ADAORA ONYECHERE

Adaora Onyechere is a broadcast Journalist with Daar Communications Plc and also the co-anchor of Kaakaki on Africa Independent Television (AIT). She is the CEO of Signature Heels.
 In this exclusive interview,Adaora talks about her journey as a journalist and a social entrepreneur.

 Tell us about yourself?

My name is Adaora Onyechere. I am from Imo state, okigwe local government area to be precise. I am born to Chief Ike Onyechere (MFR), my Mom; Dr. Mrs. Love Onyechere is the honorable Commissioner for Women Affairs and Youth Development in Imo State.
 
My Dad is a bundle of talents; he is an author and also a publisher. I am a bit of my Dad and my Mom, but when it comes to strength and energy and talking, I got that from my mother and I got the conservative writing skill from my father.

I work for AIT; I’m one of the anchors of Kaakaki-the African Voice. I am first an entrepreneur, before a broadcast Journalist. I am a mother and I don’t just mean one child but a lot of children. I have a foundation where I carter to displaced kids.
 
I lived most of teenage life in England; I came back to Nigeria in 2009.

 What was growing up like for Adaora?
That’s a very deep question. I grew up in a lot of places, we moved a lot as a child. My father worked in an oil company, when we were growing up. So, we shuttled between Port-Harcourt, Owerri, Lagos and Enugu. With regards to that, I went to four secondary schools. So, I have a lot of Alma Maters; everybody claims I am a bit of them. Maybe because they see me on TV now, but when I was nobody no one claimed that (laughs), but I finished from Owerri Girls Secondary School.

Immediately after I had to stay at home a bit. I tried to see if I could settle into a Nigerian university, but it didn’t work out quite well. I left Nigeria very early as a child. I went to the UK. I did a diploma in law as a foundation student and then I told my dad “this is not my calling”. I don’t think I want to do law; reading and rereading other people’s judgment cases to analyze my life. But I’ve also been told that I will make a good lawyer. Maybe, sometime in my early forties or there about, I probably might dabble into it. 

I studied English major and broadcasting minor in my first degree. I worked with a lot of television houses in the UK. I worked with BBC channel 4; I anchored a show on Ben Television called “Nollywood Review.” I was also, a lead actress in a soap Opera called “If Only”, which was used to raise awareness for HIV/AIDS, in sub-communities, in the counties of west England. For me, my life is an embodiment of art and craft. 

Who or what inspired your love for Journalism?

I don’t know if it was somebody that inspired it. I love to put some of my thoughts on paper, and I talk to people a lot. There’s a difference between when you are a talkative and conversational. There’s never a dull moment with me. I realized that wait a minute, once I walk into a room the light goes on bam. Like everybody says “ah she’s here now”.

I realized that for me, if I ever wanted to do anything television, one am a shy person, which doesn’t reflect, or doesn’t come across when you see me on the street. I’m a very shy person. I‘m very sensitive, and fall short between dramatic and energetic. I thought I would do well, perhaps as a talk show host for social activities and social life and relationships and analyzing the home front but I never thought I would do politics. Politics was never in my agenda; in fact, I used to think that politicians were perhaps, outside lawyers, the worst exaggerators on the face of the earth.

 What I understood was that television is the most powerful tool for mental hypnosis, in the sense that if you watch something on TV two times, it’s bound to sound and look like the truth to you. I watch Oprah and I see her bring her spirit into her talk show. Her spirit in a sense that she is not a make believe talk show, she is an artist of her experience. If Oprah could come from all of that, because I went through quite a lot of things in my life and I think that could actually be her personality, it could inspire me to stay strong in the profession.

Talking about the inspiration for the profession, I think writing and my personality have always been a television factor, but I never thought that I would do TV, because I had a speech defect when I was growing up. I think believe, passion and talent go a long way. if you have talent and you have no passion, the talent will die before it even starts, but believe in the passion for it grow, for you to nurture it is a whole total mentality that you have to experience.

What is the inspiration behind Signature Heels?

When I thought about Signature Heels, I thought of it at a time when it was supposed to be a personal agenda. I wanted to look very Afro-centric, so I would wrap my own ear rings, my shoes and bags and people would say “I like what you are wearing, where did you make it?” and I am like, I made it , “it’s like how much?”. This is something I made to wear.

I had not thought about putting a price to it and then they ask “how much” am like N1500. And I would pull the ear ring in my ears and give the person who liked it and I would have some money in my pocket. Then I go home and I will think wait a minute, so you mean I just sold something I made out of sheer curiosity.

Also, I realized that over the time and space, we have begun to westernize a lot of our thinking, our culture and our wardrobe. We have moved from a time when we would see women naturally tie wrapper and feel confident and beautiful to a place where they thought or they think western apparels were more in vogue than being African. And on the other hand, the people across borders are thinking oh, Africa is a land of uniqueness and beauty and when they come here, rather than come and wear those contemporary clothes they are used to, they come here to buy our materials, they come here to invest in our ideas that are just home grown, meanwhile we want to look like them.

So, I just thought maybe because of the power and the tool of the media-it has a way of driving the mind to think of what it sees often and that’s why you find a lot of our younger generation wearing more trousers, wearing more leather skins and painting their hair. It’s not because they don’t know where they are coming from but because this is for them what is most societal acceptable.

I don’t disagree with growing with time, because this is the 21st century. But at the same time, I disagree in loosing who we are and I think that’s what inspired me to really go into Signature Heels-to have a sense of Africa on everything. Most importantly to be able to collaborate with other African countries to also retain their

cultures and also think of a way of exporting our ideas. I thought it would be a powerful tool to be able to take a Tanzanian raft material and put on a Nigerian design and export it to Germany or you have like Ukwu-Ose material (a material that is endogenously Igbo, and it means a tale of pepper) to wrap a shoe or an iPad and somebody buys it and says “what is this?”. It’s fabrics on electronics that is the fusion of the idea. 

Signature Heels is just a baby now, the strength of my idea is to make Signature Heels a walk-in one-stop African shop, where you find everything from all over Africa in the shop.

Your bags and shoes are handmade, that means you source your fabrics locally. How do you do that?
 Well, it’s really difficult because of the stability and the unstable market. Prior to the time when the demolition in the FCT wasn’t really as avid as it now, you would find material hawkers. And I prefer to patronize people who were struggling to make a living, because you are putting a pay check to their struggle, than people who already have shops like this; who have been able to build capital over time; who have a base.  

What happens is that the people are not just selling that for a living, it matters to them that you are patronizing them because you are also going to encourage them to keep recycling culture. But over time, a lot of them have withered because there is no place for them to stay and hawk.

As a young and a successful woman, what word of advice do you have for the women?

A lot of women when you ask them, they will say “I have a lot of dreams but I don’t have capital” or they will tell you “I come from a poor background” or they will tell you “I am not educated” or they tell you “everybody I go to, want to sleep with me” that is the usual line that you hear.

My word of advice for women is that your passion can fuel your talent, in the sense that I make all of these. This is just one part of me, am also a poet and I would want to record and I would want to mass produce my cds and give it to students but it needs capital. For me to be able to get the capital to produce I invest in my passion time, and I collaborate with people who understand what passion is and we come out with this. It builds the virtue; the virtue is the value which is money and then the money which becomes capital feeds and helps to produce the cds which are products of my poetry. You’ve got to realize that nobody was born to help anybody.

Everybody on the face of the earth is determined by destiny to find an innate ability to survive. Now survival does not mean to hustle-to hustle and to work hard are two different things. To hustle is to have something that keeps you in existence which is just for you to get by. To work hard is to invest time in something that fuels passion which is enterprise.

For a lot of women out there who are looking for sugar daddies and boyfriends to carter to them. Those sugar daddies and boyfriends were not born to carter to them.
So therefore, when they complain that they sleep around to earn a living, it’s also based on the fact that they have predetermined that they will not make use of what God has given to them. For every human being there’s ability, there’s an innate source that fuels your drive. There’s something that is got to awaken your passion.

Is Adaora married/why?
No am not. Well, it’s not a question of why it’s when. Because if you say why, it would seem like I haven’t gotten a plutoria of advances or suitors. My life is a box of fireworks. Marriage for me is very much in the pipeline, it’s very much around the corner. The fireworks are buzzing already but whether it will happen it will happen.

I have seen too many divorces, because a lot of younger people are marrying for the wrong reasons. They rather have the ceremony than the institution. You have people investing in weddings rather than investing in themselves to build themselves so that they are able to sustain their marriage. A lot of us have this misconception that marriage solves all problems, in fact what you see while you are dating somebody multiply it by 25 when you marry the person. If you tolerate a relationship, you’ll endure a marriage.

Marriage for me is an institution of honor, I rather get it right and late than go into it as much as I could early enough and get it wrong. People have to understand that a marriage supplies the emotional energy to be the best you can to your children and your society.

Describe Nigeria in one word.

We are a nation filled with different people, different tribes, and different culture. Regardless of all the bickering and rivalries, we will not be without one another.
 

Our strength is in our unity and our weakness is in our division. Nigeria is the symbol, the synonym, the sign, the strength and the energy of what it truly means to be a family. Nigeria is a family and we are not afraid to love.

POWERED BY: