Engineer AdebayoAdenekan is the Chairman of Hexon Group and the Managing Director/CEO of Hexon Environmental Consultants and Engineers Limited, a Nigerian based Consulting firm, providing a complete range of multi-disciplinary services to corporations, manufacturing industries, Governmental and non-governmental Organizations. The organisation has over the years grown and evolved in response to the Engineering and Environmental needs and priorities of its diverse clients. Engineer Adenekan, an Author, Priest and the President of Association of Systems Management Consultants of Nigeria spoke on the Focus of a CEO in this interview with Nnamdi Nwokolo.

What influenced your choice of career?
I’m a Chemical Engineer and co-founded Capital Oil Plc with three other gentlemen and ran it for nineteen years before taking over as the Chairman of the board for another three years. Since I retired I’ve led the management of Hexon Environmental Consultants, a part of the Hexon Group and an Environmental and Engineering Consulting company.

The choice of studying Chemical Engineering was carefully made because right from secondary school, I made up my mind that I was going to study Chemical Engineering. In my career trajectory, I’ve been involved in Oil and Gas, Engineering, Environmental Consulting etc. and I’ve also been involved in the work of God. But each of the industries I was involved in led to more opportunities and experience. Before the oil company was founded, I was also working for an oil company from where I garnered the needed experience to run the firm. Some of those experiences have defined what I am doing today in Environmental Consulting because pollution was a major issue in the oil and gas industry.

What were the initial challenges and how were you able to surmount them?
In co founding Capital Oil Plc, we were four young men who literally had no money as all of the cash we had back then was N100.00. It is important to point out that what you need to start out in life is not so much about money; rather what you need is the will, the support and the guidance. Though we did not have the guidance then, we had the will and the perseverance. What we lack in Nigeria is the understanding of the government that for the country to survive, industrial and economic development must be priority.
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We should rather start developing a better growth format of the country than what we have done in the last few years. When oil sale was booming in Nigeria, it was also the same in other countries; the difference is that countries like the UAE planned a more diversified growth format than we did, for instance the UAE and others established petrol stations and other industries all over Europe as well as industries inside thereby empowering their people. At the time we started the oil and gas business, we had no cash but we had the will, perseverance and we were focused on what we wanted to achieve and by the time I left, the organisation has employed hundreds of people. Basically, the training and the desire to succeed was paramount in our subconscious.

From your experience, what does it take to build a sustainable business?
It takes the whole works to build a sustainable business. First of all, partnerships do not seem to work successfully among Nigerians perhaps because the foundation and understanding of business relationship is nonexistent. The desire to acquire wealth at all cost is the bane of successful businesses in Nigeria and the basic concept of business has been eroded over the years. The principle of excellence has been replaced by the insatiable quest for wealth and it has affected the sustainability of business concerns in Nigeria.

For example, the foreign businesses grow better because they came for a purpose which is to succeed and they are more interested in how it will work, but when Nigerians take over, their interest becomes how much individuals rather the corporate body can make. The approach to business relationship has been faulty in this context and except there is a deliberate attempt to re-orientate Nigerian business owners to continuously strive for excellence, building sustainable businesses will continue to be a mirage in the country.

What can be done to encourage enterprise development?
There are quite a lot of young people with varying levels of education all over the place and that is a resource base for any country. If the basic infrastructure is there, it shouldn’t be difficult for a proper arrangement between the government and the private sector to encourage growth of young people in industries.
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We can have a joint venture with young people to develop industrial villages. We can also divide the country into industrial areas. For example, Lagos is surrounded with water, but how much of the fish as a water resource from Lagos is felt within Nigeria? I’ve just been to an area in Ogun state and I saw hundreds of hectares of green bushes, whereas in that same place there are very many jobless young people and it is like that all over the country. How can you have land and young men are jobless? There shouldn’t have been blowing of pipelines if we had utilized them for productive growth that will help us balance the economy. There had to be a renewed approach by the leadership in terms of designing our educational curriculum to be geared towards performance, excellence and growth.

As a professional, what is your take on the tremor warnings in Nigeria?
It is a scary situation that we should all worry about. When you have tremor warnings, it is a sign that something is not right under the ground. If per chance we are not sure of the findings so far, we should engage other professionals to ensure that the tremors are not serious warnings. But I know that the team that did findings is made up of competent people. When you have three tremor warnings in eight years, it calls for serious concern. I understand that the last one coincided with the drying up of Ogun River.

In all honesty, it is not drying up of the river as such. The emptying of the water is related to that tremor and is telling us that it is a very dangerous time. I urge the government to do a deeper investigation to know the chances of the earthquake so as to minimize its impact. The government ought to quickly assemble professionals in related fields to do deeper studies and plan ahead putting mitigation measures in place. I am deeply worried, but it is principally a federal government issue while the states and the local governments affected must cry out so that things like specific emergency response systems, earthquake warning equipment, related evacuations systems and other mitigation measures will be put in place along the earthquake belt.