Celebrated and drop-dead ex-beauty pageant packager, actress and a former Actors Guild of Nigeria (AGN) President, the first one ever, Ibinabo Fiberesima, has seen it all. Luckily, she survived the challenges. Hence, she talked authoritatively, relaying her experience to our Contributing Editor, IFECHI OKOH, when he closed up on the ex AGN Presidio who actually climbed into focus years back as a beauty queen packager, beauty queen herself and AGN helms person. Fiberesima touched on a few other interesting personal matters, took time to let us into her past activities which eventually paved the way for her AGN presidency, her challenges, the magic that saw her through without any sort of scandal till she left the hot seat.

Excerpts:

When did your journey to fame begin?

It actually started for me at a very young age. I got into entertainment after winning the Miss Wonderland Beauty Pageant in 1997. I was the first runner-up at the Miss Nigeria 1991 beauty contest. That was the very beginning of what later became the brand Ibinabo. What happened to me was simply a glory of God thing. Hence people who first saw me in the market were so shocked to see me there and asked surprisingly if I go to market. Honestly, I feel elated when people see me on the road and call me. It is just the glory of Almighty God glowing all over me.

You were known and Celebrated as a beauty pageant packager, beauty queen, actress and years later, AGN president. Can we know how the beauty pageant concerns really paved the way for you to attain the AGN President?

Good talk! I actually spent most of my time dealing with all that concerned beauty in its entirety in those days. However, I knew that I still needed to know everyone that mattered when I made up my mind to go into acting later. Hence, I just carried the same mindset into Nollywood. Luckily for me, it worked out the way I had calculated. To actualize this, I had to make as many friends as possible within the shortest time frame. I must confess that all these quickly came together to pave the way for me during my campaign for the AGN presidency. Today, I am the first ever female AGN Presido in the history of the Actors Guild of Nigeria (AGN). I thank God for making this possible. May his name continue to be praised in Jesus name. Amen!

What factors distanced you from past AGN presidents and what are your success ingredients?

To start with, I am first and foremost, a woman. It had been men all through till I came and changed the narrative. My first success ingredient was my strong belief in the saying that honesty is the best policy in life. Personally, I tried against all human odds to live an honest life, which, in the long run, came with peace of mind that I actually needed to be focused. Luckily for me, I had great people around who honestly wanted me to succeed. With all these, and God on my side, every other challenge or challenges were very minor. Hence, I was able to achieve all that I could during my tenure.

What were your strengths and weaknesses?

My weaknesses were to trust everybody and be kind to them too. Unfortunately, they noticed it and took undue advantage of it. However, I thank God that the damages this caused me were not serious or much. My strength, as Presido was rooted in the fact that I am naturally a person always confident of myself. Things, as a result, never weighed me down throughout my challenging tenure. There's no doubt that I have had my high and low moments; however, I still thank God that today, I am very confident of myself in any situation I found myself.

Can you still remember what your priorities were when you mounted the AGN hot seat then and why was it so?

I still remember vividly that immediately I came on board as the AGN Presido, I took time off to talk to my friends, family members, the Niger Delta people for the urgent need to support me so that I will succeed, as the first female AGN Presido. I made a special case for myself when I told them that they should remember that all eyes were on me as the first ever female Presido. They agreed and contributed to buy a bus for the Guild. Even before the arrival of the bus, I had been preaching about the urgent need for AGN to have a health scheme which I personally saw as the biggest priority for members. A lot of members had died as a result of lack of functional health facilities. I was quite close to a good number of them before I became the President. There were really lots of things that we would have avoided to stem untimely deaths. One of them was for members to aim at living a decent life. To me, going for a health insurance plan was the most pragmatic. With such an arrangement, all that registered members needed to do was just to pay a certain amount of money to the insurance company. This would guarantee treatment for any member any time he fell sick.

What were the pains you took to ensure that your health insurance scheme worked?

First of all, I arranged with my Executive then to travel to the States where we ran tests for them, only to discover that a lot of them were simply diabetic and were ignorant of this deadly challenge. Could you believe that most of them prefer that they don't want to know about such deadly diseases for the sake that they don't have the financial means to tackle it? But how can you tackle what you don't know you have until it might have been pretty too late to treat?

What was your greatest challenge as AGN Presido?

There was a lean purse to operate then. But sadly, most members didn't know then. Then, I used to tell my friends who wanted to give me money to pay it into an AGN account, so that the association could stay afloat. This, they did, impressively. But the Nigerian unpatriotic blood in some of my executive members almost pushed me to misappropriate the little fund we had in our account then. My strong mindset encouraged me to disallow them from misusing the fund. It even made me fight them before I left office. My happiness is that the misappropriation would have one day become a public matter and I would be disgraced for their sake just like that. But I thank God that I did His bidding which has saved me from the aftermath of their nonsense.

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