Innocent Chukwuma: The Man Who Built His Own Road
Some people inherit roads; others build theirs from scratch. Innocent Chukwuma belongs firmly to the second kind. When he recently walked into Government House in Yenagoa to announce a new Innoson assembly plant for compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicles, it was more than a business pitch; it was the sound of a man still carving paths across Nigeria’s industrial map.
The Bayelsa project, he said, will produce buses, ambulances, and utility vehicles powered by CNG, a cleaner and cheaper alternative to petrol. 1,000 direct jobs are on the line, with many more expected to ripple out through logistics and parts supply chains. Governor Douye Diri, eager to turn his state from consumer to producer, promised infrastructure support and policy incentives to make it real.
Chukwuma, it’s the latest turn in a long, improbable journey that began in Nnewi in the late 1970s. He never got into engineering school. Instead, he learned commerce under a motorcycle parts dealer and later struck out on his own. He built Innoson from a spare-parts shop into Nigeria’s first indigenous automaker, a company that now builds buses for cities, trucks for factories, and even vehicles for the army.
His genius lies in a kind of industrial stubbornness. Where others saw import dependency as inevitable, he saw an opening. He made plastics when parts cost too much, manufactured tyres when suppliers fell short, and now, as fuel prices squeeze Nigerians, he turns to gas-powered engines.
It is tempting to read his story as a parable of self-made grit, yet it also mirrors the slow, uneven rise of Nigerian manufacturing: full of fits, pauses, and bursts of defiance. Even with Nigeria’s long addiction to imports, Innoson’s quiet rebellion has been to stay put and build.
The new plant in Bayelsa may seem a small thing in the global order of factories and emissions targets. But somewhere between the creak of a new assembly line and the hum of a gas-powered bus, a deeper story unfolds: of a man who keeps inventing what Nigeria seems to have forgotten to build for itself.
