Employment in Nigeria: Between Grace, Grit, and Gamesmanship
By Yahaya Kana Ismaila
Last year, I gave a talk about how staff are employed and retained in most Nigerian agencies, both public and private in today’s Nigeria. You might want to think it’s quite straightforward, right? Competence, merit, and all those righteous things we tell ourselves?
Well, that’s not quite how Nigerians find themselves employed or remain in employment, not nowadays at least. Let me concede that competence or merit has its place somewhere down the line and we’ll come back to that. However, realistically, most Nigerians who are employed today are products of, ermmm… grace.
Yes, they have the grace to have gone to school and somehow graduated, and the grace to find someone who will get them employed. This could be through what I call ‘name, cash, or kind’. Let’s be frank: we know that job racketeering, both official and unofficial, has become the true gateway to employment these days. Did I hear you say what are those? Well, the official racketeering involves the new normal of sharing slots with politicians, who in turn share them among their friends and cronies. The evidence is of this current practice is on the page of virtually every politician you know in Nigeria. The unofficial kind is where civil servants simply merchandise job slots like gala in a Lagos traffic jam. A ready evidence of this is the Teachers Service Commission employment racket, but there’s evidence or so many bursted rings reported in the media. The legal position in Nigeria is that only the unofficial racketeering is illegal and liable for prosecution. But let’s not worry ourselves about all that.
So, you can pay for your employment if you can, or your father’s name can do the payment for you. There are some who pay with their good looks. Again, the conclusion whenever we say this, is that we’re referring to women, but that’s not always the case. There’s evidence that men have also been sexually harassed in exchange for employment. Then there’s the “knowing someone, who knows someone, who can facilitate employment” approach. No need to explain this one.
Now, once you’ve found yourself employed, the real challenge is how you keep yourself there. My boss has a theory: I can facilitate your employment, but only you can keep yourself there. That’s his theory. Operationalising the “keeping yourself there” clause means different things to different people. Many survive their employment by allowing the basic animal instincts of adaptation to kick in and take control.
Adaptation strategies can be both legal and illegal. Settling for either depends heavily on four factors: parentage, intelligence, pockets, and looks. For those who are intelligent, capable, and teachable, but come from humble backgrounds, the legal adaptation strategy is best for them. It allows them to fall back on that much sought-after bar of competence as a means of staying employed. A major trait of those in this category is their eagerness to learn on the job and undertake tasks that others may consider too hard.
Illegal adaptation strategies, on the other hand, are preferred by those who are neither intelligent, possibly from rich families, nor have much else to offer but good looks or influence. This category understands the Nigerian system well. They know how to use a combination of approaches be it cash, kind, or simply dropping daddy or mommy’s name to remain on the job. You’d be shocked that these ones often rise faster and are ever-present in projecting the tasks and responsibilities of the job.
Ok, I’m not saying that all people from rich backgrounds are unintelligent or need to cut corners to remain employed. There are many hardworking, very beautiful/handsome people from privileged backgrounds who are still capable and do not require underhanded practices to thrive. But it must be said that they pale in comparison to their kind who exploit the illegal adaptation strategy.
My conclusion is simple: it would be naive to tell ourselves that merit has any serious value when it comes to gaining employment in Nigeria, but it does have great value when it comes to retaining employment, especially for people from humble beginnings. It becomes triple jeopardy if you are unintelligent, incapable, and from a humble background. So, depending on your parentage, work on how best you plan to get and stay employed. One thing that we must never do, is stop romanticising merit as the only means to an end. That thinking is not Nigerian. Perhaps, if we stop telling ourselves lies, we may begin to develop the mindset of changing the situation.
