Winner of The Sun Nigerian Hero Award 2015, Ms Josephine Ugwu, has declared that her nomination for the honour had further strengthened her resolve never to veer from the noble path of integrity and rectitude that she had been treading for years.
She said she would remain eternally grateful to the Board and Management of The Sun Publishing Limited for voting her winner of the prestigious prize.
Speaking when a team from The Sun Publishing Limited, led by the Editor, Saturday Sun, Mr. Bruce Malogo, formally notified her of the award in Ikeja, Lagos, Ugwu declared that the honour from The Sun was the biggest of all the awards she had won since she came to the limelight last year after returning a bag containing money, which she had found at the airport.
Ugwu, then a cleaner with an agency working at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Ikeja, Lagos, had, on January 23, last year, found a bag containing the sum of N12 million lying carelessly at the airport. Even though her monthly salary then was a miserable N7, 800, she returned the bag to the authorities.
Ugwu, who has since been employed by the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN), would be honoured on Saturday, February 20, at The Sun Awards holding at the Expo Convention Centre, Eko Hotels and Suites, Victoria Island, Lagos. Other awardees are Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Anambra State Governor, Willie Obiano, wife of Borno State Governor, Hajiya Nana Kashim Shettima and 16 other very distinguished Nigerians.
But the incident at the Lagos airport wasn’t the first time Ugwu would be demonstrating such rare exhibition of uncommon integrity. Two days to Christmas in 2014, she had returned N3.3 million she found at the airport. Four days later, on December 27, she found and returned another N600, 000. At Enugu airport in 2006, she had found and returned N10 million.
Ugwu expressed gratitude to God that a 2014 prophecy by her spiritual father, Pastor Victor Okechukwu Agah of the Restoration Outreach International, Ikeja, that she would soon be announced to the whole world had been fulfilled by The Sun.
“I’m very happy for this award,” she asserted. “I’m happy because the prophecy of my daddy in the Lord has been fulfilled by your organisation. Pastor Agah told me in the second week of December, 2014, that God said He would soon announce me to the world. He said it three times. I was confused when I heard it, because I’m not a rich woman. I was earning just N7, 800 as my monthly salary. I’m not related to Dangote. So, I was wondering how the world would hear about me. But see how the prophecy has been fulfilled. So I’m grateful to God and I will forever remain grateful to The Sun,” she stated.
Ugwu said even though she had come across large sums of money in raw cash since she started working as a cleaner at the airport, the temptation to take such money had never crossed her mind.
“I have never taken such money because it is not mine. If I need something and God wants me to have it, I believe God will provide it.
“Even the N12 million, I saw it and took it to the security. That was how I was brought up by my stepmother, because my parents died when I was very young. My stepmother told us the children that anything that did not belong to us, we must never take. And that has remained with me till date. I’m also a Christian and that is what the word of God says,” she said.
She noted that she had been honoured by a number of organisations, government agencies and private concerns since she returned the N12 million last year. She informed, however, that The Sun Nigerian Hero Award was the biggest and the most prestigious.
While presenting the letter to her, Malogo said the Board of Directors and Management of The Sun Publishing Limited as well as the organisation’s Board of Editors were very proud of Ugwu’s exemplary acts of integrity, especially the honesty she displayed after discovering N12 million.
“We recognise you and celebrate you for these amazing stories and your incredible honesty, contentment and willpower. It is hoped that other Nigerians would learn to follow your good example,” Malogo said.
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