HIS is a tale of determination to succeed. He rose from a very humble background to become the CEO of thriving businesses, the latest being Cocoa Products (Ile-Oluji) Ltd.

He qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 1980, in England, as a member of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants and was admitted to the associated membership of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria in 1985. He was later admitted as a fellow of that institute some years later. He worked in various sectors of the nation’s economy, starting with the UAC of Nigeria in 1981, as Head Office Accountant and later transferred to NIPOL, one of the company’s subsidiaries in Ibadan. He moved on to O’dua Investment Company Ltd where he rose to the position of a chief executive officer in one of the group’s subsidiaries. The Managing Director,  Cocoa Products (Ile-Oluji) Limited, Pastor Akindolani Olusuyi, reveals his formative years:

Parents
I was born to Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Ogunsuyi Akintunde on August 2, 1950. My mother’s name, is Alice Omobisola, nee Akinbisodun. I didn’t grow up with them, but with my grandmother. Although, their styles of bringing up a child were slightly different, my parents brought me up in a way that I thank them for today.  My father was the gentle type, his method of discipline was subtle and I can’t remember him raising up his hand to beat me, but my mother was a very strict disciplinarian and her own agenda for her children was to bring out the best in them, and if they needed to be panel beaten to achieve that, she was ready to do it. My grandmother played a very vital role in my upbringing, because my parents separated before I grew up to appreciate anything in life.

Growing up
Because I grew up with my grandmother, it took me quite a long time to know that my grandmother was not actually my mother. Growing up was modest; I didn’t suffer; we had the basics of life and I can’t remember that we lacked.

Primary school days
I started primary school in January 1956, at the age of five, at Muslim Primary School, Ile-Oluji, now in Ondo State. I am not a Muslim  but when I was with grandmother, we had neighbours who were Muslims. We had a tenant who was a Muslim and he had two boys; one of them was my age mate and the other one a bit older than us. These were the people I grew up with and I was attracted to their festivals. One day, I just decided to go to the mosque with them and that was it. So when I wanted to enrol in school, my mother just took me to Muslim Primary School, Ile-Oluji.

First day at school
I remember that the first trial at writing was on a wooden slate on which there was sand. The teacher would put sand on the wooden tray and would use your index finger to trace the figures or alphabets on the sand.  We used sand as our primary writing slate in those days and I think there is psychology in that. Naturally, a child, in our days, had the tendency to play with sand and that tendency was converted constructively to educational tools. When I look at the ingenuity of teachers in those days I marvelled because it seems to me that nowadays, that creativity and ingenuity in taking the interest of the child and marrying it with the desire to educate them is no longer there. I remember that when I was in primary school, every one of us was looking forward to becoming a teacher, because a teacher in our rural setting then was the king. If a child was misbehaving and the parent told him that ‘I would report you to your teacher,’ he would straighten up immediately. We looked up to teachers as our role models. Without being immodest, I was a very brilliant pupil in the primary school, so my teacher took to me naturally. Teachers in those days liked pupils who were focused, brilliant and would always want to encourage them to achieve their dreams. When I was in Primary Four, which happened to be my brightest, my class teacher then was always coming home to look for me. Most of the evenings, he would just stroll in to check on me and ascertain how I was faring with my studies at home. It was borne out of the interest to see that the potential in me was not killed. Part of my growing up in primary school was again to help my grandmother in her trade.

My grandmother was an eko seller and most of the evening, when I came back from school, I would first hawk eko all over the town and come back in the evening to have my dinner and do what other children were doing on the streets. When I finished primary school in 1961, I had to repeat Primary Six, not because I didn’t do well, but there was no money for me to proceed due to my father’s illness.

In those days, you either made a Grade A or a Grade B in primary six and this was usually celebrated. It was Western Region exams then and everybody would anxiously wait for the result to come and the result would come before the close of school. I had to repeat in 1962 because I did  not do well due to the various activities I had to engage in after school hours. When the result came and it was good, still, there was no money for me to go to secondary school, so I had to settle for modern school, in 1963, because it was cheaper. To be in modern school in those days, it cost about 23 pounds. But if you wanted to be a day student in grammar school, it was about 39 pounds, while being in the boarding house cost as much as 60 pounds.

Fond memories
After a two-year spell at the secondary modern school, my mother finally struggled to put me in Gboluji Grammar School. By this time, I was already living with my mother’s cousin, the late Venerable Olumide Oni. When he saw the potential in me, at the end of the second year in secondary modern school, he insisted that I should go to Gboluji Grammar School, in Ile-Oluji and I went straight to the boarding house. Boarding house in those days was part of education. I was over 14 years then, going to 15 and that was the only grammar school in my town then. It was such a good school that admission to that school was usually drawn from every part of the country and from indigenes who were abroad. In those days, there was healthy rivalry among students that we were even betting on who would come first in which subject. We struggled to be in either Grade 1 or 2, because those were the grades that could see you through to the university.

What informed my choice of university
When I finished my HSC in Aquinas College,  there were five universities in the country and each of the universities conducted entrance examination. I took entrance examination when I was in Lower School and curiously, I chose to go to the University of Nigeria (UNN), Nsukka, because I wanted a change of environment. I was admitted for Engineering in Nsukka because we lacked career guidance and when I was filling my form, it came to a place when they asked for choice of course, I just put engineering and which part of engineering, I didn’t know. So when the admission came, they just put in Mechanical Engineering, because I had good result and did well in the exam. However, when I got to the university, I just said to myself: “Why is everybody doing either engineering, pharmacy or medicine? Why is nobody going into commercial courses?” I just decided that I was going to be a banker or an accountant. Times were good then and before I left the Enugu campus in 1975, I already had five offers for job. All the graduates of Accounting that were produced in the country then, 1975, by three universities, were less than 100. It was the period of indigenisation and the big companies were recruiting. t might interest you that CFAO had increased my salary before I started work. They were writing me every three months to say my position was still vacant and that they were expecting me to join them.