Opinion
By Ifeanyi Igwebike Mbanefo
THERE is a particular loneliness in believing in something that no one else in the room can yet see.
I know this because I once walked into a meeting at Nigeria LNG Limited — one of the most formidable energy companies on the African continent, and the largest industrial plant in sub-Saharan Africa — and tried to persuade serious, commercially minded people that the company should fund a prize for literature.
Not a pipeline.
Not a platform upgrade.
Not a neatly measurable community-health intervention.
Literature.
Poetry.
Fiction.
Drama.
The kind of thing that, to a certain corporate instinct, can seem like an expensive affection for other people’s children.
I was not the most senior person in that conversation.
Not by any stretch.
What I had instead of rank was conviction — a conviction that had been growing quietly for years.
Nigeria had always produced writers of extraordinary talent, voices that deserved a stage worthy of their imagination. Yet the ecosystem around Nigerian writing was fragile.
Publishers were underfunded.
Distribution was weak.
Serious literary work and serious money rarely met.
A prize — properly governed, transparently judged, and generously funded — could change that.
It could do more than reward one writer a year. It could tell every writer in the country that excellence had a destination.
I believed this with the kind of certainty that often arrives before language does.
The difficulty, of course, is that belief alone does not survive a corporate budget discussion.
My boss at the time was the General Manager, External Affairs. She was sharp, politically alert, and deeply protective of her department’s standing.
When I raised the idea with her, she did not dismiss it carelessly. She did something more exacting: she acknowledged its promise, then began to dismantle it with great precision.
Her objections were practical, and not without force.
First, she pointed out that there was a manager in the department, a published poet of some standing, who would almost certainly receive the credit the moment any literary prize was announced. We both knew this.
The politics of attribution in that environment were rarely innocent.
Second, when I pressed the matter further, she said the idea did not properly belong in my schedule. I was Head of Media and Publications. A prize of that sort, she argued, fell under the Head of Public Relations.
She was correct in the narrow sense. She was also using the chart of authority as a shield.
There was more beneath the surface. Between her and the poet-manager there was no affection to speak of, and the Head of Public Relations was himself a difficult colleague — mean, backbiting, territorial, sly, and not easily crossed.
She had no desire to ignite a fresh office war by appearing to bypass him on something as visible as a national prize.
So she said no.
And then she said no again.
For two years, she said no.
Those two years are important, because they are the part of the story most people would skip over.
They were not wasted years. They were the years in which the prize was actually being built.
The refusal, though painful at the time, became a gift I did not yet understand. It gave me something more valuable than permission: it gave me time. Time to think. Time to read. Time to consult, to test, to refine, to prepare for a conversation I did not yet know how to have.
I studied the great prizes of the world with the care of a graduate student. The Nobel. The Pulitzer. The Booker. I was interested not merely in their prestige, but in their architecture — how they were funded, how they were governed, what gave them credibility, what controversies they had survived, and, very importantly, how much of their budgets went into administration.
That last question matters more than people imagine.
With the major prizes, administration is not an afterthought. It is part of the structure of legitimacy.
The Nobel Foundation, for example, spent far more on administration than casual observers might assume.
The Booker Prize, for all its glamour, had lived through seasons of uncertainty during its years of pure corporate sponsorship, surviving largely because new patronage arrived at the right moment.
No endowment, no permanence.
That lesson stayed with me.
I did not stop at reading.
I travelled to London and visited the offices of Getty Coleman PR, the firm managing the Booker Prize at the time.
I wanted to see, at close range, how the machinery worked — how the judges were supported, how the prize was administered, how publishers, booksellers, and journalists were brought into its orbit, and how controversies were managed when they inevitably came.
I asked questions.
I took notes.
To them, I was a curious visitor from Nigeria.
To myself, I was laying one brick after another.
Back home, I went still further.
I visited actuarial and economics departments and engaged teachers — some of them at my own expense — to help develop a financial model that could stand up to corporate scrutiny.
I did not want a sentimental or emotional argument.
I wanted a durable one.
I wanted to walk into a boardroom and speak both to the spirit and to the balance sheet.
Those two years of rejection had, in fact, prepared me in ways an early yes never could have.
The gate finally opened on an ordinary afternoon, through the most unlikely of doors.
An email arrived with the subject line: Redeployment.
Management had reshuffled officers across functions. In the body of the message, the Head of Public Relations was being moved to Community Relations.
I was directed to combine both portfolios.
The Managing Director was copied. The General Manager was copied. The entire senior layer of the company had been included.
I read the message twice.
Then, before caution could fully catch up with me — or perhaps because it had already lost the argument — I replied to all.
I thanked management for its confidence. I stated that in my expanded role in Public Relations, my focus would include, among other priorities, a major national prize for literature and support for the development of the domestic gas market.
Then I shut down my computer.
I should say plainly what that moment was: I used the machinery of a mass email to create a public commitment that would be difficult to undo. It was audacious. It was also, in a formal sense, insubordinate. I knew it even as I pressed send.
But I had spent two years preparing for a conversation that kept being denied, and this was the narrowest opening I had ever been given.
The General Manager summoned me to her office.
She was furious in the manner of someone who has chosen restraint over shouting. She asked, very carefully, when exactly she had approved this prize.
I was in the middle of explaining that Public Relations now fell within my expanded portfolio — a defence I knew was not only thin but also threadbare even as I offered it — when the room shifted.
Andrew Jamieson, the Managing Director, had replied to the email.
He wrote that he had himself been thinking along similar lines — perhaps not specifically about a literary prize, but about an impactful national project.
He asked for a presentation at the next Senior Management Team meeting, in two weeks’ time.
The General Manager looked at me.
It was not anger in her face then.
It was something sadder. I still wear scars of delayed revenge.
Then she rose and left the room.
I returned to my desk and sat very still for a long time.
I was in trouble — that much was obvious. I had bypassed my boss in front of the company’s senior leadership. At the very least, my career had suffered a serious bruise.
At worst, I had invited real danger.
And yet the Managing Director had replied.
He had used the words impactful national project.
That was enough to make me stand up, leave the office, and walk.
I walked from Ajose Adeogun Street through the heat of Victoria Island all the way to Bar Beach, the way a man walks when he is trying to hear his own thoughts above the noise of what he has just done.
I went over everything in my mind — the figures, the arguments, the models, the London conversations, the pages I had filled, the estimates I had commissioned, the architecture I had slowly assembled over two quiet years.
I was checking the foundations, searching for errors and commissions before someone else could spot them.
By the time I turned back, something had settled in me.
I did not have permission.
But I had preparation.
And in two weeks, preparation would have to suffice.
I called one person.
Jahman Anikulapo — then an editor at The Guardian on Sunday, and someone I had known since our days at The Guardian in 1987.
He had gone to the arts desk; I had gone to copy.
Even then, he possessed an uncommon understanding of Nigeria’s literary terrain.
He was intelligent, lively, mischievous in the best sense, and not one to seek quarrel for its own sake.
But when something mattered, he was solid.
He answered immediately.
“Bros, you still dey office?”
“I’m coming to see you,” I said.
He heard something in my voice and asked if everything was alright.
When I reached him and told him what I had done, and what I now had two weeks to produce, he listened with his usual mixture of concern and delight.
He warned me gently that I was already in difficult waters and should move carefully.
Then he smiled broadly.
“Bros, this is big. Are you sure these people will do this?”
“I will try,” I said.
“What do we do now?”
I told him I needed a national workinggroup to draw up the prize guidelines — two writers from each of the six geopolitical zones, people of standing who could open doors and command respect, but who would work in strict secrecy. Not an institution weighed down by politics, but a circle of trusted individuals who understood that a literary prize serves an entire ecosystem: writers, yes, but also teachers, publishers, and readers — all those for whom literature is not merely a profession, but a form of life.
Jahman thought for a moment, then said, “We should speak with Professor Akachi Ezeigbo.”
Professor Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo was a scholar of English at the University of Lagos and one of Nigeria’s most respected writers and academics.
Her sister, Professor Chinyere Stella Okunna, had been my teacher. I knew the family by reputation — disciplined, serious, and exacting.
When we called her, she listened carefully, asked excellent questions, and then opened her address book with remarkable generosity.
She offered names from across the country from which I could make my selections.
Jahman, under no small pressure from me, declined to sit on the committee himself. He said his role was to point the way, not to occupy the room.
Instead, he gave me what I needed most: careful character assessments — who was dependable, who was vain, who could keep a secret, who would turn the matter into theatre.
On the basis of his counsel and Professor Ezeigbo’s recommendations, I made the selections.
We worked the telephones through the weekend.
By Monday, the invitations had gone out. The venue had been secured.
Accommodation and logistics had been arranged.
By Thursday, everyone had arrived.
That weekend was intense, occasionally contentious, but always purposeful.
People brought different ideas, but one shared intention. In that room, the Nigeria Prize for Literature began to take shape — its structure, its process, its judging procedure, its purse, and the rotating categories across fiction, poetry, drama, and children’s literature.
When the work was done, we signed a communiqué.
Before we dispersed, I asked the group for one thing.
I explained that management approval was still not secure, that I was already in difficult territory, and that any premature mention of the prize in the press could kill the project before it had a chance to breathe.
I asked them to keep the secret.
They agreed.
And they kept faith.
From that November until February, there was not a single mention of the prize in the Nigerian media. For a room full of writers and journalists — people whose lives are made of words — that silence was itself a remarkable act of discipline.
Two weeks later, we entered the Senior Management Team meeting with everything we had: the financial models, the governance structure, the benchmarks from the Nobel, the Booker, and the Pulitzer, and a case built not on sentiment alone, but on reason.
The objections came quickly.
Many senior managers believed that a gas company had no business near literature.
But the most persistent objection was narrower: NLNG, they argued, was a science company. Any prize worthy of the name should reflect that identity. Literature alone, they feared, would seem misplaced and controversial.
In the end, Andrew Jamieson made a decision.
The proposal would be expanded. A science equivalent would be added. We were to return with a revised presentation.
It was not yet a yes.
But it was no longer a no.
And after two years of no, that was everything.
To be continued…
A.I
June 9, 2026
Tags: Ifeanyi Igwebike Mbanefo Nigeria LNG Limited