Omorodion Solomon Uwaifo

By the time you left ECN in 1973, you have risen to which position?

At that time I was the northern area manager, but basically at that time, I was senior executive engineer. I said, I came back in 1962, by March 1973, ECN thought I was too experienced for all these substation and stuffs. So by 1963 March, I was moved to Onitsha and in Onitsha by 1965, something happened and I solved the problem and the head of planning and design department in ECN headquarters in Marina said Mr Uwaifo is too experienced to be engineer manager in Onitsha, he should come and design distribution system for ECN. So I was moved back to planning and design department in Lagos. I was there for one and half years. Then the head of planning and design department was leaving, I think he is an Australian, then the chief electrical engineer of the ECN who said that we never had a Nigerian engineer to head the Metering and Instrumentation Department and that Engineer Uwaifo was most suited for that job. So they moved me out of planning and design and took me to system operating department where metering and instrumentation was and then sent me straight away to Austria, London and Switerzland for a nine- month experience in meter design, manufacture and settings.

I did that and that was during the civil war. I went to Austria in 1967 March, I spent four months in Austria in Vienna and from Austria, I flew to London to learn this idea.
After that experience they moved me from LG Works Switzerland; it is a place called Zoom. I worked in what we call Trajector meter. After about nine months, I returned to Nigeria, the civil war was still on when I came back, then I was in metering and instrumentation up to 1968.