Dike Onwuamaeze
Nigeria’s own Mr. Integrity took his last bow on the stage of life in this planet on October 9, 2025. He is Dr. Christopher Kolade, CON, who was born in Erin–Oke, Osun State, on December 28, 1932.
Between the day his entrance was announced and the day he took his final exit from the stage of life, Kolade lived a disciplined, principled, ethical, impactful, and productive life. He was one of the few Nigerians who choose the straight road contrary to the crooked and twisted path.
During his lifetime time Kolade worked as a teacher, broadcaster, a boardroom guru, diplomat and academician. In all these areas of his life’s endavours he left bold exemplary footprints that have influenced some of his countrymen and women to walk and stand on the good life of integrity.
The Chief Executive Officer of Center for the Promotion of Private Enterprises, Dr. Muda Yusuf, summed up the personality of Kolade thus: “He was a great and highly revered member of the corporate world. He was an elder statesman. He consistently propagated the ideals of business ethics and good corporate governance. He was a role model in many enviable respects. He will be greatly missed.”
Kolade came into the limelight as a broadcaster in the 1960s soon after Nigeria’s independence. As the director general of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, Kolade promoted transparency, honesty, championed professionalism and insisted on public-service values.
But it was his position at Cadbury Nigeria that launched him deep into the heartbeat of Nigerian corporate organisations and boardrooms. Kolade was the first Nigerian Managing Director and, later, Chairman of Cadbury Nigeria Plc, where his overriding vision was to “Nigerianise” the operation of the company in a manner that would make it a truly Nigerian company.
His first appointment in Cadbury was the position of director of personnel after he had left his position as the director general of Nigeria Broadcasting Corporation.
Casting his mind back during the 60th anniversary celebration of Cadbury Nigeria in February 2025, Kolade recalled that his vision when he was made the managing director was that this has to become a Nigerian company and we have to work at making it a Nigerian company.
He said: “I came in as director of administration. But four years later I was told that I am going to become the managing director, so I had to develop a managing director’s vision.
“With the decision to make me the managing director, I found myself with what I did not expect.
“My vision then was that if they have ‘Nigerianise’ the chief executive’s position, does that not tell me that I should ‘Nigerianise’ every position because we were having expatriate directors as well then.
“So, my vision was twofold: One, we must try to ‘Nigerianise’ as much as we could because I believed that Cadbury Nigeria should become a Nigerian company rather than an adjunct office of an international business.”
Kolade said he was convinced then that the company was never going to succeed if it continued to depend on expertise from abroad. “So, we have to develop our own expertise,” he said.
He also recalled that he and his colleagues had a rough time pursuing this vision to ‘Nigerianise’ the company.
“The last position to be Nigerianise was that of the technical director because the international group (Cadbury Schweppes) believed that the technical expertise needed for a company like this could not be found in Nigeria and, therefore, has to be someone from abroad.
“But we found a Nigerian with everything you will consider the right qualification to be a technical director. This is in fulfillment of my vision,” he said.
Kolade has seven simple principles to corporate life. These principles are that “people are seeking to obtain some value that they consider to be of appropriate quality and worth to themselves; that people make business resources productive; that a company does not perform better than its people; that each person can give or demand his/her best; that people can usually do better because they can desire to learn; that people can apply the fruits of their learning and that success, failure and mistakes are opportunities for learning.
A Professor of Law and Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Professor Fabian Ajogwu, in his tribute to Kolade described the departed icon as “The Master Craftsman of Character.”
Ajogwu said that a great light has been extinguished with the transition of Dr. Christopher Kolade.
He said: “We have lost our foremost teacher, a master craftsman whose primary material was not wood or stone, but human character and corporate conscience.
“He was a teacher of practice in the art of integrity, a curriculum he taught not from a textbook, but from the impeccable manuscript of his own life.
“In the lecture rooms of the Lagos Business School and the Society for Corporate Governance Nigeria, in the quiet moments of mentorship, his words were not just instructions; they were invitations to a higher plane of existence where principle was non-negotiable and service was the highest calling.”
Ajogwu called Kolade “the guardian of our professional souls, a father figure who saw our potential long before we did, and a lighthouse whose beam cut through the fog of moral ambiguity.
“His true legacy is not merely in the policies he wrote or the titles he held, but in the enduring integrity of the countless professionals who proudly call themselves his students.”
He added that though the master has laid down his tools, “the workshop of virtue he built endures.
“The lessons of ethics, faith, and professionalism he imparted are now our sacred charge to uphold and pass on. He was a life of profound impact, beautifully lived. I have lost a revered mentor.
Speaking in the same vein, the Chief Executive Officer of BIC Consultancy Limited, Dr. Boniface Chizea, said that with the unfortunate loss of Dr. Christopher Kolade, the number of remaining genuine icons of Nigeria has further diminished.
Chizea said that Kolade belonged to a rare and disappearing breed of Nigerians who were formed after the manner of Judeo-Christian ethics: those who bring pristine values to the table.
He said: “They are refined and well educated; they are not loud, they are not stylish; they are not greedy. They are conservatives who are simply contented.
“Have you heard and listened carefully to Kolade speaking the English language? His clear articulation sends a clear message of one who was formal exposure in that space. He spoke the English language flawlessly, a clear evidence of his background as a broadcaster.”
Chizea recalled that his first knowledge of Kolade “was upon my return from Manchester to Nigeria when my sister in law worked with him as his personal secretary at Cadbury.
“In that position, it is saying the obvious to observe that she knew him close up, and she did have many positive things to say about his integrity.
“He was a verbal disciplined administrator who was not concerned about his personal comfort and did not have the usual what is in it for me mentality.
“And after all his grand tours as Nigeria Ambassador to the United Kingdom and numerous other board appointments often as Chairman, he still retained the servant leader profile to accept to be saddled with the responsibility of the formation of students and managers the correct orientation by accepting a teaching appointment with the Lagos Business School.
“We will not find many with such humility to accept a teaching job at that stage in their lives. And by all counts, he submerged himself to the job as he gave as must be expected a good account of himself even as he left robust legacies at the school.
“The content of his character and the value he espouse could be fully gleaned from the fact that when he could not cope with the crude shenanigans of politicians, he resigned from his appointment as chairman of Sure-P. How many other Nigerians have you heard resigned from such appointments?”
According to the former Editor/Managing Director of Independent Newspaper, Mr. Ikechukwu Amechi, wrote in 2022 that Kolade’s has been a most-fulfilling life, describing him as a teacher, media aficionado, administrator par excellence, boardroom guru, diplomat and academic.
“A man with the Midas touch, his stint at Cadbury Nigeria Plc where he was the managing director/chief executive officer and later chairman is still adjudged the golden era of the multinational company.
“The story was the same when former President Olusegun Obasanjo tapped him in 2002 to proceed to the United Kingdom as Nigeria’s High Commissioner.
“When he retired mid-year 2007 from the position, Britain knew that a different kind of diplomat had come to town.
“Unlike the axiomatic Jack of all trades who masters none, Dr. Kolade has excelled in all fields of human endeavour he ventured into,” Amechi wrote.
For his contributions to nation building, Kolade was awarded the national honour of Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON) in 2000. He was also a Fellow of the Institute of Directors, the Society of Nigerian Broadcasters, the Nigerian Institute of Management of which he was President from 1985 to 1988, and the Institute of Personnel Management in Nigeria where he served as President from 1988 to 1994.
For his devotion, in 1981, he received the medal of the Order of St. Augustine from the Archbishop of Canterbury and he is also a Lay Canon Emeritus of the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, Diocese of Guildford in the UK.
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