MY WORST DAY—HEBERT WIGWE- Mike Awoyinfa Column

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In an interview with Peace Hyde which I transcribed from YouTube, the late Access Bank boss, Dr. Hebert Wigwe shares his ‘Worst Day’ experience. May his soul and that of the remaining dead, in a helicopter crash in the USA, rest in peace:***

Looking back, the journey has been great, but there’s been very trying times. There’s been days when we’ve had to roll on the floor and pray and just beg God that certain things shouldn’t happen, when there’s been big changes in the macro. There’s been more days of celebration with each success makes us more confident. So it’s been mixed feelings. But in the whole, I think it’s so much thanksgiving to God. My worst day in business was a very interesting day. My partner and I sat back and we had a couple of people come over and share with us the fact that something was gonna hit the news the next morning. And we were getting very much concerned because we knew that perhaps there was some miscommunication and that if our regulators were now fully aware of this event that was unfolding, it could lead to complete destruction in our careers. There was some information about an exposure which we had. And I am talking about financial commitment which we had somewhere. The communication was that it was not a performing loan, and it was not true, it was actually performing. But because of the size of the loan, it could have triggered an issue. So, having been that concerned, we said we need to share with the media or find out from them what is happening, and all of that. But remember we were a much smaller institution and our reputation, particularly in banking, could affect the overall franchise. It would affect our stakeholders, that is to say our shareholders, it was going to affect our customers, most importantly, it was going to affect our people because there was going to be concern about our professional future. We were opening a subsidiary in Ghana at the time. And we were just gotten all the approvals, and opening up that subsidiary was the President of Ghana, obviously the Central Bank governor of Ghana was also going to be present. So I was rushing to make that trip because obviously we couldn’t disappoint the President who had basically obliged to come and perform that function for us. We got on the airplane and I was under the most severe pain. And I knew it was coming from the pressure. And this was deep pain in my guts. And it was the beginning of a symptom of something else which I was going to have to solve later on in life. I was wriggling in that plane. Halfway through, we were trying to make up our minds if we should come back to Lagos. I have never been that vulnerable in my life. I have worked eight to 2a.m. for several days all of my life. We landed in Ghana and there was an ambulance that came to meet me on the tarmac. I had my shirt taken off. I didn’t know when all this was happening. One of the things I was happy that didn’t happen was that none of my people was at the airport apart from the protocol. I was taken to the hospital. After about three hours, it subsided. But I was kept under intensive care. Much later in the day, I continued the conversation with my partner, asking him what had happened. And he said he was not sure but it would appear that the news was still going to make it in the morning. And so, we were busy talking to our friends in the media up until midnight. And then, he said it was truly going to make it in the morning. We spoke for about two hours and then he told me he was going to go back to sleep. He had to try and get some rest to face the battle in the morning. I had to ask him a very stupid question: “How are you going to sleep? We just need to keep talking until the morning because there is nothing that can happen.” I stayed awake until the early hours of the morning and managed the reception for our bank in Ghana. But right after the President left, I actually did not take my luggage, I didn’t take anything. I walked straight to the airport. Just to show you my state of mind. I had no appreciation of time, I was totally engulfed in that process. And I made it back home. I asked my partner when I got back. I said: “I have not slept for 48 hours. How did you do it?” And he told me he had to clutch his Bible to his chest. That was the only way he could get some sleep. But that was just the beginning. As this situation went on for a couple of days, we started asking ourselves: “How do you truly manage this situation? How do you communicate with the public? What type of legal advice do we take?” We went to seek legal advice as to how to manage the situation. And you know because we are financially astute people and all of that. Our lawyer told us and described the setting to us, and we understood very sharply what he meant. And this was not in the country. We were in the middle of winter. Well, what he said was that if we did manage this situation delicately, it could create a very, very significant exposure to us far beyond the financial exposure that we knew. It could get to bankruptcy. I felt we had the energy, the capacity to go through it. But it’s a very difficult statement when you hear…We must have walked about three of four kilometers in winter without a jacket and it meant nothing to us. We had several sleepless nights, because you had to sell everything you had—everything, completely. To basically go past all of that. Those were the nature of experiences we had that changed us and made the difference to us. Because we had to prove this point and we had to maintain our reputation, it was something that took literally ten days—from start to finish. And we had to everything that we had to do. But even after doing that, the rest of mind that came on the day that we finished all of it, in spite of the fact that you had lost everything you ever created, was a totally different experience. FAILUREI am absolutely petrified of failure. I will do everything possible not to find myself in such circumstances. People ask us why we spend so much time working. Apart from the fact that we truly enjoy what we are doing, so I don’t know anything about worklife balance. I am always in balance because I enjoy every second of what I do. But the thought of failure is something that I don’t even want to dream of. And so we are perpetually seeking ways to better ourselves, to better prepare ourselves for those difficult moments in life and all of that. We like to share it with our people, that the only way to continue to sustain a business over time is for you to always be in day one mode, assuming that something can go wrong. And how do I continue to make sure I lift this enterprise to the very next level to make sure that whatever shocks come up, one year after, I am still in day one mode, reinventing and coming up with innovations to take me ahead. For us, what we are seeking to do is not just a Nigerian or West African dream. It’s not just an African dream as well. We are creating a global enterprise.