By Abuchi Obiora
We are back today on The Kaleidoscope Archives to discuss a few more things about Dr. Herbert Wigwe, his wife and his son all of whom perished in a fatal helicopter crash in faraway United States of America.
Before we go on talking about some matters arising as a result of his death and different perceptions of him by different people, I must observe here that Herbert, unlike what many Nigerians think, did not start from the ‘scratch’ as is always said in Nigeria, neither did his wife, Chizoba start from the ‘scratch.’ Both of them were born with ‘silver spoons’ in their mouths into aristocratic, elitist percentage.
It should not therefore have been a surprise that both of them whose parents were already living in Ikoyi, Lagos by the time they were born, where they met, married and ventured into their respective businesses, had enough social asset to quickly and speedily take them to the peak of their professions. Being a smart man, Herbert would have been wealthy, (may be not ‘stinkingly’ wealthy as people always say), even if he had not ventured into the banking industry.
For those who may not know his privileged parentage, Herbert was born into the family of Pa Shyngle Wigwe, an 89 year old Engineer and a former Military Officer who ended his public service career as the Director General of the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA). Pa Shyngle Wigwe hails from Isiokpo in River state of Nigeria.
On her part, a lawyer and business woman, Doreen Chizoba Wigwe (nee Nwuba) was born 46 years ago (1978) in Lagos to the family of Chief Cyprian Chukwuemeka Nwuba, a Chartered Accountant who worked for the Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) where he rose to become the African Financial Controller of SPDC and transferred to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) where he retired as the Group General Manager, Finance and Account.
Having made this brief introduction, I must say that the rise to fame and exit from the world of Dr. Herbert Wigwe can, in so many ways, be likened to the appearance and disappearance in the sky of a polestar. So, before I look at what his colleagues and other people who were in his business and social environments said about Herbert as to his meteoric rise to stardom in the Nigerian financial sector, let me explore my comparison of him with the polestar.
What is a polestar? A polestar (astronomy) is a visible star that is approximately aligned with the axis of rotation of an astronomical body. It is a star whose apparent position is close to one of the celestial poles. On earth, a polestar would be directly overhead when viewed from the North or the South Pole.
A polestar appears to be stationary irrespective of the rotation of the earth because it is situated at the point through which the axis of the earth passes. For this reason, before the advent of complex and modern navigational equipment, a polestar, because of its being apparently stationed in one spot, was used by sailors for navigation up to their destinations. There are other subtle characteristics of a polestar. One of these characteristics is that it is imbued with strong magnetism having the capacity to draw some other stars unto itself.
Some people, especially leaders in whatever thing they are engaged in, have the polestar character of drawing other people to themselves and leveraging on those peoples combined efforts and energies. Such people are both navigators and trailblazers who pave the way for others to follow. The polestar character is a natural trait and spiritual endowment with which some people are born. Nobody ever imbibes it, no matter how sociable that person may be.
It spite of whatever anybody may say about him, I have no doubt that Dr. Herbert Wigwe was a polestar. Like the eclipse of the astronomical polestar spells doom both to itself and to navigators who look upon it to reach their destinations, the eclipse of a human polestar as Dr. Herbert Wigwe, much as it brought disaster and doom to himself, his wife and his first son, will most probably put an end to the ambitions of some of his colleagues and business partners in those areas where Herbert excelled.
Could this lost by some of his colleagues and business partners be the reason why so many discordant tones are heard around the country, some eulogizing Dr. Herbert Wigwe for what he was and what he was not, while others condemned him for what he did and for what he did not do?
To explore this line of thought, I would want to take analyses of five different posts in the internet which I believe capture the varied opinions and views of netizens and Nigerians as regards the life and times unto death of Dr. Herbert Wigwe.
These posts are:
- Petition by Erastus Akingbola to the Honourable Attorney General and Minister of Justice as was published on 29th September 2010.
In this 30 point petition with points number 13 and 26 having additional four and ten sub-points respectively, Erastus Akingbola, the former MD/CEO of Intercontinental Bank Plc. fingered the activities of Dr. Bukola Saraki a former Chief Executive Officer of a bank, (Society Generale Bank) who was also a former Senate President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and Dr. Lamido Sanusi Lamido, a former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and an emeritus Emir of Kano, in taking away in controversial and dubious circumstances, his bank from him, a bank which he created and nurtured with great pain.
That expose reels of unimaginable corruption if it was true, and puts a question mark on the saintly pontification of the two personalities mentioned, who are still being looked upon within the Nigerian political and financial circles with great respect. I wish everything said about them in that petition was not true, otherwise those details portray them as criminals who should long have been in jail in the manner some American financial criminals who were apprehended for share round-tripping and using insider information to gain undue advantage in the American Stock Exchange, served their jail terms in the United States of America. In Intercontinental Bank, the efforts of Erastus Akingbola who also acquired the assets of some other banks including Global Bank where I maintained an account (he did not tell us how that particular acquisition happened!) was to build the very solid foundation that was to be inherited by Access Bank in a future mergers and acquisitions that the duo of Herbert Wigwe and Aig Imoukhuede benefitted from. This future acquisition where the former shareholders of the Intercontinental Bank Plc lost out was succinctly described by a former senior banker as the tilapia Access Bank Ltd swallowing the whale of Intercontinental Bank Plc.
- The second template we have here to peruse activities in the Nigerian banking industry and the involvement of Herbert Wigwe in those activities is taken from an anonymous post in the social media by someone who calls himself ‘a very senior banker’. The report traced the formation of Access Bank with all the foul plays and ‘mago-mago’ in that formation. In this particular post, Paschal Dozie of the defunct Diamond Bank was severally mentioned as participating in a fiducial malpractice, before Herbert Wigwe came into the scene.
In item (2) of this expose, the writer says ‘Herbert Wigwe went from Coppers’, an Audit firm, to Kapital Merchant Bank, to GT Bank and from GT as ED, the idea to buy Nigeria Arab Bank came up and it was acquired with Ike Nwabuoku as the first MD”.
The writer gave deeper details about the Wigwe family, telling us that Pa Shyngle Wigwe, Herbert’s father was a Deputy General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), which benefitted immensely by the largesse of Herbert Wigwe.
The anonymous writer closed his revelations with an emotion of caution and an epitaph in the following words: “You don’t get very rich by being A NICE GUY. You TRAMPLE ON PEOPLE, YOU WALK ON THEM. Most Nice Guys are not VERY RICH. Rest in peace, Herbert, Chizoba, and Chizzy. The world of banking will really miss him” (ALL emphases are the writer’s).
- The third material that will be of some help in what I intend to do here is taken from a publication of the “Saturday Breakfast with Tony Okoroji (Special Publication)” titled “Will Access Bank continue like this?”. As the man steering the leadership of his association, COSON, Tony Okoroji had a long-stretched running battle with Access Bank in respect to that organizations fund stocked in Access Bank. The way he narrated it, it was not a pleasant experience at all. Too bad to have one’s money stuck in bank while the person wastes away in hunger and deprivation. Some people die undergoing those experiences.
- We still have another anonymous post in the social media titled, “Bank Executives Criminality and Destruction of the Nigeria Economy”. This post took a sweeping expose of the more-you-look-the-less-you-see abracadabra of the whiz-kids of Nigerian banking industry and their collaborators in government oversight agencies, establishments and parastatals.
In his Facebook Page, Ayoade Ojeniyi had also examined the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of the Intercontinental Bank by Herbert and his friend with the support of some staff of the CBN who had vested interests in the acquisition. So many other issues about the rot in the Nigerian Banking industry have been made public since the death of Herbert, but the above four considerations referenced here capture the major fiduciary crimes that have become the foundation upon which the Nigerian financial industry has been built, is thriving on and is wrongly sustained.
Another inquiry by people about Herbert Wigwe which constitutes the last thing we will examine in this discourse with a view to learning something from it pertains to similar and seemingly weird deaths through accident which have occurred in the home of Mr. Slyngle and Mrs. Stella Wigwe.
According to a report, Osita Wigwe, a Civil Engineer and a wealthy young man, the first son of the Wigwes, had died in an auto crash at the age of thirty-seven when his car crashed before Patani, River State on his way to Isiokpo, their home town. Some years later, a pregnant daughter of the Wigwes and her husband were involved in an accident when the car they were driving on was hit by one of the vehicles in the convoy of a Nigerian politician in Lagos, by the name Dapo Sarumi. Her husband died on the spot. She and the baby inside her died later in the hospital.
Netizens have offered many reasons for the harvest of deaths in the home of Pa Shyngle and Ma Stella Wigwe. In this regard, I must say that most of the comments I have read on this issue betray lack of knowledge of the ways of God. Let me therefore use this opportunity to teach whosoever that is interested, a little I know of the wisdom of God.
God works in mysterious ways. This is what we all know and understand. Is there anything like life span in the wisdom of God? I don’t think so. Whether some religions believe it or not, there could be several life spans in the evolution of the soul of man on his way to attain eternity and subsume itself to the God-Head. It may not, after all matter on how many years man lives on earth each time. Besides, we bother ourselves, being veiled pilgrims on the path to eternity, on what happens to us in life because we have lost touch of our understanding with God on how long we will live on the earth even before we came. Nobody lives a day longer or shorter than is destined for him as also approved by him in his spirit nature before coming to the earth. It therefore follows that a soul may have to take many forms in different human personalities before it attains eternity.
Secondly, God is a perfect geometrician who knows how to weave the most incongruous parts together to form a perfect whole. Though tragic it was that Herbert, his wife and his first son died together, I think differently from what other people think because of the things I know. I understand that it is a rare honour for people closely related to themselves on earth to die together. As for Pa and Ma Wigwe, it is actually their souls, like that of Job, that are on trial in the harvest of deaths in their family. These parents of the deceased persons are great souls. They shall overcome it and meet their creator in Heaven as victors on earth. I am praying for them. We should all pray for them.
As I get close to concluding this work, I must say that all the revelations that throw light into the circumstances prior and after the founding of Access Bank point to one thing: the Nigerian banking industry is at the forefront of corruption in the country, obviously funding it because every “successful” politician wants to invest in and control a bank in order to, among other things, have unlimited access to the foreign exchange market and the oil and gas sector of the economy.
Another important revelation from the information released by a section of Nigerians since the death of Herbert is that like politicians, Nigerian bankers, though they adorn themselves with clean suits, designer’s shoes and other paraphernalia that wealthy people are known with, are wicked men and women operating amongst themselves in the manner of dog-eat-dog.
If Nigerian bankers have capacities to ruin one another as evidenced in their share-overtaking and round-tripping maneuvers as have been revealed in many reports by Nigerians, they should equally have the capacities to influence the death of one another. This possibility gives credence to the conspiracy theory that Herbert was killed. What remains is to put flesh into the skeleton of the theory and prove it through a tenacious investigative process with all available leads.
What about the information released earlier by NTSB in America that all the eye witness accounts of residents, drivers and commuters in the city near the site of the helicopter crash who volunteered to give information were unanimous in saying that the crashed helicopter was first observed in the sky as a flying “fireball” before it crashed-landed and tiptoed. What could have been responsible for the fire while the helicopter was airborne? Heated devices? Lightning, or bomb explosion? Well, like I said before, all these can stand as veritable clues to the investigating authorities, if they cared to use the clues.
Having said all these things, in Nigeria, nay Africa, it is the tradition to mourn and not to castigate the dead. It is also human nature to learn lessons from the lives of deceased persons. As Nigerians and the international community mourn Herbert, his wife and his son, one thing is certain: when the audit of the activities of the most active players in the Nigerian Banking industry is taken by any serious government in order to sanitize the sector and stabilize the financial system that inevitably succumbed to the malignantly leprous disease called corruption in Nigeria, the activities of Dr. Herbert Wigwe now dead, and the activities of all his colleagues still living including those of them who have availed us of the knowledge of the stinking rot and other information we now have about the dubious operations of Nigerian bankers, will jointly be taken into consideration and each and every one of their names shall be made to adorn a National Hall of Fame or a National Hall of Shame, as the case may be.
What lessons has Nigeria and Nigerians learnt in the death of Herbert? If I were the government, I would use all the revelations that have been brought to public knowledge as a result of the death of Herbert to reform the Nigerian banking industry. But what about if the whiz-kid bankers of our era, the politicians and the people in government as in the case of a former Senate President of the Federal Republic, Bukola Saraki, who was mentioned in one of the “dirty” deals, are in the same corruption and swindling game together?
My opinion is that there could be no better opportunity as has been created now, to reform the Nigerian banking industry if the government is truly serious to put life on the micro economic side of the economy in order to engineer stability and growth, otherwise Nigerians will continue to believe that both the politicians, government officials and the newly rich whiz-kids of the banking industry are, true to popular opinion, and as I have earlier said, in the same game of corruption and swindling together.
Meanwhile, the Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau (NSIB) has received a copy of the preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the United States lead agency that investigated the tragic Airbus Helicopter EC130B4 accident that claimed the lives of six Nigerians, four of whom are Herbert, his wife, his son and his bosom friend, Mr. Abimbola Ogunbanjo, a former Chairman of the Nigerian Exchange Group, on February 9, 2024 near Hallowan Springs, California. This information, signed by Mrs. Bimbo Olawumi Oladeji, the Director of Public Affairs and consumer protection in Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau (NSIB), was released a week ago.
Apart from the NTSB former release that “adverse weather conditions characterized by rain and a mix of snow” was responsible for the chopper crash, the new report said that, “Initial findings suggest that the helicopter suffered catastrophic damage upon impact, resulting in fragmentation of major components”. The new report which also said that “the information presented is subject to further investigation and analysis” also repeated that the helicopter was seen by eye witnesses as a “fireball” in the sky before it crashed.
Finally, I wouldn’t know which purpose it would serve for them but on the home front, King Blessing Wagor, the traditional ruler of Isiokpo Kingdom, the homestead of Dr. Herbert Wigwe, has assured his subjects that his Kingdom will take all appropriate measures in the manner of their forefathers to unravel the cause of death of their most illustrious son and determine whether that death was a natural or an unnatural death in order to do the appropriate thing.
To cap up, since I believe that nothing will come out of whatever investigation that is on-going in the death of Herbert, his wife Chizoba and his first son Chizi as always is the case in all high profile air crashes, I must console Pa Shyngle Wigwe and Ma Stella Wigwe. They must take heart and understand that as Jesus Christ tarries, the capacity of man to do evil cannot be checked.
As for Tochi, a young woman described to be as rugged and enterprising as her late mother, David her brother, Hannah, her younger sister, and Okachi her kid brother, I am sure that God in His manner of being parents to the orphans and shepherd to those who lack keepers, shall see them through all the days of their lives unto their ripe good old ages as they live to completely perform their assignments on earth in accordance to the purposes of God for them in the Mighty Name of Jesus Christ, Amen!
ABUCHI OBIORA
Global Upfront Newspaper
Read Other Posts by
Abuchi Obiora in
The Kaleidoscope Achieves
