By Adadareporters
Dr Sam Maduka Onyishi (MON), the founder of Maduka University Enugu and Peace Mass Transit, last Friday, received the prestigious Vanguard Innovative Investor of the Year Award.
He bagged the award during the 2024 Vanguard Personality of the Year event held at the Eko Hotel, Lagos. The award recognises individuals who have significantly impacted business and capital development.
Onyishi said his transition from the humblest of beginnings to his current status was by “extraordinary Grace and unusual favour of destiny upon him”.
Quoting him, “I sincerely make no pretence of being smarter in my businesses, nor do I assume to be better competitively. My honest circumstance was a pretty rough survival road, very basic in scope and capacity as it were. There was no hint of aspirations to what has providentially become, nor any label of exclusive personal hard work other than the grace of trust people had on my endeavours. I’m more surprised than most in my quiet moments of reflections.”
He acknowledged that “unspeakable grace” met him at the point of toil and sweats, adding that the grace “took hold of my destiny without any resistance”.
He continued, “It’s just that simple because I have had several losses, made mistakes, failed again and again, but never obliged failures to conquer my determined focus. I had no god-father to fall back on nor access to other sources of finance, than acceptance to live what I am and see what will be.”
He mentioned three factors that transformed his fortunes: “One was in Tudun Wada, Kano, when a Ghana woman, Mercy Nana Dufie, gave me money to keep for her in an Ovaltine container. I simply dropped it under my bed securely. When she came back after some months to take it, she shouted that I gave her the same exact money she gave me. ‘Did you not trade with it?’ she screamed, totally surprised.
“I protested naively that she told me to keep the money for her, not trade with it. She went ahead spontaneously to tell all the Ghana people in Tudun Wada LGA that she had seen one man in Nigeria who didn’t touch money given to him for safe keeping. Patronage for my clothing business spiralled that I saved N12,000 between 1987 and 1989 and quietly left for spare parts business in Kano City.
“Secondly while there, one Alhaji Mohammed Lawal Kurfi gave me spare parts on credit to pay back after selling. I travelled and sold them in Lagos, and returned the money in bundles of cash in a carton. Of course, I didn’t have any bank account then because of how much my capital was. Alhaji Kurfi marvelled at seeing his complete money in cash and confessed it was his first experience of such in that business.
“He promptly told all his colleagues who imported spare parts that he had seen someone who pays completely and in cash for goods given to him on credit. Again, out of my ‘naivety’, in not recycling his money to multiply returns as others ‘smarter’ did, my patronage exploded. I suddenly became very important as the reliable middleman there. Expansion was inevitable, and it came forcefully.
“The third and most amazing of all was when I became a transporter and went to buy a new vehicle from the popular Ineh-Mic Motors in Lagos. After paying, I was short by two hundred thousand naira. I pledged to redeem it to him in two weeks. He kindly obliged me. Before the two weeks were due, I paid it off without any phone calls or reminders. And I didn’t think anything of it, except being my natural self as l had promised, fearful about the shame of a possible let-down in future.
“Dr Mike Inegbese, the owner and major car dealer, then voluntarily without my asking, because of that single act, commenced giving me double of any cash purchase orders I made. If I paid for two, he would give me four; if four, he gave eight; if twelve, he released twenty-four vehicles to me without any form of colleteral, no agreement and no witness.
“He made it plain when eventually I managed to ask him much later, that I was his first customer who paid off his credit grace on time, without asking or tedious follow-up.
“These are people I hardly knew nor had a leverage upon, other than doing things the way I knew and believed, as I was thought by my mother. I grew my number of vehicles on the road to a record four thousand units without ever borrowing from banks as was the trend, because that man found better colletaral in a risky trust that was not betrayed at all. He later continued supplying me vehicles even without my orders, that when I scream, he calms me down instead to relax and pay later. So, how can you receive such favour and trust and claim you did these on your own?”
It was gathered that the Board of Editors of Vanguard was curious to ascertain how Dr Onyishi rose from a peasant trader, bus conductor, bus driver to become a spare parts dealer, and founder of “the most disruptive player in the Nigerian mass transit ecosystem through his Peace Mass Transit company, that ply all land routes in Nigeria and beyond”.
Remarked Vanguard, “Not content with that comfortable money spinning terrain, he again leaped into the conservative and complex frontier of the academia as a promoter and founder of a university, complete with a feeder college, amazing facilities and fully accredited faculties, operating seamlessly as a generation-next citadel of learning.
“Yet again, he elbowed his way into the corporate realm without noise, as a consummate investor in blue chip companies that see him sitting as board chairman of the only quoted leasing and maritime company in Nigeria, C&I Leasing Plc; director of May and Baker Pharmaceuticals Plc; director at Globus Bank Ltd, and owner of other thriving businesses”.
Dr Onyishi emphasised that “grace and destiny couldn’t have been more explicit”, and advised “people to strive to have something that would attract grace and make it stay”.
