Magic Igbo” and a lot of foundation members of Nollywood were there and we expressed the same sentiments; we have been there from day one and it has been a partnership that has worked. We took what is now known as Nollywood to the rest of the world. You would agree with me that this is no mean a feat. We have made global stars out of local talents.

That is the joy of the whole thing and the interesting thing is that we have done it in partnership . We are not just in the business of buying and selling; we also create what we sell as well. We just took what they created and said this should be shown to the rest of the world. So I would say that we have been good partners looking at everything that would advance the local entertainment industry. Again, we don’t just create content, we also go out of the way to create demand for the content. So this also helps people who feel they have something to offer to go ahead and create them. We offer much assistance as in training, financing and any other things that would make it work. How would you describe the recent platform deal you had with Arise TV?

That is also part of what we are saying. We would do anything to work with the local people doing something great and qualitative. Arise TV is one such example. We did our research and we found that Arise TV offers the very best in television programming you can get anywhere in the world. We were therefore, very glad when we read that Arise TV just

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