Victoria Nkong is the founder and CEO of Qtaby Events, which is involved in artistes booking management and human resource consultancy, among others. Over the years she has worked with notable music artistes like Akon, P-square, Harrysong, Orezi, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, Shaggy and Toofan from Togo. She tells Adetutu Audu what makes her tick.
What is it like being a female entrepreneur, and why did you choose to be one?
Being a female entrepreneur is both exciting and challenging at the same time. I love it each time I’m misjudged or underestimated by my male counterparts because of my sex, and I get satisfaction each time I beat their expectations by being the best at what I do and hearing the surprise in their voice each time they meet me and are like “oh are you the one?” or “oh I thought you were much bigger”.
On the sour side, it actually gets frustrating when you arrive a meeting as a female entrepreneur and the person on the other end will rather spend time teasing you and trying to flirt with you instead of talking business. However, on the brighter side, we get soft-landing and easy access on some projects, when you are dealing with a gentleman who would rather not bother a woman.
What will you say is responsible for your success?
God’s blessings have brought me this far, determination and dedication; hard work, more hard work and hard work. I have come to realise that there is no shortcut to success.
What values and principles have helped you so far?
Strict professional work ethics and standards set for my team and myself, delivery before excuses, attention to the most minute details, strict supervision for my team and ensuring customer satisfaction. I never mix work with pleasure, there’s time for everything.
Why did you go into entertainment and event management?
I would rather say that my current business chose me and not the other way round. While in the university, I was that student that would be called to handle social activities. I remember anchoring my HODs book launch and even our final year awards night where I had to change outfits each time I needed to receive my award because I was anchoring and “producing” the event at the same time.
I finished school and my first job came. It was entertainment-inclined even though my entire family wanted me to be a lawyer. I was two months into the first job when I got the call from the prestigious KORA All Africa Music Awards.
I spent my early years on earth studying so hard to please my parents who were majorly educationists and my family as a whole. So now I have decided to make the rest of my life one big holiday, hence my adventure into entertainment so that I can earn a living from having fun.
Entertainment, for me, is a passion. I am basically doing what I love to do, so it doesn’t feel like work in the end. Also, I realised early enough that there was a vacuum in the field and I had been trained to fit this field from my early days working with KORA Awards through different roles; first as a bilingual phone operator, PA to the KORA president, presenter, a Talent Manager with KORA and finally as a presenter. When I relocated back to Nigeria, I was quick to know in what areas my services would be appreciated. There’s lateness to contend with. There’s trying to make people see the vision of excellence of delivery around here; trying to make people understand that as a client. Your word is supposed to be law. It was quite hectic. In the end, I needed like nine lives to pull that event through and it wasn’t an event you wanted to also mess with because referrals came all the way from Cape Town South Africa. Also, it was like a diplomatic event. We had the Italian ambassador; we had a couple of ambassadors from the Italian embassies. That’s also difficult because we come from a place where we give you exact figures for what we need to deliver and we deliver it. But now we are at a place where the client is the one telling you to up the figures and is demanding a percentage as a kickback. There were quite a lot of challenges initially, but we’ve been able to find a middle ground.
How would you appraise the entertainment scene?
It’s big business in Nigeria, if you ask me. Aside the oil boom, the next thing that has had a serious boom in Nigeria is the entertainment; whether it is music or acting. But then again, we have people who have been in this industry for quite a while, who have not seen the need to professionalise it. So we have people still seeing entertainers as unserious people. It’s not true; we work really hard in this industry. We work twice as hard as the people in the bank, but again, we haven’t done ourselves the right service. We don’t have proper insurance, though a couple of people are trying to start that now. We have artistes whose talent have proved that they should be at an international level. They are earning money but they don’t have the right team to take them to that next level, to give them that kind of respect. They don’t have the right team to ensure that even the brands they are affiliated with get the desired privileges attached to getting an artiste and as an ambassador. There’s still a lot we need to put in place for the Nigerian entertainment industry. A lot is being made out of it, but there’s still a lot we need to put in place in terms of structuring the industry for it to run professionally and properly.
As a woman, how would you describe life behind the scene?
I think it’s a decision. My life is actually in two aspects. As an event producer, you really need to learn to stay behind the scene. If you do not learn to discipline yourself, you will get carried away and the job will not be done. So I tell everyone on my team, never try to struggle for stardom with the stars. We are supposed to be the star maker, so I try to keep it at that. You can’t come to an event and see me glamorously dressed. I do that on purpose. As an artiste manager, at times, it is also inevitable to get seen but that’s a different angle entirely. I now know how to balance keeping the star makers. It was something I learnt when I was producing KORA; suddenly, I had to deal with celebrities I had seen on TV.
Why did you sett up a foundation?
The first rule of my life is to be different. I’ve always been different from the norm. From the charity angle, I see it as an assignment I had from childhood. I grew up happy putting a smile on other people’s faces. I grew up giving my elder sister my lunch money in school and staying hungry just to ensure she’s happy. I grew up finding out that I cannot sing to save my life. I hardly have any other aspect I can handle well in church so I went on a soul searching at some point in my life to know what I could also do and it was clear to me that it was charity. So I gave myself an age deadline. I told myself that by the time I’m 25, I would love to have started something in that direction. I didn’t know how I was going to achieve that, but each day I went out on the streets and I saw a child begging or a child hawking, I bled. I came from a background where I was lucky to have my bills paid for all through my growing up age but I didn’t choose that. I might as well have been that child on the road hawking bananas or plantain. And then something remarkable changed my life when I was leaving secondary school. We went on an excursion to an orphanage home. There were these pretty little children all in their cots and seemingly at peace. Now I made the move to pick up one of the babies and she wouldn’t let me put her down again. She kept crying. So my heart reached out to that girl and then I told myself that the only way to go would be to have an orphanage home where I can try to set up something as close as possible to a family setting for children. When I lost my sister eventually, I knew that was the halting time. Luckily for me, I met with the CEO of Jabo Oil. I had some savings but not enough to put up the dream I had. And he, with a very large heart, keyed into the vision immediately and has always kept his part of the bargain to do 85% financing and also be a father to the kids at the home. We also embark on a lot of projects for the foundation, empowerment projects for slums and for widows and he has always gone the nine mile with me.
So you had a soft landing?
Almost, but finance is still not everything because when you are planning, it looks easier than when you get into it actually. When I had my first five children, I realised what challenges could be; both emotional challenges, financial challenges. Right now, we have 17 children. We’ve had up to 25 kids in the past but some of them got adopted, some found their parents.
How do you get the kids for your homes?
For regulatory reasons, we are registered with the Lagos State Government Ministry of Youth and Social Development. So every child we get comes from the government. Even when we see a child in a vulnerable situation, we alert the person in charge in Alausa. They go and do the rescue and then hand the child over to us. We do that to protect ourselves as well as the child. We don’t want a situation where they come and accuse us of being a baby-making factory. If we ever go to rescue a child ourselves, it would have been that we received a call from the government to pick the child up.
What has been your most emotional moment running the foundation?
There are several of them. There is a particular child who came in a very critical condition. I was called at about 11:30 at night that the child was almost dying at the orphanage. I was in my house in Lekki. I drove down by midnight alone through third mainland bridge to pick up the child, took him to the hospital. Within the same night, we did four trips to the hospital and back. The doctor kept trying but he didn’t tell me it was beyond him. He suggested that we should go see a consultant at LASUTH. Now, my driver wasn’t available at that time of the night. I had to drive myself and the child to LASUTH. We were kept for about two hours and we were eventually told that the hospital was full and we needed to go somewhere else. They referred us to LUTH. This was about 2:30am. Long story short, we found a private paediatrician who finally stabilised the child at about 5pm the next day. So, between 2am and 5pm we were battling with the child. I missed my MBA exam trying to get the child stable. After that time, I had to nurture that child for a full year. He came to us at three years old and when he was getting to a year and five months, we found his biological father. I had become so attached to the child before the father took him back, I had to lock myself up and I cried throughout the night. I felt like I was losing my own baby. But then, I had to train myself after that to realise that some of them would have to go eventually.
What are some of your activities?
We had one annual activity called Slum Invasion. We go to slums; we’ve been to Makoko Extension, and we have been to Ayetoro and Isale Iwaya. We go and celebrate with them. We take celebrities that we know they don’t have the opportunity to meet. We know if we go there to give a motivational speech, nobody would come out so we use celebrities to lure them out, celebrate with them and then empower them. We partner with skill empowerment organisations and we get these youths to register with them for free. We give scholarship to children. We do an outreach to widows called share your closet where we encourage people to give out of the abundance of what they have for us to sell and use to empower widows with petty trade and businesses.
How do you find time for yourself?
It’s going to happen someday. I’m going to find time for myself someday (laughs). It has hardly happened yet. It’s almost a 24-hour job because when I’m not attending to business, I’m attending to the kids. And I try to see them on a daily basis when I’m in the country. So, I have to work almost 24 hours most times, but I’m working now so that I can rest in the future. But then I’m trying to organise the orphanage in a way that it must be able to run without my physical presence. That way, I can create more time for myself.
Describe yourself
I am completely made in Nigeria. I am multilingual, I love adventures, I love putting a smile on other people’s faces and I love to be happy. I earn a living from helping other people achieve their dreams: I am a talent manager, a line producer, an author and a mother to the children at Life Fountain Orphanage Home. I refer to myself as the best thing that happened to the world.
