THE OTHER SIDE OF UNEMPLOYMENT

Many employees are dishonest, reckons Joshua J. Omojuwa

Tunde once worked and lived in Lagos. He was doing quite well even then, but he secured an opportunity in the Netherlands that provided him with more opportunities than he could have imagined. Within months of relocating, he was already remitting money to his family and friends. He had no issue with doing that, except for when the bills pile up around the same time.

Tunde always wanted to have a farm, so he discussed the idea with an old friend back in Nigeria. The friend already farmed on a small scale so they both agreed to start a new farming enterprise where they each owned shares. Tunde provided the capital which also helped to secure land and labour, whilst the friend provided the managerial supervision needed to bring the idea to fruition and ultimately grow it.

When Tunde dreamed of having a farm, he always thought of it as something to make money for himself. However, by the time he kicked-off the idea, it was no longer to make money for himself. His primary reason for starting the farm was to provide jobs back home and to use the money to support his friends and family.

A year into the business, Tunde knew he was going to exit. His partner told tales of farm workers who always found a way to game the business. They’d kill the fowls overnight, then claim it was some disease or ants. They found a way to place ants at the scene of the crime. Tunde’s partner always ended up telling the workers to throw away the dead fowls. The workers simply took them home to eat.

At other times, they’d feed the animals a lesser ration than decided, then sell some of the feeds elsewhere. The feedback Tunde got every other week indicated he was running a lost cause. He found out he had spent four times more than he had intended to invest on the farm over a year.

Tunde decided to discuss the matter with another friend. That was when he also found out that his partner ran two separate farms, a thriving one and a suffering one. Tunde’s partner was building another farm with the investment from Tunde whilst using some of the money to pretend to run the joint enterprise. During one of their partner video calls, Tunde asked him about the other farm. The partner said he was running that as an insurance against the failure of the failing one. Tunde was shocked. His trust had been betrayed. He stopped sending money across. Soon after, both farms went under. The partner and the farm workers were all back in the labour market less than 18 months after the call.

This is not a unique story; it is more like the norm.

We have built and entrenched a culture that treats betraying other people’s trust as being street-smart. You either know someone or have heard stories of people that sent money back home to build houses that ended up returning home to see no land, let alone a house on top of it. Elsewhere, your capital is all you need to commit to buy or start a business. Because once you hire the right people and a focused manager, they can run the business, earn their pay whilst you earn your profit. Here, if you aren’t available to monitor your business like an obsessed cat, chances are that the business will be run down by the very people that were hired to make it thrive.

Everyone wants to be rich and richer, here and now. And it does not matter how the money is made. Indeed, our society hardly cares how the money is made, it only cares that you have it. That has created a cyclic system of distrust that you can plot to the state of businesses, work, and unemployment in Nigeria. There is more than enough private capital in Nigeria and diaspora to create more businesses. That capital sees the level of depravity in our society and instead chooses to stay in the bank where it barely benefits the owner.

Nigeria’s diaspora is one of its most important economic forces. The remittances indicate that it is a group with enough capital to power commerce and industry here. A lot of these remittances are to support family and friends to help them meet their needs. If we weren’t such a society where you are more likely to see someone run your business down on account of their greed and larceny, some of that would have gone to setting up businesses here. The difference between giving someone money to meet their needs and starting a business to have them manage it is like giving someone fish to feed versus trusting them to manage a fishing business where they can legitimately earn their own fish.

Sadly though, it is easier to just give people fish. Because if you hand them your fish business, they’d run it down whilst pretending to be smarter than you. And when you decide to approach the courts for justice, between those who’d insist you are a wicked person for taking the person to court and the court itself showing you that it is a pointless endeavour —at least on account of the processes and the years it’d take to get justice – you’d know to just count your losses and move on.

You lose money — hopefully once. They lose jobs and opportunities and pile on the national unemployment data, while we look to government for help. The same way culture eats strategy for lunch, culture will always moderate whatever economic policies a government introduces. Unemployment, I believe, is a policy issue that needs to be addressed by government. That belief doesn’t invalidate the fact that there is a side to it that’s deeper than an economic policy.

There are those who pay their workers less than those workers deserve. That bit is true. However, that does not change the story; we have built a culture that scares capital.

Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/author, Digital Wealth Book