Nigeria incorporated, too big to jail, By Uddin Ifeanyi

In my almost thirty years of work as a foot soldier in Nigeria Incorporated I learnt lessons galore. A few of the instructions have been handy. Contrast the plainness of the fact that work ought to be directed to where it is best done with the local preference for staffing junior positions with one’s cronies. Or the requirement that one ought not to separate the benefits of “management by walking about” from the fact that the manager who regularly sees likeable events, people, things, and processes on the shopfloor is not managing well. Equally, a lot of my experiences have been useful only in a Nigerian sense – sessions in how things ought not to be done, nor people conduct themselves. The brown nose one gets from kissing arse regularly, for example, is not exactly that difficult to notice. To the corporate cognoscenti (and this grouping includes all staff in an organisation but the man at the top and his lackeys) it is as ugly as it is whiffy.

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However, none of the lessons learnt have been more important than the realisation that the difference between our public and private sectors is only a matter of degree. Indeed, a great deal of the general antipathy one encounters towards the public sector (bloated, inefficient, and sleaze-prone) is, ironically, one consequence of relatively better governance in that space. Even under the worst military governments, our local media feels duty-bound to hold our leaders’ feet to the fire – the prolificacy of samizdat publications during the Abacha dictatorship being the peak of this process. The media’s resilience is how news of our public officers’ peccadilloes becomes beer parlour fare.

Not so in the private sector. You only need to look at newspaper reports of the quarterly performance of our local companies to understand how bad this lack of oversight is. Few business and economy desks in our media houses can independently make sense of audited annual reports and accounts. Nor have many bothered to outsource the process, either – a much easier workaround. And so, the pabulum that our media houses’ audiences, listeners, and readers get fed on the goings-on in corporate Nigeria, are boilerplate press releases from these businesses’ respective corporate affairs departments – full of sound and delight, nearly always signifying nothing.

Is this dearth of beneficial information and the useful ignorance that goes with it the reason minority shareholders struggle to play noticeable roles in the governance of quoted Nigerian companies? Probably. There is the traditional assumption that one who buys equity must at least be familiar with double-entry bookkeeping. Which, as company failures the world over attest to, is not always the case. Nigeria Inc. fails, though, entirely as a cultural conversation. The Nigerian pooh-bah (s/he not only heads a company, but seats on multiple boards) struggles with two cultural constructs. First, s/he needs for the answer to the question, “Do you know who I am?” to be answered by underlings quaking and stuttering in dread. Second, it is not allowed for the Mercedes of any other person in his/her narrow universe to be bigger than his/hers (pace Nkem Nwankwo).

If difference (if not necessarily moral or intellectual superiority) is the goal, the theatres in which the performances that underpin these cultural constructs take place are just as critical for understanding corporate Nigeria. For instance, the yearned-after contrast lies not just in the chief executive officer (CEO) being driven in those noisome convoys bristling with armed mobile police officers – driving other taxpayers into ditches in the process. No. It is in the convoys’ ability to drive against traffic. To get away, in effect, with what “children of lesser gods” will be consigned to secular Hell for. Confronted with this fact, one such CEO blamed his indulgence in this idyll on the fact that he would usually go through his papers while being driven – and so he misses the fact that his convoy drives against traffic.

“Oh, yes!”, he understood how the optics of it all could redound to the reputational disadvantage of his organisation. He, after all, was the public face of the business. And so, to “drive one way” could only cast his operations in the wrong light before other stakeholders. He never stopped driving against traffic, though. Plato was wrong. Ignorance is not the root of wickedness. A certain kind of malice is. Or how do you explain the returnee executive, London-trained and garlanded (s/he supposedly exemplified “global best practices”), whose daily commute to work had him drive kilometres against traffic?

“How, pray tell, does all this matter?” was the regular counter to my griping all those years. “How does driving against traffic prevent a CEO from profitably driving the business’ bottom line?” Forget the “broken windows theory”. The sense of licence that compels a CEO to drive against traffic, in order, daily, to prove his/her CEO-ship, would have him or her eventually drive against the corporation’s profit and loss accounts. Especially in a country where panjandrums of all colourations are “too big to jail”!