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

Mary Nnah

CEOs, bankers and students packed the Muson Centre recently, 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 by protesting “gender bias” before dismantling the myth of flawless leadership. “None of us arrived here perfectly put together,” he told the audience.

“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.”

He also recalled resistance to Airtel’s 4G rollout in Africa and stressed that tenacity means refining strategy instead of abandoning it.

Authenticity, he insisted, is non-negotiable. “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 is 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 candor. “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 to laughter.

“I have been thinking of doing a doctorate for the last seven years and have not even filled an application form yet… And I am already 60 years old.” Her motivation? Her grandmother, who returned to school at 70 to read the Bible for herself. 

Ogbechie spoke of being raised “like a boy” after her father had five daughters, and of vowing at 16 never to let a boy compromise her future after her best friend became pregnant. 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 admitted to her own insecurities, from hating her “masculine” voice to doubting her grammar, but said 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’re 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.”

She added that failing is acceptable if it leads 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 noted, is when “people want to take a shortcut… but the necessity pays.”