One of my mentors owns an O&G firm, he found out from his PI that his top staff were stealing from him & his finance guy, a pastor, just bought a filling station worth N150M. I asked him why he didn’t sack him, his response “He just made the company N2B, let’s consider it tithe”. https://twitter.com/samuelotigba/status/1275027639363940352

He contracted me to set up an ERP system to curb the stealing, while we were on it, he made it clear that they won’t use it & even if they did, they will find a way around it. He was right, they abandoned the platform after 6 months. If you have ever owned a restaurant, club,

Hair/barbing saloon, supermart, church etc you’ll know that people steal & unfortunately it’s more prevalent in Nigeria. Most businesses shut down cause of this. Someone called it “The Nigerian factor”. You have to account for it in your financials. It is what it is.

It will be dishonest of me to think my own case will be different. That’s business foolishness. From Govt to law enforcement to staff, you’ll have to navigate your way through a system set up from day 1 to make sure your business doesn’t succeed in Nigeria.

So when he was recruiting GEDs for his pan African expansion, he told his candidates, “steal but keep it within 10%”. They all felt insulted. These were people with solid CVs, self acclaimed moral standards & families. 3months later, the budget they submitted had over 30% markup.

How did he know? They had internal fight about splitting the profit they were about to make & how much markup they should put ontop. The 2 that said 10% was ok, snitched. He ended up recruiting them. One of them got death threats. “The Nigerian factor”.

These men/women were church leaders too. I have seen greed first hand & what it does to people. Mentor said “when recruiting for top positions, prioritise honesty over skills”. Nigerian Banks learnt the hard way: Employees porting to another bank after getting free trainings.

15 years of doing business in Nigeria, from O&G, IT, Tomato/AC/Toothpick retailing to PET recycling, I have learnt one thing: no matter the pay or incentive you give your staff, most will steal. Experience is a good teacher but learning from others experience is better.

What happened to the finance guy? Mentor had an exist strategy in place, brought in interns to work under him without raising any suspicion. After 3yrs, he transfered the CFO to one of his subsidiaries & retired him. Severance package with details of all his thefts.