How Do You Speak Truth To Power? Chioma Afe’s Candid Account Of Life After Diamond-Access Bank Merger May Hold the Answer

The Seplat Energy executive opens up on managing executive power, professional clash, and the emotional toll of the 2019 acquisition at NIMN’s inaugural LeadHers in Marketing Conference

For the first time in what colleagues describe as characteristic candour, Chioma Afe, now Director of External Affairs and Sustainability at Seplat Energy, peeled back the curtain on what it truly felt like to be a communications leader inside one of Nigerian banking’s most consequential mergers. Her remarks, delivered this morning at the maiden LeadHers in Marketing Conference organised by the National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria (NIMN), left little room for ambiguity and gave industry observers fresh insight into her professional journey before she left Access Bank.

The conference, held at the Civic Centre in Victoria Island and presided over by NIMN President Dr. Bolajoko Bayo-Ajayi, convened some of Nigeria’s most prominent female marketing and communications executives for a session titled “Redefining Influence: Women Shaping the Future of Marketing”. The panel brought together Dr. Chizor Malize, Managing Director/CEO of FITC; Onyinye Ikenna-Emeka, Chief Marketing Officer of MTN Nigeria; and Adebola Williams, Marketing Director of Promasidor, moderated by Dr. Malize herself.

Speaking in response to a question from moderator Dr Malize, who asked panellists to describe their most defining moment of courageous leadership, Afe offered what many in the room sensed was a deeply personal reckoning. Her answer reached back to 2019, when Diamond Bank, where she served as a Head of Corporate Communications, was acquired by Access Bank in a merger that reshaped Nigeria’s retail banking landscape and created what would become Africa’s largest bank by customer base.

Afe described the psychological weight of being the public face of communications during a period of profound institutional anxiety, when colleagues were consumed by uncertainty about their careers and identities. “I needed to drive internally and externally positivity,” she said, “and that is very hard to do when you’re telling people they’ve been bought over and they’re not sure of their careers.”

Central to her account was her working relationship with the late Herbert Wigwe, then Group Managing Director and CEO of Access Bank, who died in February 2024 in a helicopter crash in the Nevada desert alongside his wife, son, and Access Bank Group Chairman Ik Oraekwuotu. Afe painted a portrait of a leader of fierce conviction and uncommon drive. “You had a very strong personality in the late Herbert who was very clear as to where he saw the business going,” she recalled, describing Access Bank at the time as “a very driven business” that “some would call very aggressive.”

Afe recalled that the merger placed her between two worlds, her Diamond Bank colleagues who looked to her for reassurance about their futures, and an Access Bank leadership she describes as high-velocity in its drive. Her counterpart in the combined entity was Amaechi Okobi, who served as Head of Corporate Communications at Access Bank.“

So, you have me, who is now having to speak truth to Herbert and stand up to say, look, we need to manage the tone of voice. We need to be a bit more inclusive in how we deal with people,” she recounted. “Sometimes I found myself labelled the traitor in the midst because I was not pro-Diamond or pro-Access. I was pro-business.”

Asked at the time by members of her team whether she intended to stay, Afe said her answer was grounded in pragmatism and belief, not uncritical loyalty. “I’m going to stay because I get paid well. “I’m going to stay because I believe this dream is true,” she said she told them. “Ultimately, the organisation has to grow, and growth is what I’m here for.”

What Afe stopped short of saying, but what her account intimated, was that navigating that tension indefinitely, in an environment characterised by strong-willed leadership and lingering friction after the merger, is not a mission without limits. Her move to Seplat Energy, one of Nigeria’s leading indigenous oil and gas companies listed on both the Nigerian Exchange Group and the London Stock Exchange, marked a pivot to a sector and institutional culture of a different character.

Whether Afe intended her remarks as a coda on a chapter fully closed or as something still unresolved, the conference room at the Civic Centre received them as exactly what courageous leadership looks like in practice — not the absence of compromise, but the willingness to name it.