The applause had barely settled in the hall when the announcement came: the Dratech Business Innovation Excellence Award 2024 had a new name on it, and it belonged to Mr Ndukwe Victor Ukara. It was a fitting close to the Dratech International Conference 2024, a gathering built around ideas, execution, and the people who quietly keep African businesses moving forward.
On paper, the award recognises professionals who stand at the point where business operations, analytics, and real execution meet. In practice, it honours people like Ndukwe, who understand that strategy only matters if it shows up in cleaner processes, stronger numbers, and better decisions that everyone in the organisation can act on.
Tonight, that story was his.
A professional who speaks both business and data
Ndukwe is, at his core, a business and data professional who understands how organisations actually run and how numbers guide smarter choices. His foundation in Business Administration, built through studies at Cameron University in the United States and an MBA from the University of Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom, gave him something many professionals never quite manage: a view of business that connects theory with the everyday realities of people, cash flow, inventory, and risk.
He did not stay in the classroom. His career has touched management, purchasing, data analysis, fundraising, business support, and customer focused operations across Nigeria and abroad. That mix matters. It means that when he looks at a dashboard or a spreadsheet, he is not just seeing graphs and columns. He is seeing supply chains, staff schedules, delayed shipments, customer complaints, vendor negotiations, and the complicated trade-offs that sit behind every decision.
In a business environment where many people are either “numbers people” or “operations people,” Ndukwe has deliberately positioned himself as both.
From store floors to strategy rooms
The story of his business strength did not start at the top. Before he ever carried the title of General Manager, he learned the language of purchasing, inventory, and store management.
In roles across Vicson Trading Company and earlier at Vicndyson and Associate Nigeria Ltd, he worked through the practical side of business that rarely makes headlines but always shows up in the profit and loss statement. He managed supplier relationships, negotiated pricing, tracked stock, and kept an eye on cost control. He learned how late deliveries ripple into lost sales, how a poorly negotiated contract can quietly drain margins, and how a single weak link in the supply chain can unsettle the entire operation.
As Purchase Manager at Vicson Trading Company, he progressed through purchasing, warehousing, and leadership roles. He was responsible for sourcing vendors, building long term supplier relationships, and achieving cost savings through careful negotiation. Those decisions, line by line, helped to stabilise inventory, strengthen cash flow, and create room for the company to reinvest in growth.
When he moved into full general management, first as Manager at Vicndyson and later as General Manager at Vicson Trading Company, he brought that foundation with him. He was no longer only responsible for purchase orders and stock counts. He was now overseeing complete business units, managing teams, monitoring financial performance, setting budgets, and structuring operations in a way that kept staff aligned and customers served.
Colleagues describe him as someone who builds stable workflows, not just documents them. He has led diverse teams, set clear expectations, and created environments where both front line staff and managers understand how their daily work connects to wider business goals. That is business innovation at a very practical level: turning scattered activities into a coherent system that can grow.
Turning data into direction
What sets Ndukwe apart, and what weighed heavily in his selection for this award, is not only his experience in operations. It is his ability to bring data into the room in a way that is useful, honest, and understandable.
He has hands-on experience with tools like Excel, Power BI, and SQL, and not in a superficial way. In his work as a Data Analyst with High Impact Careers, he maintained Business Intelligence tools, built analytical visualisations, and designed dashboards to help decision makers see performance more clearly. He worked with customer journey data, digital interaction records, and market research, turning them into insights that could shape strategy rather than sit idle in reports.
Data cleaning, performance tracking, and reporting were not just technical tasks for him. They were part of a broader habit of asking simple but important questions: What are customers actually doing? Where are we losing them? Which products or services are quietly driving revenue, and which ones are only consuming resources? How do we present all this in a way that non technical stakeholders can understand and act on?
This ability to translate complex insights into simple, action ready guidance is one of the main reasons Dratech singled him out. Many organisations now say they are data driven. Far fewer have people who can sit with a sales manager, a warehouse supervisor, and a company director and explain the same set of numbers in language that each person can use. Ndukwe has consistently done that.
Innovation in business is not only about technology or financial engineering. It is also about people: how they are led, supported, and challenged.
Throughout his career, whether managing a team of ten in a store environment or leading broader business units, Ndukwe has paid attention to staff experience. At Vicndyson and Vicson, he has been responsible for hiring, developing, and retaining personnel, as well as creating performance structures that move teams forward without burning them out. He has understood that smooth processes and good numbers are built on clear communication, realistic targets, and mutual respect.
Beyond formal roles, his leadership has also shown up in volunteering and community service. As a volunteer peer educator during his National Youth Service Corps year, a fundraising chairman with Delta Sigma Pi, and a project committee member with a Rotaract club, he has worked on projects that required coordination, accountability, and service minded leadership. His brief time as a Health Care Assistant in the United Kingdom added another layer: empathy, patience, and the discipline required in high trust environments.
These experiences matter because they shape how he approaches business decisions. When he is looking at a spreadsheet, he is thinking about the people behind the numbers, the customers affected by a delayed decision, and the staff who must implement whatever strategy is chosen.
Why the Dratech Business Innovation Excellence Award 2024 belongs to him
The criteria for the Dratech Business Innovation Excellence Award are clear. It honours professionals who bridge business operations, analytics, and real world execution in a way that delivers measurable impact. It looks for people who support growth, improve processes, strengthen decision making, and contribute to organisational sustainability in a way that reflects Dratech’s values of innovation, clarity, and leadership within Africa’s business ecosystem.
When the selection committee considered Ndukwe’s profile, several themes stood out.
First, breadth with depth. He is not simply a manager who once attended a data workshop, or a data analyst who has never handled a budget. He has lived in both worlds. He has run full business operations, with responsibility for profit and loss, policy creation, and operational structure. He has also rolled up his sleeves with datasets, SQL queries, and dashboard design. That combination is exactly what many African organisations now need as they navigate digital transformation and regional competition.
Second, consistent process improvement. Across his roles, he has taken on responsibility for creating and refining systems: designing workflows, setting policies, managing stock, evaluating markets, and building performance structures. The focus has always been on improving stability and clarity, not chasing trends. That kind of grounded innovation is what keeps businesses alive through currency shocks, regulatory changes, and market shifts.
Third, human centred decision making. His experience in fundraising, healthcare support, and volunteer leadership shows up in the way he thinks about stakeholders. He is not only optimising for profit. He is looking at how decisions affect staff morale, customer trust, and long term relationships with suppliers and partners. That balance between numbers and people is increasingly recognised as a competitive advantage.
Finally, readiness to share knowledge. Whether working with analysts, store staff, or senior managers, he has built a reputation for clear communication. He explains complex insights in simple language, encourages questions, and treats data as a shared tool rather than a personal advantage. For Dratech, which is committed to growing an ecosystem where knowledge and innovation are shared, this attitude aligns strongly with the spirit of the award.
Put simply, he represents the type of business leader that the award was designed to celebrate.
What his win means for African business and innovation
Awards can sometimes feel symbolic, but this one carries a deeper message for the African business and innovation ecosystem.
Across the continent, organisations are under pressure to modernise, digitise, and compete with both local and international players. Many are investing in software, tools, and training, but the real bottleneck is often people: professionals who can connect technology with the realities of cash flow, staff capacity, market behaviour, and regulatory complexity.
Ndukwe’s journey shows a path that more young professionals can follow. Start with a solid grounding in business principles. Learn how operations really work on the ground. Develop technical skills in data and analytics. Grow into leadership roles where you can pull all of that together in service of clearer decisions and better outcomes.
His recognition by Dratech signals that the ecosystem values this blend. It sends a message to business leaders that innovation is not only about apps and platforms. It is also about rethinking how purchasing is managed, how budgets are set, how performance is tracked, how customers are understood, and how staff are supported to execute on strategy.
For mid sized companies and growing enterprises in Nigeria and across Africa, this kind of profile is especially important. They need leaders who can sit in a general manager’s chair in the morning, review a dashboard in the afternoon, and then talk with a frontline team in the evening without losing the thread.
As the lights dim on the Dratech International Conference 2024, the announcement of the Business Innovation Excellence Award will stay with many of the delegates who watched Ndukwe walk up to receive his recognition. They saw not just a polished citation, but the story of a career built patiently across continents, industries, and responsibilities.
For Dratech International, his win reinforces a commitment to celebrating talent that is both visionary and practical. For younger professionals, it offers a template: build real skills, stay close to the numbers, understand people, and treat innovation as something you do in the daily structure of work, not only in big speeches.
For Mr Ndukwe Victor Ukara, the award is both a recognition and a challenge. It honours the work he has already done in bridging business and data, in structuring operations that work, and in turning insights into action. At the same time, it invites him to keep shaping the conversation about what modern African business leadership should look like, across Nigeria and beyond.
As the Dratech Business Innovation Excellence Award 2024 now carries his name, it also quietly carries a wider hope: that more organisations will trust professionals like him to design the systems, read the numbers, and lead the teams that will define the next chapter of African business innovation.
