EBERE CHIAMAKA EZEUGWU

First Bank relationship manager, Port Harcourt, and the daughter who kept the rhythm going

Ebere Ezeugwu counted things. The number of stairs to her father's bandstand. The number of beats in a bar of highlife. The number of days until payday for the market women who queued at her desk at the First Bank branch on Aba Road. Numbers, she said, were just a kind of music with fewer instruments.

She was born in Enugu in 1988, the youngest daughter of the guitarist Obiora Ezeugwu and his wife Ngozi. She grew up in a house where rehearsals lasted until midnight, did her homework at the edge of the stage, and could play four songs on the piano by the age of ten. At the University of Lagos she read Accounting, graduated with second-class upper honours, and joined First Bank of Nigeria's graduate training programme in 2010.

Posted to Port Harcourt, she became a favourite relationship manager for small traders, helping dozens of women move their businesses from a cash box to a proper account. She was famous for her patience, her flash cards for new tellers, and her habit of walking a nervous customer out to the car park after a loan approval. In 2017 she married Chukwudi Ibe, and in 2019 they welcomed their son, Kamsi.

She led the youth choir at Christ the King Catholic Church, Port Harcourt, and organised an annual Christmas highlife evening in her father's memory after he died in 2021. Her nights off were spent on Okrika waterfront walks with her husband and a bag of roasted corn.

Ebere died peacefully in January 2025, after a brief illness, three and a half years after her father. She leaves her husband, her young son, her mother Ngozi and her brother Chidi.

“Numbers are just music with fewer instruments.”