The past week or two saw a little debate on “Nigerian Twitter” about a claim that Nigerians are unwilling to work, effectively saying Nigerians are lazy. While the proponents of the claim had the initial field day espousing their view, the opposing team came out strongly in the second half with valid rebuttals around inadequate remuneration and unstructured workplaces. As usual with many of these debates, the truth is neither here nor there.
If you were to take any of the points articulated by the debaters in isolation and with an open mind, you would quickly accept that there is evidence to support them all. Firstly, the claim that Nigerians are unwilling to work would find credence in the repeated complaints about workers being late, treating their work as worthless due to a missing sense of ownership because “it is not my father’s company”, wanting to be paid for doing nothing, or doing the least possible work while expecting the output to be “managed like that”.
Conversely, one could also make the argument that many Nigerians may treat their work with disdain because they feel inadequately remunerated. Hence, their lack of productivity is linked to a subtle protest against poor working conditions. Also, the position about unstructured workplaces is also valid in the sense that overall productivity tends to be lower because of suboptimal working processes. When there is no order, no defined job description and people are just assigned tasks at will, the output would surely be less than what would be expected in a structured environment.
Any side you decide to camp with, you would find somewhat logical reasons to buttress your position, but as with many societal issues, things are a bit more convoluted than we choose to accept. For example, we complain about corruption in Nigeria being driven by poverty, but this does not explain why we find citizens in poorer countries who still appear to have stronger values around integrity than we do, nor does poverty explain why someone who has stolen billions of naira still feels compelled to steal more. Which poverty is still chasing such a person? Similarly, we say artisans are poorly compensated in Nigeria, yet foreign artisans are taking the same or less pay to deliver better work. It is shameful that you could ask for experienced masons or tilers and you would be advised to get artisans from Benin or Togo rather than Nigerians.
The crux of the matter is while it is true that we need to address issues around poor pay and unstructured workplaces, we should not see them as a silver bullet to fixing our national productivity. We also have a values system to address—our agreement or disagreement on the premise that what is worth doing is what doing well. It is this philosophical alignment that would determine whether we take our work seriously or not.
Interestingly, Nigerians are some of the most hardworking humans on earth, which makes an odd paradox where we can be seen as very hardworking yet with a mindset that devalues hard work. Clearly, we have what it takes achieve a lot more as a country if we could blend the hardworking spirit with a commitment to excellence. It is a paradox that a tailor would labour hard to cut and sew fabric under hot and darkened conditions but does not bother about “finer things” like symmetry, well-woven seams, or not leaving threads hanging. So, the tailor delivers a cloth to a disappointed client who cannot see the tailor’s hard work in a cloth that was designed to be “managed”. Paying the tailor more money only addresses one side of the equation as you merely get a very well-paid tailor who still delivers disappointments.
And so, we return to the small matter of not seeing things as either black or white. We can accept that we have a productivity problem in Nigeria, and we can accept that majority of the population is underpaid, and we can agree that many workplaces need to emplace structures that optimise productivity. And we can also accept that we need a society-level change in our attitude to work. When we begin to see our work as a vital contribution to the overall society and begin to take pride in doing a good job, we would see a drastic uptick in our overall productivity and have a large mass of satisfied customers and employers who would not come online to paint us with the brush of laziness.
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Jilomes 