Chief Executive, Stanbic IBTC Capital Limited, Yewande Sadiku tells Nseobong Okon-Ekong how raising $10 million for the making of Half of a Yellow Sun has made her a more compassionate banker There are a few paradoxes that make Yewande Sadiku’s life very interesting. She is a banker with all the shrewd mannerisms that come with the trade. Every banker knows how to be watchful and keep a keen eye on the books. And Yewande is like that too. But she has a flip side known to her peers in the banking sector. She is an artist at heart. Many people tell her that she should have been an artist. In more ways than one, she is alive to her creative instinct. So even though she is Chief Executive, Stanbic IBTC Capital Limited, nobody raises an eyebrow when she steps out of convention with the way she wears her hair. Four years ago, she bade farewell to the last form of synthetic hiar product and allowed her natural hair a free reign. Many of her friends harboured a hidden disdain for people who wear their natural hair because they held the wrong opinion that it was not possible for a right thinking person to wear her natural hair. But here is a banker who found a neat way of wearing her natural hair. For this, she gets a lot of compliments. Twice a month she drives all the way from Lagos Island to Onike on the Mainland where she previously resided for 15 years. She goes to the same hairdresser who uses homemade shear butter to manage her hair. Not a few of her friends have been won over by her style. In the manner of established female entertainment personalities who are married and yet retain their maiden names, Yewande’s marriage to Muhtar Bakare did not necessarily lead to a change of name. As the name Yewande Sadiku had become an established brand in the banking sector, becoming Mrs. Bakare was going to take some time to get used to. Of course, everyone knows that Mr. Bakare, the owner of Farafina - a publishing concern that made its debut with Chimamanda Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus - is the husband of Yewande and that they are very much in love. To be sure, it takes a man like Bakare to understand Yewande, as he was formerly a banker who turned his back on the finance industry for publishing. In 2010, Yewande made, arguably, the most definitive move in her career. While on an Eisenhower Fellowship, she studied the Role of the Financial Sector in Supporting the Development and Growth of the Media and Entertainment Industry in the US. During that course of study, She observed at closed quarters how films were used as an influencer in the communities. It was just as well that Yewande and her husband chose to promote Chimamanda’s book, Half of a Yellow Sun as their first film project. Their sentiment for the author is understandable. And it is a feeling that is reciprocated by Chimamanda. It was the Eisenhower Fellowship that fired Yewande’s imagination to begin a search for the USD10 Million for the production of Half of a Yellow Sun. It is the most ambitious budget yet for a made-in-Nigeria film. Narrating the rough road and unwholesome experiences she had with trying to raise funds for the movie, Yewande was moved to tears. As a top investment banker, she knows where to look for money. She knows many Nigerians who are millionaires (even billionaires) in any convertible currency. She thought her closeness to some of them could be exploited for this purpose. Raising the money, she thought would be easy. But Yewande had another think coming. She was surprised when many of these persons refused to pick her calls. And this is the painful part. She thought these persons were her friends. They could afford the funds she was asking for. She could never understand why they turned her down. As she relived the experience again, she fought back the tears that flooded her eyes. For Yewande, her travails in the process of raising money for the production of Half of a Yellow Sun is a tough story to tell. She likens it to the sweet-sour experience of a pregnant woman. “It is a joyful thing that film is created, but the process of creating it comes with pain. It is like birthing a child. You are happy about the life that has come but the mother goes through pain to bring it forth. It is still a work in progress. From an artistic perspective, the film is done but from a financial perspective it is not. It is only when the money comes back that the movie is done. I’m like a woman who’s seven months pregnant, for the first time. You can see that I am pregnant; I don’t have to say it. But it is only after I’ve given birth that I can tell you about the experience of having a child. So, I am almost there. We have not made our money. The other investors are waiting.” Yetunde might have glossed over details of her struggle to get funds for the movie by stating that she only went through the usual challenges people face when they are trying to raise money for anything. She was confronted with questions like, ‘Will they do it? Will they do it well? Will they start and not finish?’ For the first time, she was faced with the challenges that creative people have to shoulder. Owing to the fact that the creative space is intangible, it is a lot more difficult to explain. The difficulty was compounded as a result of the scale of intangible product she was trying to produce. That explains the pain she went through to raise the fund. “Entertainment is intangible. A musician says I want to write a new song and it is going to be a hit. How do you know it will be a hit? It is difficult for him to explain that somebody should fund the making of that song. You need to take a leap of faith. Banks are not in the business of taking a leap of faith. If you give a bank your money and you go back for a withdrawal, you are not going to accept it if the bank says ‘sorry, we took a leap of faith and we don’t have your money.’ That leap of faith is the business of investors in the private sector, then banks come in to support that. But we shouldn’t be mistaken to think that banks are in the business of throwing away money.” From her experience as a banker and as a lover of the arts, a lot of work needs to be done in the entertainment industry before banks can completely accept to look at them. The first thing is accountability and record keeping. Entertainment industry enterpreneurs need to show their cash flow. The industry needs to know that banks will treat their request the same way as others. Surely there must be more to it since record keeping and verifiable statistics did not seem to impress investors when she went knocking on their doors to get money for Half of a Yellow Sun. Apparently, there are long-held notions that have to change. “You are telling people who are not used to financing entertainment to finance entertainment. You have to deal with the problem of trying to do something for the first time or in a way that it hasn’t been done before or on a scale that it hasn’t been done before,” she pointed out. However, one of the good things that emerged from the Half of a Yellow Sun experience is that Yetunde has become a more compassionate banker. “We work with models that say what should happen, but in real life things happen. Real life is not in a model. You can model it all you want but it will turn out differently. You may not factor that it will rain or that it will rain for four hours or that it will rain for the entire week. Some of that reality I am a little bit sensitive to now.” An important driving factor for Yetunde in accomplishing the movie project was her belief that it was a very important story to tell. She reckoned that it would have been different if Half of a Yellow Sun were seen through the eyes of a foreigner. She was particularly happy to support the project because it was a Nigerian who wrote the book and a Nigerian who directed the movie. The cast and the crew are Nigerians. Explaining her involvement in publishing Half of a Yellow Sun in book form and production of a film adaption of the book, Yewande said something bigger than her decided she was going to be involved in the making of the film. “I can’t explain it better than that. We had so many difficulties that I felt I had faith in what seemed impossible. When I sat down to analyse why I got involved I realised that the book had sold about one million copies and had been translated into 30 languages. It is a very Nigerian story, written by a very Nigerian author with a very Nigerian name. For the book to have traveled that far, it is a story that has touched the lives of many people. It is not about race. It is not about colour. It is just a beautifully written book.” To understand Yewande’s dress sense, she is guided by one factor-comfort-whether at work or weekends. She grew up with four brothers but she is the first girl of the family and the third child. Growing up, she copied her brothers.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 07:43:37 +0000
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