Born as far back as 1932, Olola Olabode Ogunlana stands tall today as the Doyen of Insurance in Nigeria. A graciously aging patriot who has continued to give himself to the country after serving Nigerian for decades, he is currently studying for his PhD at 87 years old. With publications including Quest for the Rare Leaf and Other stories, Yoruba Love Stories and Out of the black pot, the chairman of SCIB, who started his career at Inland Revenue Department and later Royal Exchange Assurance Group before the old Western Nigerian Government appointed him General Manager and Director, Great Nigeria Insurance Company Limited and later Managing Director of National Insurance Corporation of Nigeria (NICON), spoke to ADEDAYO ODULAJA.
How many of your peers do you still get to call upon or meet with regularly?
I still relate with many of them. Days ago, I spoke to one of my classmates who is now 88. This morning, I have talked to one who turned 90 years old back in July, a few of us are still around although many of us are dead. So we still get to meet once in a while.
As a trail-blazer in the insurance subsector in Nigeria but who can you say influenced your choice of career?
That is a mighty question. I was not planning to be in insurance; I was studying to be an architect with a passion in fine art, technical drawing and all such but my boss, a friend of my father. Both of them had attended St Andrew’s College between 19 and …, he was my boss and he said I should take the exams for fun. I did and although it was for fun, I passed. And the western government wanted to give scholarships for insurance.
In those days, it was a great thing to go abroad so I applied and was given a scholarship.
Before then, I was a civil servant, working at the Inland Revenue which was until sometime in 1951 but since 1st of April, 1952 I got into insurance and I became stuck since then. I was in royal exchange for 17 years, then I took over the management of the western Nigeria government insurance company in those days called Great Nigeria where I served for five years. Then I went into the national insurance corporation of Nigeria, became the first managing director and later started a company of my own.
That company became 41 or 42 years old this year so I have been in insurance now for about 67 or 68 years.
Which moments can you recall now as some of your greatest moments in this storied career you just mentioned in a few minutes?
Frankly, everyday in my life is an important moment. In addition to everything else, i am a lay preacher and I got licence from 1966. So when a man goes to bed and wakes up in the morning, it is by the grace of god. And if you believe in god, anything that you put your hand in, is a great moment. Recently, we had an event that was called celebration of our heroes in the insurance industry and I was honoured as the doyen of the insurance industry.
It was a joy for me seeing all the big men who were either my students or worked under me, some of them using walking sticks and i felt really great and thank god.
So, honestly, everyday is a great moment but many don’t think about god. If i may compare to when I was young, Nigeria has become a god-less nation. Because people say ‘I’m a Chris tian’ and when you ask them which church they attend, they don’t have any. How can someone say ‘I belong to the Armed Forces when you are not in the Army, Navy or the others?
Although I have lived for just about 87 years, I have seen great changes but Nigeria is not on the right path. Apart from the great impact you made in the insurance sector, you are also a great reader and author. What informed your love for books and reading? My father was a teacher and from the age of 10 in our home, you had to read two novels a month. By the time you were 13, you graduate to six novels a month. So that made me love reading, writing and poetry.
It all goes with my love for nature, I am a child of nature. I love the environment and joined the boy’s scout in 1942 and I am still there. In scouting, you tell stories, you dramatise stories and it is a way of life.
I was chief commissioner for the scout in Nigeria, I was their president in Africa and their vice president for the whole world. I go to Germany and other places for scouting events and all of them entail storytelling. In the Boy’s Scout, I was known as Olabode opitan (storyteller). You must tell stories and I ask questions. I asked questions of my grandfather who died in august 1939 and he used to tell us stories he heard from his father and grandfather.
That is nature of the Oral culture which is now dying. This background would easily explain your love for the preservation of culture?
Yes, for instance since 1975 when I left service, I stopped wearing suits and I dress not just in native dresses but with a cloth wrapped around it like this. That is the way my grandfather dressed and I belong to Egbe Ijinle Yoruba where we teach children Yoruba culture, about our food, our folksongs and show the value of indigenous ways that have been undervalued during the colonial period.
Most tribes are doing it now, I am happy to say, Igbos, Hausas, Efiks and we should all value our own traditional ways because it is the sum total of them that make a nation.
Unfortunately we have not been able to weld all of them into one and we cannot discuss in one language and with one purpose. You said the western regional government put the scheme in place that aided your scholarship and later bringing you on board to manage the region’s insurance company. It means those in charge must have seen the value in insurance at the time.
That fervour seems to have waned over the years? In the past, we had visionary leaders. Chief Obafemi Awolowo was responsible for starting Great Nigeria Insurance Company, the instrument he used was the Western Nigeria Finance Corporation.
He got his B.Com as a private student here and he knew the importance of invisible income to Britain, insurance, shipping, banking, accounting, transportation. So he decided to start the western region production development board and the area of specialty of that board was to give scholarships for all those subjects that would give invisible income. That was why he started the board around 1955, all of them are doing very well, that was how Great Nigeria was started.
The first manager was an American but then the politicians started to interfere and after seven years, they were making losses and they wanted to know why. So I was asked to come and take over management of the company, we got good managers, put our acts together and within three years, we broke even and we started building the Great Nigeria House. Leadership counts, visionary leadership is what Nigeria lacks. And in those days, we had that through a personality like Chief Awolowo.
Who do we blame for the lack of visionary leadership we have today, with generations locked in the debate about which did better? Nation building is like a relay race. My grandfather ran his race, his sons were the sources of wealth, they all went to farm but when the missionaries asked him to give up one of his sons, that was his contribution. He passed the baton to my father who was trained by St. Andrew’s College as a teacher. He contributed his bit, after sometime, he resigned and went to the civil service.
He was the first manager of the law courts at Tafawa Balewa Square and in those days, when that place was built and my father was the manager, everything was spick and span. I was there recently, it was in shambles. Now I went into insurance, I am enjoying it, I built the Insurance Training Centre to build insurance managers and I can count no less than 50 managers I trained. It is like that, every generation should try and do it better than the one before it but there is a breakdown in Nigeria today.
That is why we have the issue about leadership. Education is like a triangle, this is home training. Many of our children today lack home training. In my time, we went to neighbourhood schools, my mother was a full housewife and she would walk me to door of St. Paul’s Breadfood School and at the close of school, she will be there to pick me up back home.
She would insist that I do my homework before i go and play ball with my friends so education starts from the home. Today, you don’t have that, the average father or mother would leave home so early because of traffic when the children are still in bed and also come back very late, again because of traffic when the children have gone to bed. And during the weekend when there should be children-parent bonding, they will be going for weddings and other ceremonies. So the base of education has been eroded.
And what they teach in schools nowadays is like the knowledge some people have put in a test tube, you just pinch it out and drum it into the heads of the children and when they are able to regurgitate them, they say they have passed and they are released into the school of life to start intermingling with other people. To produce visionary leaders, all the three must mix well together and that is not happening today.
I will give you an example, when we became independent in 1960, America, through the auspices of the ford foundation, gave Nigeria a present. They didn’t build a fountain like the funny thing you have as Tinubu Square, what was there before was a magnificent supreme court building.
It was knocked down to build that funny fountain. Instead, the Americans brought about 32 young Nigerians together drawn from different parts of Nigeria and we interacted for six weeks at the federal palace hotel.
And all of them without exception, went to the top. I will give you some examples, Prince Solomon Akenzua became the Oba of Benin, Dr Michael Omolayole became the chairman of Lever Brothers, late Olaku became the boss of SCOA, McEwen became the chairman of the Nigerian Ports Authority, I got on in insurance, among others.
The selection was very good and it was not a matter of who knew who; they wanted the best from the private and public sectors and got them. That is the way things should be done, do we do that in Nigeria of today, that is why things are like this.
Beyond what you just said, how do you see the educational terrain today?
We have millions of graduates today who are not employed, and some of them are unemployable because the system they went through, bought question papers, were dashed first class, they would not be able to perform.
Shouldn’t our leaders sit down and take a fresh look and redesign the educational system?
Sometime ago, i tried to put in place a school for the training of artisans. I got a parcel of land and applied for the c of o from the state government nine years ago. I am yet to get the c of o today but in the meantime I had interviewed teachers and lecturers in South Africa, Ghana, all over the place. I just wasted my money, $100,000 just went down the drain because I wouldn’t pay bribe.
Many are not doing things right because they are not patriots.
You went back barely 8 years ago to bag another B.A and a Masters and now you are gunning for a PhD at 87?
Why not?
We are all students of life. Education is an aggression of knowledge. I am better able to do that now because I have lived for this long span and I have been tracing the history of the Yoruba since 1955 when I listened to the first in the series of the Lugard Lectures by Dr S.O Biobaku, he wasn’t even a professor then. And I told myself I must find out more about my background.
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