The President, Rotary Club of Festac Town, Lagos Alexander Chukwuemeka Geonlebedum, spoke to DEBO OLADIMEJI on why he joined the club and his plans to take it to the next level.
Background
I am a native of Umucheke in Ideato South Local Council Area of Imo State. I am the current President of Rotary Club of Festac Town, Lagos and the 34th president of the club.

I am happily married with kids: two boys and two girls. I am a businessman as well as a farmer.
I joined Rotary through one of my friends, Chief Collins Onyenze. He is a Rotarian. The day they wanted to induct him, he invited me but I couldn’t make it. He kept telling me that I should come and fellowship with them. After fellowshipping with them once, I just liked what they were doing.

The following year, that was in 2004, I became more interested. I joined on March 24, 2004. That was the day they inducted me into the club. After my induction, I served in many capacities in the club. From Bulleting Editor to Rotary Foundation, I became the president-elect and finally today, I am the president of the club. It took me 11 years to get to the post of president. It is not a small club where you can just come and get to the top.

What led to your interest in the club?
In Rotary, you don’t think of what you will gain. You think of what to do. Right from time, I love to do humanitarian services. Helping people to achieve their dreams. Rotary is a good place where you can help people to achieve their dreams. People that you don’t even know. That is really what made me to join Rotary.

What are your plans for the club?
My plans are not really my own plans, per se. It is the general plans of the club. Each Rotary year, there are some agenda we have to run. And those agenda you can’t run them without money. That is why we do what we call investiture, where we have to raise money to do those programmes.

The theme of Rotary this year is: ‘Being a gift to the world.’ We have six major areas of focus. We talk of Water and Sanitation under which we hope to drill boreholes, maybe two or three boreholes in Festac. We have what is called Maternal Care. We have a star project called hole-in- the-heart. We have to send little kids with hole-in-the-heart to India. Each one is going to cost us $10,000.
We have the plan of taking six people to India before the end of the Rotary year.

Then we have what is called Basic Education and Literacy. Under that, we are going to schools to distribute exercise books, organise debates in different schools and give the winners awards at the end of the debates. During my investiture, one Prince Benson pledged to give us two scholarships. He has sent us a letter to train two people from Junior Secondary School (JSSI) to Senior Secondary School (SSS3).

The money has already been approved. We are now looking for the right people to give the scholarships to. We have what we call Community Development and Community Care. Here, we bring people of different ethnic groups together for peace. We need money to run these programmes. We are giving incubators to some hospitals. One will cost about N2.9 million.
We have what we call Rotary Youth Programme Exchange. We are going to send some youths to some schools in Apapa for training. That one will cost N25, 000 per head. We are looking at 20 youths. We are sending them by December to go for the programme.

Some of our late Rotarian brothers, we have the plan to bring members of their families closer to us. Then we are also planning what we call WECARE. We need to find out what the people that are no more in the club are doing. Now in Rotary, we are also helping ourselves as well. We now care for the interests of our members. That is why we have WECARE programme in the club.

makes your programme unique?
The next five presidents coming after me will benefit from my programme. People will continue to benefit from the scholarship programme in six years to come. I have inducted six new Rotarians for the short space of time after my induction and they are going to bring fresh ideas to the club.

I will try my best to make sure that my meetings don’t last more than one hour. We are going to make it more lively. Our goal is to make money. If you don’t make money in Rotary, you will not have the means to carry out your programmes.

How do you plan to raise money?
We have a budget of about N22million for the year and with the look of things, we are hitting to the money. We have six new members already, we are only left with four to get to my target.