By Udochi Nwaodu – Chief of Staff, Heirs Holdings
Excellence enables you to get it right first time.
When I left secondary school, I had no idea what I wanted to read in the university.
That is not unexpected – I went to a village college that gave no guidance to the students for the future. I started working as a casual staff in a seismic company at Owerri a month after I finished my WAEC exams. The first Jamb I took was for Theatre Arts because it caught my fancy. The next one was for one Art course; I can’t remember now. I was uncertain of what I wanted to be. Somehow, I wasn’t ready for the university.
One year afterwards, I left the seismic company and came to Lagos to stay with an uncle who is a chartered accountant. He worked at PWC (Pricewaterhouse Coopers) at the time and oversaw their staff training and development. He got me a job as a clerical officer in the legacy UBA a few months after I came to Lagos. Each night he would list a couple of questions he wanted me to copy out from several textbooks on Auditing, Financial Accounting, Financial Management, Taxation, Company Law, etc. I picked interest as I read the questions. They were informative and bordered on everyday lifestyle activities like saving money, paying tax to the government, making investments and general business issues.
At the Raymond House, which was the headquarters of UBA at the time, the operations manager was called Branch Accountant. He sat on an elevated platform and swivelled from corner to corner like a king while his customers sat below him, as his subjects. That was in the days of ‘arm-chair banking’, the time of tally numbers. Bankers were reverenced. I asked my uncle his thoughts on this: if someone answered the questions correctly and passed the exams, the person would automatically become a chartered accountant? He confirmed it. Therefore, I decided to be an accountant so that I can sit like the branch accountant on that coveted platform at Raymond House.
I subsequently gained admission to read Accounting at Obafemi Awolowo University (then it was University of Ife). Most of the subjects were new and strange to me but I found them very interesting and instructive. For instance, I never heard, let alone knew, that there was a subject called Accounting and Bookkeeping all through my secondary school days. However, most of my course mates were very familiar with the subjects and were even calling out the answers ahead of the lecturer. I vowed not to be intimidated and determined to graduate with good grade despite the strange courses. Four years afterwards, I graduated on top of the class with First Class Honours as the Best Graduating Student in both the Department of Management & Accounting and Faculty of Business Administration.
After my NYSC in an accounting firm, I wrote the November final exams of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria, ICAN. By January of the next year, the result was released and I passed!
That year was 1991. It was a dream come through as I wrote B.Sc., ACA beside my name from that year onward. By 2003, I was admitted as a Fellow of the institute and began to use FCA instead of ACA.
Did I become a Branch Accountant? Yes, of course.
Between 1995 and 1997 I was the operations manager at Diamond Bank Aba in Abia State. Anyway, by that time the elevated platform, as well as the swivel chair, had gone and a new era of banking had begun.
Did I go back to UBA? Yes indeed.
By a stroke of providence, I joined the Standard Trust Bank in August 2004 shortly before it merged with the legacy UBA. By July 2005 I was back in UBA by the merger. However, not as a clerical officer, not as a Branch Accountant, but on a higher level propelled by the dreams of the past.
Determination, focus and hard work were my driving forces, my inner motivation. Anyone who has passed through the ICAN examinations would confirm that these three attributes must be present if you want to write the exams and pass in one sitting.
Excellence enables you to get it right first time. Excellence distances and keeps you ahead of your peers.
It distinguishes you.
Nice