Fourth-time author and tax consultant at Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC), Vincent Adeoba shares the story of his sojourn from extreme deprivation and poverty and how he clawed his way to prominence with DORCAS EGEDE.
Earliest memories of being an orphan
I never had the opportunity of meeting my dad. All I was told was that he passed away. I am not sure if this was before or after I was born. I never saw his picture, so I have no memories whatsoever of him. Attempts to find out about my father threw up conflicting stories, and it was hard to decide what to believe; so I sort of gave up on the idea. That way, I avoided inflicting on myself more emotional and psychological pain than I had already suffered.
The story is different with my mum, however. The sixth of seven children, I spent four years with her; and even though I was young, I have fond memories of the way she treated me, which was quite different from the way she treated my siblings. She had special love for me. I recall there was this particular meal called feregede; it’s a species of beans that takes several hours to cook, but despite the time it takes, my mum always cooked mine separately because I didn’t like palm oil and plantain in mine.
She treated me like a special child. I’m not sure she knew she was actually preparing me for the future. A night before she passed away, an old woman came to our compound and asked us to pray for my mum. But because I was just 4, naïve and had no idea what was happening, I slept off and didn’t join them in the prayer. As early as 6:00am, I woke up to hear people screaming, crying and calling my mum’s name. Her name was Theresa. In my innocence I cried along, only that unlike others, I cried out of hunger. This was all I could recall about my mum’s passing, until 20 years later, when we had a memorial service to celebrate her life and work.
It was that day in 2014 that I saw where my mum was buried for the first time. I recall that she was so hard-working. I remember she combined auxiliary nursing with working at a fuel gas station as an attendant, and also had farms. She combined a lot of things together just to be able to meet our needs. It was a terrible experience for us; life was hard; we lived in extreme poverty and suffered hunger. But when I look at the whole event, I believe God used those tough moments to make me who I am today.
Dark days ahead
After my mum passed, my younger sister, Gbemisola, who was still being breastfed and I, became my grandma’s responsibility. From what I heard, my grandma had many children, most of whom she lost, leaving only my mum and her elder sister. She had this special love for my mum, so she was devastated when she passed. Initially, she was comforted because she was the one taking care of me and Gbemisola; but she couldn’t get over the pain of my mum’s passing. So, less than a year after my mum passed, my grandma also passed. I was 5 at the time and Gbemisola was barely 2.
When my grandma passed, family members came around to see what they could do to support the family. But at the time, my older siblings had all left the village in Ire-Ekiti; and because Gbemisola and I were so young, nobody wanted to take us. I guess they didn’t want liabilities. So, we were left all alone in the village and at age 5, I had the responsibility of taking care of my little sister. It was my older sister, Morenike, who took it upon herself to become a mother to us. When she discovered that we were just left in the village with no one to take care of us, she came all the way from Akure and took us with her. Sister Morenike, then 19, who had relocated to Akure to sign up for apprenticeship in tailoring just before mum passed, was forced to become a mum to two little children.
The role Sister Morenike played in my life was so important that when I graduated from the university in 2014/15, I wrote a story in her honour, which went viral.
When she took up the responsibility of raising us, she had to quit the apprenticeship programme because money was not coming in and she needed money to at least provide our basic needs. So, she started selling beans. Luckily, she got a wholesaler who sold her bags of beans on credit. As early as 5:00am, she would set out for her first hawking of the day. Thinking about it now, I see she was actually a good businesswoman. With the early morning hawking, she was able to target food vendors. After that early morning hawking, she would return by noon to rest and by 4:00pm, she would start the second hawking and do so till 7:00pm.
With the little money she made, she was able to take care of us. There were days we couldn’t afford more than a meal, and our food then was always akara (bean cake) and garri (cassava flakes). Since we always had beans, it was easy to blend it and make akara. That business, however, soon died a natural death because people often bought from her on credit and it got to a point when she couldn’t pay her supplier. Naturally, the supplier stopped supplying.
Thereafter, she got a job in a canteen to wash dishes 10 hours every day except Sunday. Owing to this, she registered us in a lesson close to the house. This lesson was at best, a traditional learning centre where they dumped all of us in a class, whether you were 5 or 15 years old. And our curriculum was very simple: numeracy, the alphabets, states and their capitals. She did that job for sometime until something awful happened that ushered us into another phase.
Distraught teenage mum
At some point, Sister Morenike became so depressed that she ran away and left me and Gbemisola for more than two weeks, with nobody to care for us. We never knew she ran away. I remember going around the street, begging for money and food, so we could eat after the little food we had at home finished. I was about age 6. Words got to my mother’s only surviving sister and she came and took Gbemisola and I to live with her somewhere in Akure. I spent about a year in her house. This is one experience I don’t like talking about because it was a terrible time for me. What I experienced in that one year almost killed me. She never really had the intention to maltreat me; it was people around her, people I would rather not talk about.
Sister Morenike soon returned to Akure and came visiting when she got wind of where we were. It was then she explained the whole event of her running away from home. She took us home with her to spend the weekend. When we returned to my aunt’s place, I knew I couldn’t continue living with her. Before age 7, I packed my bag and ran to Sister Morenike’s place. I left Gbemisola there and that was the greatest mistake of my life. I shouldn’t have left her. It is one of my biggest regrets. But then, I was barely 7, how could I have embarked on the long journey to my sister’s place with a 3 year old?
Near-death experiences
By the time I moved back in with Sister Morenike, she was selling vegetables like okra, pepper, and tomatoes at Ojaoba Market in Oke-aro, Akure. I immediately moved in to support her. So, whenever I was done with school, I would head straight to the market to hawk the goods. This was my first business experience and what actually birthed my entrepreneurship drive.
While helping with the business, I encountered kidnappers. There was this big market called Iloro in Oke-aro, where we used to buy vegetables in baskets and transport to the market where we sold them. On this fateful day, another older sister of mine, Eniola and I went to the market. She had just moved in with us after her bitter experience living with another relative. While sister Morenike went straight to Ojaoba, she would send me and Sister Eniola to Iloro.
On this day, we went to the market, bought our goods and took them to the roadside. That was the period the N100 note was released and ritual killings were rife in Akure. A lot of students died or simply disappeared and it was generally agreed that they were victims of ritual killings. After buying our baskets of vegetables that morning, we were waiting for a taxi by the roadside, when a man approached us and promised to help us get a taxi for free. Happy to save some naira, we accepted the offer. Soon, a vehicle approached us and the man flagged it down. Eniola instantly hopped into the back seat of the vehicle.
Being the meticulous boy I was, I followed the man to see how he would place my precious basket of okra in the boot of the car to ensure nothing would ruin the okra before we reached our destination. While trying to adjust the basket of okra in the boot, a thread from the sac covering got hooked to the basket and just then, I saw knives, cutlasses and charms. I immediately connected to some stories that the old women in our compound had told us about kidnappers and their strategies.
So, I told the man we weren’t going again and threatened to shout if he refused to let us out. Thank God we were along the road; if we had been in a hidden place, he probably would have forced me into the car. When Eniola heard us arguing, she alighted from the car to know what was going on. When the man saw there was nothing he could do, he dropped our basket, got into the car and they drove off. It was then I realised that they were a team. Imagine that I hadn’t followed him to the boot to see how the basket was being placed; that, probably, would have been the end of our lives.
Again, I escaped from being killed by flood on two occasions. The first time, it was late at night and I was returning from where I had gone to eat. It had rained heavily and I didn’t know that the path leading to the house was flooded. To be sincere with you, that is one experience I don’t have explanation for. I actually ran into the flood and the water was already washing me towards the culvert. I also knew that falling into that gutter that day would have been the end of my life. I don’t know what happened, but at the edge of the culvert, a force I cannot explain pulled me to the other side of the road. That’s one incidence that made me know that God really exists.
On another occasion, Sister Eniola and I were returning from the market, when we walked into a flood; and just like the first time, I cannot explain how we got to safety.
School dropout
I first went to school while living with my mother’s sister. There, I attended St. Anthony RCM at Isolo, Akure; but I wasn’t doing well. After I ran off to Sister Morenike’s place, she registered me in a public primary school at Oke-Aro. I still wasn’t doing well. At age 11 and in primary 4, I could not spell simple words. In Primary 5, I got so frustrated that I dropped out of school – because I wasn’t learning much and my classmates were treating me so bad. I couldn’t tell Sister Morenike, so I’d get dressed for school, but would also take extra clothes into which I’d change once I left home. I would then go to a saw mill in the area to carry plank and earn between N10 – N50 daily. I saw more value in that menial job than in my education.
One day, one of the market women saw me and reported to Sister Morenike, who personally took me to school the following day and found out from my teachers that I hadn’t been to school for weeks. That was how I was redirected back to school. Only God knows what would have become of me if that woman had not seen me at the saw mill that day.
Defining moment
In January 2003, when I was 12 and in primary 6, an uncle came to Akure and took me to Odogbolu in Ogun State. That was my defining moment. I got to his house on January 2nd, 2003. I was registered in a very good nursery and primary school, and for the first time, they bought me a school bag unlike the sac I was using in Akure. Initially, I wasn’t very serious, but it later dawned on me that this was a lifetime opportunity I couldn’t misuse if I wanted to make something of what was left of my already broken life.
I became more studious. After my common entrance examination, I was admitted into Mayflower School for the first year and later got a transfer to Federal Government College (FGC) Odogbolu, Ogun State in my second year. I, however, had challenge with anything calculation. So, I didn’t have a credit in Mathematics when I wrote my final exams, even though I had good grades in other subjects. And since I was to study Accounting, the result was useless. Luckily, my NECO result was better, so that was what got me admission to study Accounting in Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.
Career progression, business acumen
Towards the end of my first year at OAU, my uncle’s salary wasn’t forthcoming, which affected my regular monthly allowance. I started borrowing to feed until there was nobody willing to lend me money again. One fateful day, as I was returning from where I’d gone to read, I stopped by at another hall of residence to see a friend. When I got to his room, I saw sachets water, wraps of groundnut and sugar. I told him I was hungry and he gave me something to eat.
As I was about to leave, he told me that he started the business because he was also running out of cash and needed something to fetch him extra cash to sustain him for the rest of that semester. I asked if he could give me a bag of water and a dozen wraps of groundnuts to see if I could sell to my roommates. He agreed. Surprisingly, my roommates bought everything in less than two hours. I realised that was a business opportunity; meanwhile I had been borrowing.
I did that business for about a month before the long break. During the holidays, I got a tutoring job and was paid N5000. That, added to my school fees and pocket money, I was ready for the new session. When I resumed, I decided to expand the business by adding bread, egg, spaghetti and noodles. It got to a point where I was generating revenue of N500,000 in my room and my profit was around 10-15%, which meant I was making more than N50,000. I soon stopped calling home for my N5000 allowance, since I was making 10 times more.
Naturally, I told myself I wasn’t going to work for anybody once out of school, and that I would focus on doing business somewhere in Ibadan. This was my plan until I met my mentor, Taiwo Oyedele, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Few weeks to my POP, I booked an appointment with him to share my plans with him and ask for his guidance.
One beautiful Sunday evening, we sat at his home for about two hours, discussing my future; where I wanted to be in the next five, ten years…. I told him I was planning to relocate to Ibadan to do business. He, however, shared an insight with me that changed my life. He said, “Vincent, you are a very smart young man, but I don’t want you to make a terrible mistake.” He told me to consider looking for a corporate job to garner experience before deciding on full-time entrepreneurship. He was the first person who told me it’s possible to combine a corporate job with business on the side.
Following his counsel, I signed up on some websites and sent out my CV. PwC was one of the places I applied to and luckily I got in there as an intern. While an intern, I started buying cars for Uber and getting monthly rentals of N30,000 on a car. I was making N120,000 monthly, more than the salary I was being paid as an intern. After my internship, I applied for their apprenticeship programme and got the job offer. That’s how I started my career at PwC.
Sincerely, taking this job was one of the best decisions I have made. I lack words to tell you how much I have learnt, the people I have met, the experience I have gained in less than three years. It’s priceless. Today, I have more business investments than I had when I took the decision not to work for anybody.
Me and my books
I have four books published. I think that is quite an interesting feat for a boy who couldn’t spell H-A-T-E at age 11. I wrote my first book before I was 21. I started writing immediately I finished secondary school because I was at home and not engaged. One of my teachers was borrowing me books to read. Books are one of the things that actually transformed my life.
From reading those books, I got inspired that I could also write a book; so I started putting my thoughts down, linking it up with my story. That’s how my first book, “A task to be a hero” published in 2011, came to be. I wrote my second book, “Change is possible” published in 2013 in my 300-Level. The N300,000 I used to publish that book was raised from the business I was doing in my room.
In 2016, I published my third book, “Maximise your potential for academic excellence” for secondary school students. I recently launched my fourth book, “I am employable”. It’s a book for undergraduates, graduates and young professionals. I just decided to share my experience in the last three years, linking it up with entrepreneurship. I wanted to balance the narrative about doing business alongside a corporate job and also let people know that there is no excuse for failure.
I know I’m not done yet. There are still more books to write, because my future is still ahead of me. This is just a little part of what God has destined me to be.
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