I did not want to go to night school like my mother

•The gripping testimony of Dr. Gregory Ibe, Founder and Chancellor Gregory University, Uturu in Abia State.

You can describe him as restless, perhaps ubiguitous. His ability to attend virtually every event of national consequence is legendary. As an academic, his capacity for prolonged engagement is mind-boggling. As an investor, you can describe him as a Jack of all trades and master of all. But what endears him most to many people is that this shrewal businessman, restless academic and political activist is also a compassionate philanthropist whose milk of human kindness has touched many needy people in his hometown of Uturu in Nigeria’s Abia State. Gregory Ikechukwu Ibeh, Chancellor of Gregory University Uturu spoke to True Vision team in his country home in Achara, Uturu Okigwe

You have a very rich entrepreneurial, cultural and intellectual background. How did it all begin?

I will give you a bit of example before 1 dig further. I like to eat food prepared every day, and my wife was finding it difficult to prepare a fresh pot of soup for me every day. She felt it was more of a “bigmanism” so I took a lot of time. I was really creating problem trying to stress the matter. But one day, I sat her down and said, poverty made me to live this life, I am living. Then she said I should explain. I said, having been born as the first son of a Police officer with a salary of N285, how do you survive with nine children, three house helps, with father and mother? Are we not up to 13? What would they eat every day? I am the first son. In the morning, I used to fry akara with my mother, before I get to school, it will almost be 9am. Sometime the teachers will throw me out and I will go back to fish at Mmiri Alayi in envy, and then join her in the market. In the evening, I will go to the park and help people load various goods. Whatever money I make, I will pick few things and go back home and prepare food. I was the chief architect of running the home. In this process I cooked a pot of soup every day. It is not a thing of being proud. But it was already designed by God that way. It was a matter of routine, because no matter the quantity of soup you make today, you must make another one tomorrow. Now, we are not talking about quality, sometimes when there is no meat, I will use soya beans, so that the soup will contain enough protein. Today, I don’t like to eat much meat because I used to go to the butcher and take the bones he set by the side, and use it to help as there was general competition in the kitchen in the police: are you cooking meat, are you cooking fish – young police officers wife seem to be insulting your family for not being able to feed the family. So I lived the life of a great cook. And my wife said is that why you like to eat a fresh pot of soup every day? I answered that it is by God’s design that I am a rich man. As a matter of fact, I am an electrician. I am a surveyor; I am a carpenter, a mechanic. There was no job done by human beings that I didn’t do when I was growing up. I needed to do something and get money. I believed that the only way I could survive was by dirtying my hands. All these experiences, soiling my hands, associating with the elderly, learning from her, have made me what I am today. When I am talking, it is the experience I have gained from going to worship somebody and learning from him. I am always challenged to go out and learn a new thing or the other. That is why academically, I am an accountant, I’m a marketer, I’m a Health officer, I’m a criminal Justice Officer, I’m also into management.

You acquired a lot of experience associating with people. Could this be the reason you established Gregory University so that you can give back to the society, some of the things you gained?

There are two arms to it. Look at the picture at the wall there; that is the family of Ibe. Neither my uncle nor my father went to school. And then my father was a trained tailor; recruited into the police tailoring. He wanted education, but he never got it. He got only to the level of inspector. I found out that my father cried most times because he had no education to move ahead in life. My mother stopped at standard three. She started going to night school with me. The importance of education became too obvious to me that if I didn’t do anything about it, I would become like my mother who went to night school at old age with me. I said deficiency like this should not occur to me, not my children, not to my other family. There are different types of deficiency. Deficiency of knowledge skill the deficiency of skill shouldn’t be the lot of any human being. God is the one that leads everybody and he l e d me to opening a university so that more people would have access to education not just theoretically, when you are in my university you must have skill, so that when you can’t rely on your residual knowledge you can use your hands and perfect your act.

Why did you decide to site this university here in your community?

In 1987, a young boy 23 years old transferred to Abuja. I built Abia State University. I built Imo Airport and then I was transferred to Abuja. Then in Abuja, we had only two streets – festival Road and Wuse Street. They were only two major streets and most people were living in Suleja. And there were no public toilets and we were using the bush to do it. Those places that were covered by bush then; today have been converted to great sights by man. Why did God actually create me to come from Uturu and to make me an Igbo man? I t is because he has already destined that I should add value to Nigeria, to my state, to my home town. God’s choice would have been to make me an American or a Jewish person. But he said, this is where you are going; my thinking is to respect what I am doing along the line that God has brought me up. This is my hometown. Would I come here and spend my life, my time here, without adding my value or changing where God brought me out from? I may have to suffer another punishment when I meet God for allowing my home town to be how I met it. These are the things that guide me. They say economies are localized; the strength I am getting from this localization would transmit to state, to Federal and to the world.

Even at the risk of running the university at a loss?

Definitely! When Abuja was developing, people felt there were going to be losses. Now was it just losses? You must choose what you want. It must be passion-driven. If things were normal in Nigeria with electricity everywhere and free movement and things are done the right way, you have a niche to fulfill. You create that. The university being in my home town is not for material gain. It is for a passion to drive education and to help develop myself and make a change. Abuja was a forest but today it is a beautiful city recreated by man. If anybody has money, or is in government, there is the need for him to create a difference and that difference is what I have made irrespective of profit or no profit; the only joy is that my hometown is developed. I could have taken the money to build a multi-million naira industry in Abuja or build a school in Abuja where the money would be flowing. But if you had an agreement with God, God would even give you more opportunity to live, if you took care of the people.

Apart from the motivation you have in setting up this university, are you being encouraged in any other way?

Sorry if I may disappoint you. Our people the Igbo race, before they support you in anything they must know you are above excellence. I believe that as the Igbo people are watching the university grow, they would come to the issue of motivation. It is unfortunate that the government and the system we run here doesn’t encourage anybody to grow. Instead, they would flog you further with taxes. The revenue generation team would make sure you do not survive. For any business to survive in south eastern Nigeria, the man must have seen tomorrow. That is the truth. No encouragement, no nothing. But the entrepreneurial spirit has to give you the strength and the Almighty God will keep sustaining you because you meant well. The underlying factor is that you must solve a problem according to God’s design to make sure that other persons benefit.

What is your experience running this university up till now?

First, we keep thanking God for the strength because I have not received money from anywhere. Yet you keep injecting money because of the number of students. Where you have one student, you need to put down at least six lecturers and one or two professors. You have to pay them. Then you add non-academic staff. So the challenge is enormous. It is not something to be described. You need to go and source for money anywhere. You can sell your properties. This happened to a former President of America from Virginia. He said when he built the university in Virginia he never knew he would be the President of America. If you read his biography, you will see there was a time in the history of the university that he never had a dime in his pocket. But he goes to the beer parlor and tells people that he has a university. He started with pride and eventually, people started listening to him. His typical case is my case. Nobody is ready to help as far as south east is concerned. I challenge anybody to identify and say let me add a block to the university; let me add a donation so that my name would be immortalized. We are not looking at the relevance of education. We are moiré dominated by commerce and trade and those things leave no legacies. Our people don’t give scholarships. If you want money, they ask you to come and learn their trade and serve them for seven to 14 years so that they can open another branch of their business for you. But the history of small businesses is that most of them get extinct in two and half years. And when those things get extinct, the man has no fall-back position. He comes back home and starts riding Okada. But where you combine education, there must be a fallback position. Most of the small businesses do not recognize the risk factor nor are they programmed through a business plan. So we are all just doing a guess work in most of these businesses. Some fall by the way side. These are things we are trying to imbibe here; the culture of giving you formal business processes so that you can understand the risk you are involved in; how to mitigate problems along the way. This is a university where I brought in everything I have. We have a polythene bag making factory here; a soap factory; the largest printing press east of Nigeria. We have a paint industry; we have wine in the market; we have a bottlewater factory. All these skills are meant for opportunistic entrepreneurs, multiplier agents, people that have children who don’t have businesses to do. They can come and be agents and do business with us or they can come and learn one skill or the other. We also have a bakery here. We can teach somebody how to bake so that he can go and start it in his hometown. We can teach you how to produce perfume- a lot of things we have here in our centre even how to weave.

Many people like you who suffered deprivation while growing up would rather not think home. But here you are, remembering your own people. What really gives you the encouragement to be different?

If I am not guided by God, I do not know what I am going to do. Every Igbo man thinks that you must build one bungalow and tar 500 metres to that house and that is enough development. The house is meant for coming home for Christmas or for burial or when ones daughter is getting married. That is not an investment; that is not capital development. That is not what God has asked you to do. There are rich Igbo people today that their money is pouring on the ground, but they will not do it, because they have been defaced by their mother telling them to avoid people. They have the phobia of not relating with anybody and hiding their wealth. I am assuring everybody, when you have God, the mind to give, the mind to let other people succeed will always be around you. I know that there are a lot of societal issues that could make anybody go the other way. But there is nothing like giving. I don’t think there is any religion in this world that is not after giving. But again, the attitudinal change in trying to open your doors for the people without fear or favour should be preached and imbibed by all and sundry. That is why clubs like Rotary and Lions club are preaching about giving. Do something for your neighbor, not just the church. Even corporate responsibilities are enshrined in the laws mandating corporate entities to help out in the communities where they operate. That is what Corporate Social Responsibility is all about. When people come to this university, I hear some saying they regret not doing what I am doing. By title they call us, Aku ruo ulo. Obi of Onitsha has made a lot of presentations everywhere calling on Ndigbo to do Aku ruo ulo. If you have 20 billion in the bank and everyday you take out one million- and money in itself has a lot of connotations. As far as it sees you taking it small, small, it would send you a force that would make sure that you keep drawing down. So 20 billioin will end up as one million and you discover that ostentatious living has eroded the money. But there is a link between what you do and what is in your heart and what God gives you in return.

Did you factor in entrepreneurship when you were establishing this university, given that our people are noted as entrepreneurs?

Entrepreneurship is where talent must be met with preparation. In other way round, the issue of trying to define achievement. What is achievement, achievement is when talent plus preparation lead to success. For all talents, if you did not prepare extra on it sorry, you will not get anywhere. The type of entrepreneurship we deal on is just one arm of it which has to do with business development, commerce and trade. There are people God has endowed with the talent of being a scientist, but because of pressure from family the person has ended up selling second hand clothes in the market. This is a guy that has an endowment. So we are just coming back to you to tell you that once you have an idea, just an idea, you might not have money, but that idea is in you and you continue working with it without money, you will make a success. That is entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship has been so defined that when somebody starts a business out of nothing, creating an activity and recognizing the risks, that is the definition. As soon as he starts to make money he will come back again. That is why such successes are classified as business enterprise. Once you make money you start growing from there. Starting something out of nothing is the definition of entrepreneurship. When you have an idea, then you must find out in the environment where you are what the society lacks that moment. You create the idea to introduce that thing into that society at that moment.

One major factor in private universities is the cost. While many find their role very unique, the cost of training their children there is very high.

Let me tell you something. I think my university is one of the cheapest in the country. It is so because I didn’t borrow money from any bank. I am just myself practicing entrepreneurship. What am I doing that is different? We have a lot of industries that we established before and they are helping us to generate money to fund the university. Let us look at Users scale. Average of 70 families in Igboland today, their children went to private nursery, primary and secondary schools. You prepare your child to be climbing the upward ladder. And when he gets to the university you take him out to the public school where he drops out of the ladder. What the person will immediately imbibe is cultism and people will grab him and debase your child. So that growth level he was attaining before is erased. And again, let us look at cost implication. Today, every outside hostel students pay as high as N175, 000 for accommodation in some public universities. The school fees, N160, 000, each year. Somebody now sends his son to the federal university and says it is cheap. Now add N175, 000 to N160, 000 that is N335, 000. Now this is your little daughter, fifteen, sixteen years; you sent out to the world. It is like you have thrown him out to the street to go and copy evil, vices. Some of these children stay in those hostels and make babies and sell. They don’t come back home. They go there and do all other evil things associated with social life. At the end of the day they come out empty. Remember they have television in their room. They have all the paraphernalia they have not merited. The Bible is clear. It says everything has time and level. So how can a child that is a kindergarten, enjoy the life of somebody in the university? How can somebody in the university enjoy the life of someone who has already graduated and has worked for five to six years? In our time you worked for everything you have. But today you see personal fridges in the rooms of students who are supposed to be studying. They have cooking gases. They leave like equals. They live even better. So calculate the cost of living there. You allow them to be defaced. The amount they incur every month living like that is over a hundred thousand naira. Put all that they are doing together. Every family that has a child in the federal or public university today pays over one million naira sacrificing for the freedom of a child. But we are telling you here to come and pay N400, 000 and somebody is not coming. But when it is becoming bad, you now bring the person here. It is penny wise, pound foolish. If you have money, during holidays, we send our students to affiliate universities to do six months course in the US. Today a Major General called me and said you remember you sent my children to the university in the US, they have finished their youth service. Call the university and tell them they want to come and do their masters degree. How many students are in Southern American universities, in Greek and Malaysia universities, paying $2000 every semester?

There is the tendency for Nigerians to prefer the townships to rustic villages like Uturu. How do you grapple with this situation?

Uncle Unogu from Mgbo was asked: “what are you going to bequeath to this town?” He replied: “what I am bequeathing to this town is that I have given them education”. And there was a time if you count the number of professors in that village they were higher in number than most places. The man blessed the place with brains and died. So what God and the missionaries left this town with is education. There are 14 private schools owned by various Bishops here in Uturu. So what I am doing may not even be my creation. It is a design of God that these things must happen. Don’t be surprised that one day another person may establish another polytechnic, so it is the blessing of God around. Good things will attract people. Employment generation will also attract people. For you to know the value of Uturu as well, you can take the map of Nigeria, the epicenter of Igboland is this Uturu where the cave is. Since you are here, anywhere that is Igbo speaking, let us disperse people. In two hours they are in their place from here. So I am at the boundary line of Ebonyi seven minutes, Enugu 15 minutes, Imo two minutes; I am already in Abia. So what is left? The attraction of whoever that is knowledgeable will always be here. That is why with our positioning, we are not afraid of the manpower to come and deliver to our generation. And for the visibility like you said, today it is becoming very problematic. There is a strong apathy in this country. Value attached to television has gone down. Value attached to print media has gone down. The people that know about academics know that the print media is not something you will throw away, because that is the only referral point that the library must hold for you to be able to give documented evidence. Most of the things you see on social media are not factual. People do a creation. For instance, in sensational reports, people turn things upside down. If you say something bad about the governor or somebody in government, his own social media group will turn it upside down and say it is not true. It is difficult to quote the social media as a source of information. You cannot quote anybody. That is why in research, in what is called the primary source of evidence, the newspaper is critical. Our visibility is limited to resources.

How many schools or faculties do we have in the university? I know because of resources, accreditation is an ongoing thing. How are you coping?

When you apply for a license to operate a university and you are given the license, 70 to 80 percent of the courses approved are given to humanities and arts. Those courses that are handed over to you are the ones that require less equipment to deal with. So you keep competing with yourself. So it is even tougher for me to grow this university to this level of departing from the three colleges and moving into engineering, because there is a very big lacuna in the south east. Apart from the federal universities, state universities are lagging behind in engineering. Here in the south east, we are lacking engineers to drive industrial revolution. We are nowhere. It is just now using my own company that we have been able to make state universities to start offering engineering. The federal government is working with me to make sure that all private universities are all engineering complaint so that we can join the industrial revolution. And my university was used by TERFUND to train 292 engineers. I have what it takes. I have the best in theology. You can go and see for yourself. Then I have medicine. I have eight colleges. It is not easy if you considering how many years of operation. Right now we are building a teaching hospital. It is going to be the best in the south in terms of being a tertiary health institution. We tend to position ourselves for tomorrow.

You are teaching in ABSU and you are teaching here. Is there not going to be a conflict?

No, I was teaching in ABSU before I formed this. I started my teaching career in Tansi University then ABSU and now I am teaching here. I want to be a professor, and I want to achieve it honourably.

Why the name Gregory University and you are also Gregory?

I hate to associate businesses with my name. By 1991, I wanted to open a company called Skill Group. And I went to ministry of trade in Abuja and I gave them Skill Group Limited. I hate “Ibe and sons”. I don’t like all those associations. As an Accountant, I was told that you can establish a limited liability company and be sued and the owner is not sued; so you are shielded. So I said why would I register Ibe and sons when I can be sued? So I suggested Skill Group. And the people at the ministry of trade asked me…young man how many years are you? I told them and they said you want to run a company, and I said yes…all the skills I have learnt I want to put them together that is why I suggested Skill Group. They laughed and said before you have Group, you must have at least six companies. I said. Oh I didn’t know. I thought it was all the groups in my head. So I told them if they could hyphenate group, because one day I will be group. So my company is called Skill-G Limited. That is how I started, and people think the G is Gregory. When it was time to open this university, I looked at my patron saint. In the history of the Catholic Church, the only man that made the greatest difference academically is Saint Gregory. So I applied with the name St. Gregory. The Executive Secretary then, Prof. Okojie, said I must remove the name that he doesn’t want the name to be denigrated. Some said I should call it Uturu University. I asked myself why I should go and replicate all the papers I had done. So I decided to erase the St. and it is easier to erase St. than to change the entire thing. So since my name is Gregory, and I am working with St. Gregory, it was easier to change and resubmit the name. That was why the university came out to becoming Gregory University. It wasn’t meant initially to imortalise me. If you get to the university, you will see the Catholic Church called St. Gregory Chapel. That is how the name came about.