Michael Onajirevbe Ibru (25 December 1930 – 6 September 2016) was a Nigerian pioneer industrialist, business magnate, philanthropist, and founder of the Ibru Organization, one of the largest conglomerates in Africa.As a traditional chieftain of his homeland, Ibru bore the tribal honorific Olorogun and often used it as a pre-nominal style. This title is also borne by many of the members of his large family in the same way.
Early life and career
Ibru was born to the family of Janet Ibru and Peter Ibru, a missionary worker who also worked at the Igbobi Orthopedic Hospital, Lagos. His father provided the discipline and foundation of his unparalleled drive for success, but there is also no doubt that Michael Ibru’s sharp mercantile instinct for business descended from his maternal dynasty of shrewd and wealthy traders. The trade with Europeans (in palm oil, rubber and timber) in the 19th century on Urhobo’s Atlantic coastal waterways was dominated by a handful of wealthy merchants. Amongst them was Chief Osadjere of Olomu, a 19th century millionaire who built the first story building in Urhoboland; he was Michael Ibru’s maternal grandfather. Chief Osadjere bequeathed his wealth and business to his eldest son, Ovedje, who expanded his father’s commerce into a vast enterprise during the beginning decades of British colonial rule in Urhoboland in the 20th century. Ovedje Osadjere was a warrant chief in colonial-era Nigeria and reigned as Ohworode (King) R' Olomu (1924 -1949)Michael Ibru and his immediate younger brother, Felix Ibru, grew up as young boys under the towering influence of their uncle, Ovedje, and his vast trading enterprises. Michael's Paternal grandfather, high chief Ibru, was the olotu-rode of Agbara-otor – protector of the clan
In 1951, after secondary school, he joined the United African Company as a management trainee. In 1956, a few years after joining U.A.C he resigned from the company and started a partnership, which he called Laibru. The corporate entity was in partnership with an English expatriate, Jimmy Large. Starting in 1957, Ibru was a pioneer in distributing frozen fish in Nigeria. Olorogun, as he was fondly called, said in one of his very few interviews that he was seeking solutions to the problem of child malnutrition when he stumbled on his fish business. "I thought of a way to combat this (malnutrition); fish is a source of animal protein, the price of beef was very high, and even relatively well-off people could only afford chicken a couple of times a week,” he said. Michael Ibru also discovered that the frozen fish market was a fertile market with the potential to deliver returns above the market rate. However, it was a tough market to penetrate; at the time, many expatriate firms and Nigerian traders were lacking, and some were not interested in the market. But he felt he could put in extra effort communicating with general traders, who played key roles in product acceptance. To trade in seafood, he established an importing company; he also rented and built cold storage facilities across the country. By the mid-1960s, Chief Ibru had become a millionaire from fish trading. In the 1970’s, chief Ibru was responsible for about 60 percent (150,000–200,000 tons) of the Nigerian frozen fish market, with turnover hitting over N190 million. Fish trading had become the traditional moneymaker for the Ibru organization.