The Mananging Director/Chief Executive Officer, Green Oaks Entertainment Limited (Kiddies Kingdom), Nike Faola, in a chat with Tunde Ogunesan reveals how her passion for children made her venture into recreation business with special attention on children.AN American IT expert, Bo Bonnet while answering questions on how he made millions on the internet said, "an enthusiasm is excitement with inspiration, motivation and a pinch of creativity. I recognised a need and filled it." Such can be said of Nike Faola, a passionate child development expert and the Managing Director/Chief Executive officer of Green Oaks Kiddies Entetainment Limited,Lagos.Faola had taught for seventeen years in secondary schools both in Ogun and Lagos States. Even right from her school days, she had premonition of having something to do with children. And as fate would have it, her educational sojourn prepared her for the task ahead.After completing her primary education at Alaafia Nursery and Primary school,Mokola,Ibadan and secondary education at St Louis Grammar School before proceeding to St Andrews College of Education,Oyo,Oyo State. She went to study French at the Obafemi Awolowo University,Ile-Ife,Osun State. By the time she completed her university education, Faola had another ambition- to be a career woman working in big corporate organisation, but her first love eventually prevailed."I grew up loving kids as a teenager. Anytime I returned from school then, little children singled me out for recognition, and so I can't resist it that I decided working with children since that time."I'd wanted to be a career woman working in a big corporate organisation but I ended up teaching and I enjoyed it for good 17 years before I relocated abroad. While I was teaching in Nigeria students saw me as their confidant but at that point I needed a change of environment which neccesitated resigning my appointment."And as God would have it while in UK, I applied for a job as a child education and entertainment director, fromthere I got the inclination of doing something like this.Out of three business plans, this scaled through, though, I never thought it could be as big as this. Ideas started flowing in and we were utilising them," she noted.However, despite her long years of experience in teaching, one would have expected that Faola would easily come back to Nigeria to establish a model school. But she said her choice of children recreation centre was modelled by her love for children which cream her final choice. "Whenever I go out of the country I look out there and copy what is good for our culture. I discovered that recreation is what they don't joke with but for us here,despite the fact that we work more than they do, still we recreate less.If Nigerian parents agree that they are coping, are the children coping'In most big cities like Lagos, by 5.00am you will see school children with their bags on their backs setting out for school and they'll be returning when their parents return. Even we subject them to lengthy hours of learning, reading with the aim that it is the amount of hours they spend on academic exercise that would make them excel, no, they need rest as well."That informs our objective at Green Oaks Kiddies Entertainment Limited, with the sole aim of offering the services in that regard to Nigerian children at affordable prices. We know that recreation in this part of the world is nothing, even those that come here are not following the order but we're trying to put them through.Recreation is more than what our people believe it is, it's not about spending the whole day."People bought hours like 10 hours to be spent within three months and spend it as their schedule permits.You can spend it in one week or one month, the aim is you must be able to rest your nerves.You can not believe it, the set of people that follow it religiously are the Indians,Chinese and Europeans living in Lagos.Today, they can come for between 20-30 minutes, they go, by weekend they come for another 45 minutes. But forour people, they want to spend five hours at a visit without even resting their mind. Experience have shown that that's not recreation, it is a way of re-creating oneself to pump new performance from the old person," she said.Introducing pure recreational business into Nigerian education environment could not have come withoutchallenges, Faola admitted that but noted that Green Oaks combined education with entertainment. That she said was made possible by organising children's party and cultural day with the sole aim of imparting knowledge in the children while catching fun."We combine education with entertainment programmes like cultural day.We make the children see the way we dress, greet, the food we eat, what we use in the homes before the modern utensils became the order of the day and so on. We try to tell them what were in use in those days and ask them to mention what has replaced them.We are also packaging a leadership interaction programme that we will reveal as time goes on and which we believe will shape the future of our children."We also make sure that we bring fact from all fun we created or celebrated. Like in the last Valentine Day's celebration, we organised a parents' forum after the whole show. We asked them that now that Valentine Day is becoming popular in Nigeria, sooner or later government may declare holiday for it because everybody is celebrating it now- schools, churches and even some organisations have already made it a half day holiday for their staff to celebrate. So, we do not pretend that children are not conscious of valentine but the question we should ask is what impression is this celebration creating in their mind'"An average Nigerian will tell you that Valentine Day is about celebrating boyfriend or girlfriend and unfortunately that impression is already sinking into the children's brain.What will be on their mind is he is my girlfriend/boyfriend for the day' We're looking at ways we can change their orientation in such a situation by fun and education. So we try to tell parents to show them love at home not love in gifts only,when they have it at home nobody can flaunt it at them outside. Let parents especially mothers learn to be creative in the way they manage their homes.We gave them tips on how to be creative in the house to entrench love in the house.'In the words of Malcom Forbes,"The biggest mistake people make in life is not trying to make a living at doing what they most enjoy,how rewarding has recreation passion been to Faola' "Well, we thank God, though one should not expect to reap his investment within a short period of time. When we started, we embraked on serious marketing drive-churches,schools, to tell them of new thing we're introducing and those that have been here have become our unpaid marketing agents having had a taste of our services. "However, that should not say we're experiencing little challenges, especially in the area of multiple taxation. We receive several letters charging us for various taxes. Imagine a situation when I'd fumigated our premises and somebody again came with a bill of N35,000 for fumigation which I have to pay, multiple expenses, this is not encouraging."It is an all comers business, I ensure that staff are well motivated so that they can be in right frame of mind to handle children with training ranging from health and risk care.They were trained to pick anything that is injurious to chidren. It's a new busines and we're not hell bent in making profit at least for some time.'On her dream for her passion, the French graduate who says she may evetually retire into lecturing said she dreamt of seeing Green Oaks having branches in other areas of Lagos and Nigeria.
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