This is Oluwatoyin Olajide; she is the second-most powerful person in Air Peace after Allen Onyema, who is the Chairman of Air Peace.
She runs and is in charge of the daily day-to-day activities of Air Peace as COO of the airline, and then reports to the owner and chairman of the airline, Allen Onyema.
She holds a First Class Honours degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Lagos and she is the only female COO of a Nigerian airline at the moment.
When Airpeace was still a small airline in 2014, she joined as the head of safety, and her boss promoted her to the CEO/COO position in the same 2014.
She has been in charge of the airline’s double-digit growth and has scaled Air Peace from where she met it as a small airline to the biggest airline in West Africa today.
Toyin does not speak the same language as her boss, but it does not matter.
What matters is that she is competent, merited the job she is doing and qualified; picking a lady who does not speak the same language as him to run his business is who Allen Onyema is.
A quintessential businessman who is a detribalized Nigerian in every sense of the word
His wife is even an Igala woman from Kogi State, and he married her in the 90’s, when inter-tribal marriage was not this cool.
Toyin actually came up with the Isiagu attire because Air Peace is not an Igbo airline, and her boss endorsed the idea.
This is why I don’t understand the fuss.
Air Peace is a Nigerian airline, and Isiagu is a representation and embodiment of our culture and a representation of who we are to the outside world.
Before Air Peace started flying to London, Arik and Medviee had done the same, but they no longer do the same today.
For me, understanding the banana peel that made Arik to fail is more important to Toyin-led Air Peace than discussing Isiagu.
Toyin is doing an incredible job as a corporate Amazon who inspires our daughters that it is possible to be a mother and still succeed in a male-dominated industry on her own terms and due to her sheer brilliance.
And this is why the work she is doing is important for our culture.
Chukwudi Iwuchukwu
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