Airtel Africa’s Segun Ogunsanya, Rain Oil’s Godrey Ogbechie Lay Bare Failure, Faith and Grit at Imperfectly Awesome 4.0

Mary Nnah

CEOs, bankers, and students assembled at the Muson Centre, Lagos, on Sunday, May 3, not for a corporate seminar, but for a raw reckoning on resilience, tenacity, and authenticity at Imperfectly Awesome Conversations 4.0.

Keynote speaker, Dr. Segun Ogunsanya, former Managing Director of Airtel Nigeria and Africa and Chairman of Airtel Africa Foundation, opened the discussion by protesting “gender bias”, before dismantling the myth of flawless leadership. “None of us arrived here perfectly put together,” he told the audience.

Ogunsanya stated, “We arrived looking renewed, reshaped. Some look bruised. There’s imperfection everywhere. Whether you are rich, whether you are poor, whether you are a student.”

His defining moment came with a raw call to vulnerability: “Life is full of things. It fluctuates. So, please, start practising how to cry…”

For Ogunsanya, resilience is not about bouncing back but bouncing forward.

“Resilience doesn’t shout. It whispers, try again, try again,” he said. “It doesn’t mean you don’t struggle. It means you choose not to stop. Because when you stop, you drown. The dancing stops.”

He recounted a failed Barcelona pitch where the airline refused to let him fly, leaving him to reframe setback as data, not defeat.

“Temporary disruption doesn’t equal permanent failure,” he said.

On tenacity, he revealed he nearly quit during his nine years as CEO for one of Airtel’s 14 African countries, where he was the only black CEO of a Fortune 100 company. “But I stayed,” Ogunsanya said.

He also recalled resistance to Airtel’s 4G rollout in Africa and stressed that tenacity meant refining strategy instead of abandoning it. Authenticity, he insisted, is non-negotiable. He stated, “To succeed in life, you must be an authentic person. You must be true to yourself. You don’t want to lie to yourself.”

When asked whether to pursue the CEO path or entrepreneurship, he rejected the dichotomy: “Both parts can make you very prosperous… It depends on how ambitious you are and how you define success. Success is not just in terms of the dollar, the naira.”

He added that the true test of leadership was grooming others: “If you’re the only lodestar, you’re a very selfish leader.”

Group Executive Director of Rain Oil Limited, Mrs. Godrey Ogbechie, followed with unscripted candour. “Because the doctors are all over the place, the anchor decided to add doctor to my name this evening. But I am not,” she said, drawing laughter.

“I have been thinking of doing a doctorate for the last seven years and have not even filled in an application form yet… And I am already 60 years old,” she said.

Ogbechie said her motivation was always her grandmother, who returned to school at 70 to read the Bible for herself.

She also decried the decline in work ethic among younger generations. “That principle of hard work is what is lacking today… It doesn’t matter how much AI and things become easy. We must not forget the principles of hard work and consistently showing up… Please, kill yourself. Something must die… You must kill laziness, procrastination,” she said.

She admits to her own insecurities, from hating her “masculine” voice to doubting her grammar, but says she now refuses to let them hold her back.

Convener, Dr. Lola Bamigbaiye, summed up the day’s theme: “We’ve been campaigning that we are enough. In fact, being enough is the new currency we need to start spending in today’s world, especially when people demand perfection from us.”

Bamigbaiye added that failing was acceptable if it led to learning, and urged attendees to “be a source of inspiration to someone else”.

On resilience in 2026, she said: “We need to keep going… When you keep going, you know that the end is in sight someday.”

The hardest part, she stated, was when “people want to take a shortcut, but the necessity pays”.