“Nigerians are the problem”
No bigger lies have been told.
Every time something wrong happens around service delivery in Nigeria— like civil servants asking for bribes before giving services they’re meant to render, or landlords demanding 2 years’ rent in advance in Lagos even though we all know it is illegal, I hear things like “we are our own problem” and “how can we blame the government for this?”
I’d have called that line of thinking lazy, or overly simplistic, or maybe plain silly but I realize that a lot of us have been conditioned to think in that manner by a government that has almost perfected the art of avoiding responsibility (almost because perfection and Nigerian governments don’t go together). You may disagree with me (you probably do), and that’s more reason to read the below.
When you get to a bus park (think Mile 2 or MazaMaza), and in trying to get tickets for an operator— say PMT or GIGM, and the attendant tells you that you have to pay ₦8,000 for a Lagos to Abuja ticket when ₦7,000 is clearly written on the ticket, what do you think about that?
“These attendants are these transporters’ problems kai, what more does the company owner have to do?”
Another scenario: you wake up one fine morning and logon to your bank’s online platform only to find that your balance has reduced mysteriously by ₦1 million overnight. You can see the debit but it has no details. As the broke person that you (and me and most of us in Nigeria) are, you appear physically at your nearest branch and are the first in the hall that day. It is then discovered that a rogue teller transferred the money into his account and is now AWOL. Does the following sound like how you’ll respond?
“These tellers are banks’ problems, they need to change themselves first. There’s nothing more the bank can do”
Probably not. You really don’t care, and rightly so. Organizations have learned so too. It’s why there’s a whole body of knowledge around governance and controls. The implementation may be as simple as allowing only a manager to have the PIN with which reversals can be made on PoS terminals, and as grand as codified policies around approval limits in big organizations. When there are big control failures in businesses, the executive management and the board of directors (who are not involved in the day-today running of the business) are held liable — they are responsible for designing and implementing processes to ensure controls stay in place. A key in designing these controls is that would-be committers of illegal acts are bound to ask themselves two questions at the point of initiation: “What is the likelihood that I get caught?” and “How severe is my punishment if I get caught?”. When the answer to those two questions are “high”, then there is a big incentive to not commit that act. If the answer is low-low, e.g. in deciding whether or not to steal ₦100 billion from my state’s coffers, I realize that it’s unlikely I get caught/convicted and even if I do, I’ll serve minimal time and come back to become an elder statesman. You’ll agree with me that it’s a no-brainer.
You see that question about ticketing at bus parks? GIG & their mates have solved that problem over 10 years ago. We are having them in our spanking new train stations — and guess what? — “Nigerians are our own problems”.
