MR. IMEH USUAH – PROFILE OF A NATIONAL HERO AND MAIDEN WINNER OF THE SEC'S INTEGRITY AWARD
Mr. Imeh Usuah, popularly known as Jaja among his colleagues and friends is a native of Ubokudom in Akwa Ibom State. He is over 60 years of age and a father of six children. A former Workshop Foreman at the construction giant, Julius Berger, Mr. Usuah is presently a taxi cab operator whose station is the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja.
Mr. Usuah established his credential as a man of integrity and an exemplarily upright Nigerian in the course of November 2007 when, one early morning, he was patronized by two visitors to Nigeria. They had alighted from a British Airways flight to Abuja and approached Mr. Usuah to take them to Transcorp Hilton in Maitama, Abuja in his cab. Mr. Usuah dutifully obliged them, got paid =N=4000 for the service and was gone.
After the day's exertions, Mr. Usuah took the cab for a wash only to discover a brown suitcase, which his early morning customers from the British Airways flight had forgotten underneath the driver's seat of the car. Without opening the bag, Mr. Usuah sensed it must contain significant valuables and instinctively resolved to return it to the rightful owners at the hotel where he dropped them off earlier in the day.
When Mr. Usuah returned to Transcorp Hilton with the bag, it was the pensive, extremely worried and agonized faces of the men he dropped off earlier that day that confronted him. They were pacing the lobby and could not even recognize him. Mr. Usuah, with the bag clutched in his armpit, approached them and said, "Oga Onyibo, this is your bag". The agonized look of the men disappeared as their faces lit up with joy and they expressed profuse gratitude to Mr. Usuah. They then collected his phone numbers as he made good his exit.
It was much later that the Abuja Leasing Company called Mr. Usuah's Association (of airport taxi cab operators) to report that one of their members had returned the sum of =N=18m left in his cab by some customers. This was how Mr. Usuah got to know that the bag he returned to Transcorp Hilton contained that much money!
But uprightness, honesty, contentment and integrity are habitual with Mr. Usuah. In the same 2007, he returned another customer's expensive camera. The owner had alighted from the cab with haste at a television station and had forgotten his expensive zoom lens camera in the process.
Everyone with any familiarity with him confirm that Mr. Usuah is a man after uprightness. His wife says, "He would rather go hungry than take what does not belong to him". His colleagues at the Association of airport cab hire operators affirm that he is a beacon of honesty.

Securities and Exchange Email: integrityaward@sec.gov.ng
Commission, Nigeria SEC TOWERS, Plot 272, Samuel Adesujo Ademulegun St,
Central Business District, Abuja
www.sec.gov.ng