Cyprian Orakpo: Building Resilience in Businesses

After decades of building businesses, Cyprian Orakpo has not retreated into an office where the past is allowed to speak for him. The lingering question as the serial businessman turns 60 is: what will remain when business is over? Adedayo Adejobi writes…

A t 60, Cyprian Orakpo has accumulated the sort of credentials that usually gets arranged neatly on a wall and left there. The awards are already doing that job.

Plaques and certificates are spread across his expansive office in the industrial area of Amuwo Odofin, as reminders of a career that has moved through trading, international commerce, manufacturing, corporate leadership and, more recently, healthcare. A 32-channel CCTV monitor sits within view, quietly showing different corners of the operation. At another desk in the same room is his wife, working alongside him.

There is something revealing about the arrangement. After decades of building businesses, Orakpo has not retreated into an office where the past is allowed to speak for him. He is still very much involved. But the questions he asks himself at 60 are different from those that preoccupied his mind at 30 or 40.

“Success changes with age,” he says. “When you are young, success may mean passing your examinations. Later, it may mean getting a job, getting married, owning a house. At 60, you begin to reflect more on what really matters.”

The reflection is not abstract. Orakpo has watched businesses rise and fall, technologies disappear, colleagues die and priorities change. He has also learned that the things that once seemed permanent rarely are.

Cars change. Fashion changes. Awards are replaced. People who once seemed famous disappear from public memory. “So you begin to ask yourself, what is the value of life?” he says.

“You begin to think about relationships, impact and the legacy you want to leave behind.”

Born into a generation that understood business largely through relationships and reputation, Orakpo began his working life in trading after studying Economics and Statistics at the University of Benin. His early education was not confined to lecture halls. He describes Alaba International Market, where he spent his formative years in business, as an “international business school.”

He learned there that commerce was about considerably more than price. “It was about relationships with suppliers and customers,” he says. “Big businesses are done on credit. Your credibility is what gives you access to that credit.”

He remembers the informal tests young apprentices faced. A senior trader could give a young man money to buy food, knowing perfectly well that the change was more than necessary. Returning the balance was a small act, but it said something important.

“You passed your first examination in honesty.”

The same principle, he believes, follows a person into adulthood. When an apprentice eventually sets up on his own, the capital may be limited. What opens doors is the reputation built over years.

“That is what supplies the rest,” he says. “If you have served your boss well, your boss will give you credit. If you have served other people well, they will also give you credit.”

It became a philosophy that would prove useful when he moved from trading into manufacturing.

Orakpo spent four years at Orasonic Nigeria Limited, rising from Operations Manager to General Manager, before spending a decade as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Transerve Nigeria Limited. In 2004, he founded Transerve Disc Technologies, which became a major optical media manufacturing operation, producing CDs and DVDs at a scale that placed it among the largest plants of its kind in Africa.

The move into manufacturing was not the product of comfortable certainty.

When audio and video tapes began giving way to CDs, Orakpo saw a threat to the business. He also saw an opening. Without the money to hire a consultant, he travelled abroad, visited CD manufacturing plants in China and studied the technology himself.

“I became my own consultant,” he says.

He returned to Nigeria and produced a feasibility study and business plan. Then he took it to the bank.

Nobody wanted to finance it. He understood why. He had experience in trading, not manufacturing. The business plan sat unused for several years. Then, in 2003, a bank looking to deepen its involvement in the emerging Nollywood industry began asking questions about companies it could trust. Of five industry players approached, three reportedly pointed towards Transerve Nigeria Limited, a firm he incorporated in 1994. That reputation changed the conversation.

“I pulled out the study I had done earlier,” Okakpo recalls. The bank financed the machinery. Transerve Nigeria Limited provided the factory. By 2004, the manufacturing operation was underway.

For Orakpo, that episode remains one of the clearest demonstrations that reputation can become capital. “People are watching even when you don’t know they are watching,” he says.

“We were an ethical company. We played by the rules. That was what got us the attention of the bank.”

The company later developed a job alert management system to tackle a different problem. At the time, piracy was widespread and disputes between producers and distributors were common. Producers questioned sales figures. Distributors were accused of underreporting.

Orakpo’s answer was technology.

The system sent alerts to producers and distributors at different stages of production, from the placement of an order through manufacturing, packaging, payment and delivery. It also deliberately separated production stages so that no single employee controlled the process from beginning to end.

“It was innovation,” he says. “One person could not control production from A to Z.”

For a while, the model worked remarkably well. But technology eventually defeated the very industry it had helped him build.

The arrival of internet distribution changed the economics of physical media. Consumers could download or stream content without the old manufacturing and distribution chain. Transerve Nigeria Limited’s business was disrupted again.

This time, resilience alone was not enough. “We had to shut down,” Orakpo says.

The experience forced another reinvention, this time into healthcare manufacturing.

During COVID in 2019, he saw that Nigeria had virtually no local capacity for producing medical face masks. The company moved quickly, importing machinery and raw materials by air when borders and international supply chains were under severe pressure.

By May 2020, he says, the factory was producing masks. It was also where one of his hardest lessons in risk emerged.

Demand exploded and orders outstripped capacity. Like many entrepreneurs facing a market they believed would continue growing, Orakpo expanded. More machines were ordered.

Then COVID receded. Chinese imports returned. The economics changed almost overnight. The machinery remained, but locally manufactured masks could not compete on price with imports.

“I got my fingers burnt,” he says.

The experience has left him considerably more cautious about entrepreneurial opportunity. A gap in the market may be real, he says, but that does not mean the gap can support a viable business indefinitely.

TransGreen Nigeria Limited, an invention of necessity, subsequently moved into disposable syringe manufacturing, another attempt to build local healthcare production capacity.

Orakpo says the company began production in 2025 and became the first such manufacturer in Lagos. Yet the enthusiasm for manufacturing sits alongside a blunt assessment of what it costs.

Trading, he says, gave him more cash flow. Manufacturing gave him something else, responsibility.

When Transerve Nigeria Limited’s optical media business finally closed, some employees had been with the company for 15 years. Orakpo chose not to let them go immediately. For more than a year, he says, salaries continued even when the factory was no longer generating income.

“We were borrowing money to pay staff,” he discloses. “We value them. They are like family.”

For Orakpo, business is ultimately about people. That applies to employees, competitors, customers and family.

He is equally direct about the frustrations of manufacturing in Nigeria. He complains about overlapping government agencies, repeated requests for information, delays at ports, shipping problems, power costs and informal tolls imposed on businesses and their workers.

Manufacturing makes a company visible, he says. That visibility can become a burden when agencies treat businesses primarily as revenue sources rather than enterprises that need an environment in which to operate.

Orakpo is also a pastor and has spent decades in the Redeemed Christian Church of God. His religious life has influenced his understanding of success, particularly through the biblical passage in Matthew 25, which he interprets as a call to compassion.

For him, legacy is not simply the number of businesses built or the size of a balance sheet. It is whether people were helped along the way.

“I want to enlarge the scope of my impact,” he says. “Not just within the church, but to reach people irrespective of race, religion, tribe, sex or nationality.”

That thinking has found an institutional expression in the O-care Foundation, established on his 60th birthday on August 25. The ambition is to spend more of the years ahead on social impact and welfare.

His definition of fulfillment has also become more complicated. He does not pretend that money does not matter.

“Wealth is good,” he says. “Being able to meet your needs, pay school fees, own a house and live comfortably, that is fulfillment.”

But that is not the whole story.

He recalls a young man whose education he helped support. The man eventually became a pharmacist and later pursued a PhD in the United States. On one of Orakpo’s recent visits to America, the former beneficiary travelled for hours simply to see him. “That is a lot of sacrifice,” he says.

“You begin to see that there is more to life than being wealthy. You can be wealthy and be alone.”

That may be the most important lesson his career has given him.

His immediate business ambition is modest in description but substantial in execution. TransGreen Nigeria Limited is still young, he says. There are bills to pay, structures to build and obligations to mature. The company needs to become profitable.

He is not finished. “I want to create value and make a difference. Not just in my own life, but in the lives of people around me,” he said.

For a man who has already watched one industry disappear beneath the force of technology, that is perhaps the most revealing thing about turning 60.