Obi Cubana and the Theory of Associative Entrepreneurship

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Moses Ebe Ochonu

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Jul 20, 2021, 7:56:51 PM7/20/21
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Obi Cubana and the Theory of Associative Entrepreneurship

 

By Moses E. Ochonu

 

As an economic historian who edited a well-received book on entrepreneurship in Africa, the introduction to which argues for the recognition of distinct African entrepreneurial traditions and innovations, I find the case of Obi Cubana (Chief Obinna Iyiegbu) quite fascinating. The fascination grows when one looks beyond the visuals coming out of the funeral in Oba and the justifiable moral panic the visuals have provoked.

 

Let me first get a few caveats out of the way. I do not endorse his exhibitionist, and performative wealth, but I do not judge it either. To each their own. We all operate from different value and ethical scripts, but none is, in the final analysis, inherently superior to the other.

 

In this piece, I am not concerned with the moral and ethical ramifications of the optics on display in Chief Iyiegbu’s mother’s funeral. Morality is in the zone of the personal, and there is no single moral code for everyone. What matters is whether there are clear, unambiguous ethical and legal boundaries that safeguard society as a whole from acts that hurt non-participating compatriots or bring the country to disrepute. From my admittedly limited vantage point, I do not see how Cubana and company’s vulgar materialism and revelry transgress any extant laws, but I am open to being proven wrong.

 

Besides, a person has a right to spend their money as they wish, and Cubana's exhibitionism cannot be analyzed or understood outside his business and brand, which are anchored by show business and entertainment, the lifeblood of which are performance, choreographed pageantry, excess, and razzmatazz. In other words, his antics have instrumental and utilitarian logic in his line of business. The person, the performance, and the profession are all intricately connected in a symbiotic web of mutual reinforcement.

 

What appears to others as his offensively filthy exhibitionism and excessive self-indulgence are actually part of his business repertoire, part of the script, and aspects of a carefully, strategically organized spectacle to boost his brand. If I'm right then this is a type of genius.

 

Others of course have a right to be disgusted and to express that disgust in moral, ethical, or religious terms, but ultimately, a person has the right to bury their loved ones in the manner that pleases them, and they are accountable only to their conscience, to God, and to a lesser degree, to their natal community from which they derive social legitimacy and cultural capital. On this last point, I have not heard the people of Oba complain about the events of this past weekend.

 

On the question of how Cubana and his associates became so wealthy, any explanation outside of privileged insider or documented information is conjecture and speculation. I will also leave the question of how he started and how he obtained his seed money to those with privileged information. He has granted an interview to BBC Pidgin in which he goes into details about his beginnings and the early days of a hardscrabble life of hustle and modest successes punctuated by failures. Alternative stories of his financial ascent would have to convincingly refute and displace the autobiographical narrative of his wealth.

 

I heard of this man for the first time only a few days ago, although I knew of Cubana night club in Abuja because a friend once took me there. I did not know the owner, nor did I know that it was part of a larger entertainment empire. 

 

In fact, when I read about a certain Cubana Chief Priest, one of Obi Cubana's associates, meeting with Kogi State Governor, Yahaya Bello, recently, and the report indicated that he was a nightclub operator I assumed that he was the owner of the Abuja Cubana that my friend took me to. In other words, I mistook the associate for his Oga.

 

I find Cubana to be an interesting case study in entrepreneurial insurgency and innovation. Insurgency because he refuses to conform to and in fact challenges some of the tropes normalized by more established people of wealth in Nigeria in terms of how to mold and curate one's image to the public as a person of means. I associate him with innovation because, well, all successful entrepreneurs are innovators in their own differentiated ways.

 

Whether you like him or hate him, it is to the man's credit that he dominated the news cycle for an entire weekend and that the debate and conversations he sparked have not only continued but have netted him and his brand tons of free, enduring publicity of the type that other brands pay tens if not hundreds of millions of Naira for. By the way, I am aware that by publishing this essay, I am giving him even more publicity and extending his dominance of the news cycle.

 

The other aspect of Obi Cubana's profile that fascinates me is his model of what one might call associative entrepreneurship, my coinage and theoretical framing for the central role he accords associational relationships and trust in organizing and operating his enterprise. Obi Cubana is at the top of a core group of entrepreneurs who are roughly of his age and are his friends and enablers. 

 

Most of them began with him. Others, we are told, are independently wealthy but have embraced the aura and magnetic social charm of the Cubana brand, finding it a worthy and profitable canopy for their own endeavors. This is not traditional franchising as taught in business schools. Rather, it is an informal arrangement among trusted friends to support and build one another up by adopting a common recognizable insignia, much like the Wangara merchants and traders of precolonial West Africa, whose permissive, inclusive, and integrative brand-making I have researched and published on.

 

Obi Cubana’s associative entrepreneurship leverages the same power of inclusion and integration. In this way, Obi Cubana's success is also his associates' success, and his associates' associates' success, and so on — a collective, shared, replicable success, if you will. As he and the business rose, his associates, including the more visible and vocal face of the empire, Cubana Chief Priest, rose with him. 

 

Whether or not Cubana himself and observers realize it, this model of entrepreneurship is distinctly African, as I argued in the introduction to the aforementioned book on entrepreneurship. 

 

This is why the highly individualized entrepreneurship model of the Western capitalist experience theorized by Alois Schumpeter, with the emphasis on the sole, individual catalytic business innovator and disruptor, does not apply to the African entrepreneurship landscape.

 

Sure, Cubana fits partially into the Schumpeterian model of an innovative disruptor who identifies a niche and its deficits and proceeds to disrupt it with innovative and more efficient solutions. But unlike the Dangotes, the Elumelus, and Adenugas, the Otedolas, the  Alakijas,  the Abdulsamad Rabius, and others, Obi Cubana is not the sole patriarch of a business fiefdom or of a consanguineous empire but rather the coordinating leader of a multilayered business empire where brand building is diffuse, fairly decentralized, and robustly delegated to and distributed among the core players. 

 

It seems to me, but I stand to be corrected, that Obi Cubana has produced a new model of entrepreneurship that is an improvement on the familiar "Igba boi" Igbo apprenticeship system of business tutelage, service, training, and "settlement." His model seems to take the apprenticeship model to a new level of collaborative entrepreneurship and wealth creation. 

 

Obi Cubana did not recruit apprentices, but rather associates — friends and contemporaries of his who have helped him build an empire in which they are key players and co-creators. To the extent that, by his own account, he did not pass through the traditional Igbo apprenticeship system and does not implement it but instead created a new system of associative empowerment and conjoined wealth creation, he has in some ways improved upon and challenged the Igbo apprenticeship model.

 

The African group entrepreneurship model is not just about the formation of an inner core of invested entrepreneurs, as is the case with Cubana; it is also about the cultivation of a wider concentric circle of collaborators, communal supporters, a social network of beneficiaries, an elastic chain of empowerment, and a communally shared prosperity. 

 

It is far too early to canonize Cubana as the patron saint of associative entrepreneurship, but my scholarly intuition leads me to read his entrepreneurial vision in this theoretical frame. Other scholars should take up the challenge of investigating whether or to what extent Cubana embodies this theory, whether his business practices and accomplishments merit the credit I have accorded him, or whether these accomplishments are merely the product of what Nigerians colloquially call packaging.

 

 

Okey Iheduru

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Jul 21, 2021, 6:13:44 AM7/21/21
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Thank you, Moses, for this informative piece. Once again, you challenge us to ask a different question; the "why not" question. View the world as a big ball of knowledge and poke at that ball in different directions to find answers to our world's knotty questions so as to change that world. 

As you and any scholars who wish to take up the Obi Cubana entrepreneurship challenge get down to work, please try and find out the meaning of one of the memes that came my way on social media over the weekend: "There's Nigerian money. There's Igbo money. And there's Anambra money!"

Finally, questions about moral judgement about how people spend their money! About a decade ago, I was with the late Prof. Ebere Onwudiwe at another exclusive joint in Abuja called "Hilltop" in Wuse Zone 2 for a quiet birthday "bash" for him. In this joint, each set of guests was assigned an exclusive and exquisitely furnished sitting room. All this for just the two of us!

Midway in our conversation that evening, Ebere intimated that an acquaintance, a former fire-spitting Marxist academic who may be reading this, just gifted (I hate this word!) his wife a Lamborghini for the woman's 50th birthday. I thought that was a disgusting and outrageous display of opulence in the midst of so much poverty in the land. Laughing hilariously, Ebere fired the following queries at me: 

1. What are you doing here drinking a N2,000 can of coke, instead of buying the N50 one by the roadside?
(Hilltop had a notorious "Hausa Boy" regular customer, a man in his 30s, reputed to spend at least US$18,000 every Friday night at the joint!).
2. Why did you drive up here in your Mercedes Benz ML 500 SUV, instead of taking a ride in a Keke? Do you realize how many poor people's lives you can change with the money you paid for that "Okwu Oto Ekene Eze" (The one that stands up while greeting the king--was the nickname for that 'reigning' SUV in those days)?
3. Why do you live in a N4 million a year flat in Apo, instead of a N30,000 a year "villa" at Katampe slum?
4. And by the way, why are you paying Ivy League school fees for your daughter, instead of feeding the poor with that outrageous amount they charge you?

Oh, Ebere! Lesson learned. And we moved on to some other topic.

Yes, before you cast the first stone at the Cubana tribe, remember that moral judgement about how people spend their money is all relative. That also applies to questions about how they made the money, including those of us who were lucky to receive the education that gave us access to the good life as academics or Spokesman for a President, compared to those who never got the chance to go to school. Is that fair? Even the N30,000 a year resident of Katampe, Abuja must answer some questions of her own, relative to her neighbor's station in life!


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Okey C. Iheduru


Okey Iheduru

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Jul 21, 2021, 6:14:02 AM7/21/21
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And how about this?


image.pngIMG-20210720-WA0018.jpg


Toyin Falola

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Jul 21, 2021, 6:28:14 AM7/21/21
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Okey:

Some of these issues have been with us for a long time, the micro-- and macro- economics of development. When Western economists observed the tendency, they framed it as “conspicuous consumption”. I did Economics to A Level, and it was a question you expected to answer, as it was then linked to Africa’s underdevelopment.

How people spend money, how they display money, and what they buy with money are located in culture. A Chicago Economist won the Nobel Prize for what an Ibadan boy like me knew decades ago: the concepts of “rationality” and “irrationality” must be carefully interrogated in specific culture and, on the whole, human beings are rational.    

olugbenga Ojo

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Jul 22, 2021, 6:38:59 AM7/22/21
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So much to learn. Culture, attitudes, perceptions, realities ! The side a coin turned to one is different from the side it turned to the other. History and liberal arts are very compulsory for our continuing education as living beings and Understanding is a key word in the ocean of survival. Elders must continue to be in existence.

Ashafa Abdullahi

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Jul 23, 2021, 11:20:01 PM7/23/21
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37 LIES OF OBI CUBANA 
——————————————
I have read the extract from the CUBANA. I'm not against his money and what he deems fit to do with his money. My problem with him is trying to force his foolishness on everyone. The easiest way to convince people to  believe you are intelligent is to remain silent. But the Anambra over hype Andrea couldn't hold his tongue and end up showcasing his foolishness.
Now take a look at these, " I gave  N3m each to 53 of my boys in 2017 and today 48 of them are billionaires".
I'm not rich but at the same time I refused to be foolish. What business does one does with N3m and within 36 months he is already a billionaire. Even if the business turn over is 💯 turn over monthly, that is just N108m in 36months. Which means they don't pay salaries, no rent, no maintenance, no tax and they don't even eat food. Jesus Christ.
Now he says they are into hotel and clubs business. Oh yeah. This is where he bursted himself. Those who projected him to be into drugs business have been vindicated. It's very difficult to take stock of clubs and hotel business. Which makes the business the easiest avenue to launder illicit cash from drugs business.
Hey Mr CUBANA next time you feel like insulting people’s intelligence please do it at your village town hall meeting in Anambra. Poverty hasn't eroded some of our senses .Good night. Mbok.

#Lifted from the wall of Ubong John Brendan

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OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Jul 24, 2021, 4:21:23 AM7/24/21
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I would say that the Cubana hype is in part a result of packaging and in part an outlet for money laundering.  It is not an entirely new entrepreneurial model.  Any one who has been to Alábà market would easily recognise the model among the Igbo traders as the instinctive Igbo diaspora business link. I call it the prototype Ifá link associative model, which has been developed in non Ifá streams by the Yorùbá and other cultures.

Ashafa is right in probing the extent to which legitimate funds can realistically be regenerated and this is where the ' see no evil' aspect of money laundering as replenishing model may be hidden. So long as it is an informal ' business model' among friends and associates at the end of the day it is anything goes.  This is where the moral dimension comes in, which contributors to this thread have so far treated with non-chalance.  Dig deeper and you will find consanguinary practices to yahoo boys in certain aspects of such ' business' empire.

  It is the Las Vegas effect, which Moses Ochonu has gentrified.  And like in Las Vegas, not all that glitters is gold. That is why FBI agents are constantly on the prowl there.

If you say it does not matter how people spend their money or make it, then there is something seriously amiss in the latitude of moral values from the society in which such values emanate. Democracy cannot mean infinitely elastic moral values without the fear of the boomerang effect of such warped values on the larger society. Uncritical ethnic jingoism can have such boomerang effect in the ethnic community itself that is being lauded whether it is recognised as such and complained about or not.

And we wonder where the slush money funding the unprecedented  rise in the possession of firearms in the Nigerian society is coming  from!

Accountability, accountability and yet more business accountability to solve the myriad  security problems in Nigeria, that is what the country needs.


OAA



Sent from my Galaxy



-------- Original message --------
From: Ashafa Abdullahi <abas...@gmail.com>
Date: 24/07/2021 04:34 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Obi Cubana and the Theory ofAssociative Entrepreneurship

Boxbe This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (abas...@gmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info
37 LIES OF OBI CUBANA 
——————————————
I have read the extract from the CUBANA. I'm not against his money and what he deems fit to do with his money. My problem with him is trying to force his foolishness on everyone. The easiest way to convince people to  believe you are intelligent is to remain silent. But the Anambra over hype Andrea couldn't hold his tongue and end up showcasing his foolishness.
Now take a look at these, " I gave  N3m each to 53 of my boys in 2017 and today 48 of them are billionaires".
I'm not rich but at the same time I refused to be foolish. What business does one does with N3m and within 36 months he is already a billionaire. Even if the business turn over is 💯 turn over monthly, that is just N108m in 36months. Which means they don't pay salaries, no rent, no maintenance, no tax and they don't even eat food. Jesus Christ.
Now he says they are into hotel and clubs business. Oh yeah. This is where he bursted himself. Those who projected him to be into drugs business have been vindicated. It's very difficult to take stock of clubs and hotel business. Which makes the business the easiest avenue to launder illicit cash from drugs business.
Hey Mr CUBANA next time you feel like insulting people’s intelligence please do it at your village town hall meeting in Anambra. Poverty hasn't eroded some of our senses .Good night. Mbok.

#Lifted from the wall of Ubong John Brendan

On Thu, 22 Jul 2021, 11:38 olugbenga Ojo, <olugbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

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Toyin Falola

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Jul 24, 2021, 4:36:50 AM7/24/21
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Prince:

Also bear in mind that people in business exaggerate their wealth/worth in order to access bank loans.

TF

OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Jul 24, 2021, 8:05:27 AM7/24/21
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Oga TF.

Well, that is between them and their bankers.  Some 'infinitely' open fresh lines of credit, with bankers in the know ( owing hundreds of millions) when they should simply declare bankruptcy.  But it wont go on forever, as there are banking rules.  Witness the failed bank scenario in Nigeria.

At least we are coming back to documented credit now and not simply ' I gave such and such 3 million Naira,  three years ago and he is now a billionaire.  In fact EFCC personnel should not feel shy of interrogating such persons ( Im sure the FBI wont waste much time in that regard, if it were in America)  It is to protect the moral fibre of the society and the integrity of genuine industry.


OAA



Sent from my Galaxy



-------- Original message --------
From: Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>
Date: 24/07/2021 09:37 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Obi Cubana and the TheoryofAssociative Entrepreneurship

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Prince:

Also bear in mind that people in business exaggerate their wealth/worth in order to access bank loans.

TF

 


Date: Saturday, July 24, 2021 at 3:21 AM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

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