All posts by : Chukuka Chukuma

Fatherhood (Part 4) “What do you mean your water just broke. Oh nooooo! I leave for LA tomorrow morning. I’m going to miss the arrival of my daughter”.  Since the news of the arrival of our third child broke, I had mentally started getting r ...

Fatherhood (Part 3) “Take your pregnant wife, son, and sister to the airport and put them on a plane to Lagos.” I looked around the bathroom to see who had spoken, but I was alone in the shower. The instruction made no sense. Two weeks earli ...

Fatherhood (Part 2) I felt as though my heart was going to leave my chest. Heart palpitating, I didn’t think I was ready to be a father, to be anybody’s Daddy. Fear of the unknown gripped me. The trauma of losing my daddy at an early age had left me ...

Fatherhood (Part 1) “Chukuka stop crying! Boys don’t cry. Be a man!” I was about five when my maternal grandmother died. As I held onto my mother’s leg, every teardrop of hers that she didn’t wipe away with her handkerchief landed with a plop on ...

Fighter (Part 3) Every entrepreneur is a Fighter and Negotiator, who often Stumbles on his or her road to Success. “Karate kid, what happened? Do you still fight?” I was in my thirties, and I was about forty pounds heavier than I had been dur ...

Fighter (Part 2) At seventeen, I was not a novice anymore. I had gone way past the ten-thousand-hour mark in mastering my skill. Battle ready, I had been champion for many years in both Karate and Judo. I had dabbled into Taekwondo to learn fancy ki ...

Fighter (Part 1) Every entrepreneur is a fighter. For me, it all started with my terrible asthma attacks. To get my asthma under control, a French doctor suggested my mother adopt a counter-intuitive approach—encourage me to be very active physic ...

What Determines a Baby's First Words I was born in Paris in 1974 but I don’t speak French. I just wanted to share this revelation right off the bat as the first thing people say when I tell them I was born in Paris is, “Oh wow, so you speak Fren ...