Mike Adenuga at 70 — Mike Awoyinfa Column

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THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

What else do I give you my friend, my brother and my biographee as you turn 70 next Saturday, April 29, than to celebrate you in a piece like this?
To be 70 is not a walk in the park. I have been there, so I know what it takes and what the feeling is like to be seventy in an exciting and dangerous country like Nigeria with all its troubles yet blessed with riches and lots of opportunities for an entrepreneur and a business titan of your calibre to succeed. I was there last year on July 23, when by the grace of God Almighty, I clocked seventy. Ah, life!
Life is a difficult journey, a battlefield which according to the Psalmist “is but toil and trouble.” In one of your beautifully written, respectful letters to me which I cherish and plan to include in my memoirs, you wrote: “Please my brother, don’t forget me in the battlefield.” My prayer is that the Lord will keep and preserve you. The Lord will give you more years on earth in good health to fulfill your purpose. I am not the only one praying for you. So many Nigerians whom you have helped and who see you as their God-sent Angel Michael continue to pray for you. And their prayers have carried you thus far.
“The Road Not Taken” is the title of a famous poem which I love so much, written by the American poet Robert Frost. It is often interpreted as a reflection on choices, decisions, and the consequences of those choices in life. In the poem, the speaker comes to a fork in the road and faces a decision on which path to take. The speaker acknowledges that both paths are equally appealing and admits to feeling uncertainty about which one to choose. Ultimately, the speaker decides to take the less travelled path, which has made “all the difference.”
All through your life, you’ve reached similar crossroads where you had to decide which path to take. Ultimately, you chose the path that made all the difference. Take for example the issue of your education. Your mum wanted you to go to the University of Ibadan like your older brother but your mind was in America. Such was the level of disagreement that Mama had to report you to the Commissioner of Police, Chief Adeniji who clairvoyantly said: “Mama, when your son shows traits like this, it is the hand of God. Maybe fate is beckoning on him to go in that direction. It is better to encourage rather than discourage him.” You eventually went to America to study in North Western Oklahoma State University and later at Pace University, New York City.
After your education, you could have opted to stay back in America like some Nigerian students who ended up trapped and sucked into the existential maelstrom of the American dream. But that was not the kind of life you wanted. You didn’t want to be a slave to America. You didn’t want to be paying mortgage for years just for buying a house. Yes, it is easy to see something and you bring out your credit card to buy it, but then, the American culture encourages you to get yourself so much indebted that you become stuck in it. It is better to come home, you thought. If you needed convincing to return, your friend and your first-ever business partner, Femi Akinrinade helped you to make up your mind.
“The best decision that I ever took and I encouraged Mike to take in those days, was to come home,” Akinrinade told me, while researching for the Mike Adenuga book. “I am glad we did come back when we did. Because life was much easier then. And up till today, whatever we are doing, it is due to the good foundation we laid in the ’70s and the ’80s. More than 90 percent of us came back home and we have those who got stranded there up till today.”
In a Newswatch magazine cover story of February 1992 on “Nigeria’s Oil Tycoons,” you then aged 38, told the story of how you got oil exploration licence along with other Nigerian businessmen at a time when Nigeria under the Babangida era with Prof. Jubril Aminu as the oil minister started the programme of indigenous petroleum exploration. Most Nigerian businessmen, aware of the fact that oil exploration was heavily capital intensive and risky chose the path of selling off their licence to foreign oil companies rather than go on a chimerical chase in search of elusive oil. In the interview, you recalled how your mum came to you and spent a couple of hours with you, telling you how crazy you were to want to go into oil business. To your mum, going into oil exploration is “the biggest casino on earth” which is “like throwing money into the bottomless business.” Rather than listening to your mum and choosing the easy path that would have earned you millions of dollars cheaply, you refused to be tempted by the short-term prospect of selling your oil wells for quick gains. Instead, you braved the odds to go full-time into oil exploration despite the attendant risks. And in early hour of December 25, 1991, God blessed your effort and you struck oil to become the first Nigerian to strike oil in commercial quantity since the federal government opened up the oil exploration business to Nigerian entrepreneurs.
“Finding oil, I believe, was a turning point in Mike Adenuga’s life,” Chief Dosu Adelu, the man who mentored and schooled you about oil exploration and the intricacies of oil business told me while researching your story. “With the finding of oil, he moved away from the league of small boys to the league of big boys. I don’t think Globacom would have been easy without Conoil. Because he had the reserves to mortgage for huge bank loans. Once you have crude oil reserve, that means money. He is a very lucky businessman who carefully studied the terrain before going into it. That’s why it’s easy for him to go into banking, telecommunication, into property development, into whatever else he wanted to do. With this array of interconnections, he fortified himself as a successful businessman.”
Let me end this piece with a prayer by the famous Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho: “Lord, give us the courage, after our doubts, to be able to choose between one road and another. May our YES always be YES, and our NO always be NO. Once we have chosen our road, may we never look back or allow our soul to be eaten away by remorse.”