Her drive may come from her knowledge of real poverty. She lived with her grandmother until the age of nine as her parents were abroad getting their education.
“They were gone for almost a decade before I really saw them and knew them. I did everything a village girl would do, fetch water, go to the farm with my grandmother all the chores, I saw what poverty meant, to be poor at first hand,” she told the BBC in 2012.
Her experience as a teenager during the Biafra civil war of 1967-1970 crystalised this.
Her Igbo parents lost all their savings during the conflict as her father, a renowned professor, was a brigadier in the Biafran forces.
“I can take hardship. I can sleep on the cold floor any time,” she said.
But always quick to laugh in interviews, she added: “I can also sleep on a feather bed.”
