08.29
I’ve been reminded today by a supervisor that I see Nigeria through the eyes of someone living in a 5-star hotel. Fair enough. I’ll grant him that, but then that is similar to how I’ve seen most countries I’ve ever visited. I would like to think though that I’m not that oblivious. If I were, I probably would not have had the conversation with him in the first place. We spoke about his admirations to work and live in South Africa as opposed to Nigeria. What he thinks South African can offer him that Nigeria can’t. More about that later.
It has been an interesting week. Yesterday we made a lot of progress in terms of our stay here in Nigeria. The apartments have now been cleaned, the appliances can be delivered anytime we want; it is just the furniture that is the current stumble block.
DTS’ plan of paying the hotel and have the hotel transfer the money to the furniture shop backfired. At least the hotel could allocate some of that money against our bill. Some of it was transferred back to Lourens’s* card. DTS arranged a transfer of the money to their bank account from South Africa, but it can take several business days for the money to be cleared by the Reserve Bank. Hopefully this is the week.
Yesterday, we went to The Palms Mall to buy all the other stuff for the apartments – brooms, mops, buckets, towels, cutlery and everything else one needs for housekeeping. Lourens and I went to Game first (same Game as in South Africa) and we bought all the ‘hardware’ we called it. Only at checkout did we realise they don’t take Visa. And let me emphasise this. The Game store at the premiere shopping destination in Nigeria, does not take Visa or Master Card. Lourens does not take no for an answer, especially when it comes to money. Money is not a concern to him and I think he is used to throwing it around to get what he wants and in a way, buy contentness. But not for the first time now, he was stuck.
The solution is that we all go raid the ATMs at the Mall and withdraw as much cash as we could. Lourens will then later refund us. So between the 4 of us, we could raise N200,000 (R10,000) in a couple of minutes. And lo and behold the shopping spree at Game came to about N197,000. Jason*, Ryan* and Smart then took it to the apartments while Lourens and I went to Shoprite (same is in SA) to get the ‘software’ – soap, Handy Andy, toilet paper etc.
At least we knew they take Visa cards, so no problem there. Yeah, right. When they swipe Lourens’s card the machine says to use the chip on his card, which is normal for chip cards. Problem is, Lourens does not have a chip card. Stuck. Lourens cannot pay. I can’t either as none of my cards work at points of sale. Off we go to get some hard cash. Bought the stuff and locked it up in the apartments. At the hotel we celebrated a rather successful day.
We were supposed to leave at 10:00 yesterday morning. Jason and Ryan had some work to do and Lourens and I were to go start the shopping. Lourens was late so in proper Charles fashion I got quite upset. I have just wasted enough of my life waiting on other people and I refuse to do it here. I always ensure I’m on time and I expect that from others. So I decided that I will go to the Mall and get things going until Lourens can join me. Phoned Lourens from the Mall, no answer. Highly annoyed, I decided to frack that and enjoy myself. So I went to watch Salt at the cinema.
Spoiler Alert. I quite enjoyed it. It was not a bad movie, although those neural scans and stuff seems a bit improbable. The Nigerians do get involved in their movies. They relish every moment. When it turned out the Russian President was alive, they gasped and clapped hands and rejoiced. When Angeline Jolie killed the Liev Schreiber character, she basically got a standing ovation from the audience. By the time the movie finished there was a loud cheer and we all clapped hands.
At work, things for me have progressed slowly. Too slowly. I expected it to be a challenge – not the work though, getting the proper information and documentation. Red tape in huge cooperations like MTN is taken to the next level. To get approval to have the required software installed on my PC requires me to have a username on the MTN domain. To get a username and be registered on the domain I must be on the procurement system. To get on the procurement system I must have a work permit. Getting a work permit involved going back to South Africa and face the Nigerian consulate all over. It’s really a vicious circle. In proper business fashion, even though we all know that it impacts our timelines; it will never be uttered as an excuse or even an explanation as to why we haven’t quite progressed as far as we would like to have been. I mean, I’ve lost a month of work while waiting for my visa back in South Africa.
So to get going requires a lot of patience, and explanation, and back doors and rule bending. I’m not where I wanted to be, but I don’t think I could have done any better under the circumstances. We had a team meeting on Friday, with Roger* – the boss you can say. He seems to understand the dynamics of the organisation, the country, the people, the systems and everything in between. Roger is saying that we should understand that we are not in South Africa anymore and that things work differently over here and that he is not surprised that we are frustrated. From our point of view, we have committed to delivering a solution in a given timeframe, expecting certain things to be in place, but they’re not and there is not much we can do about it. Again, blaming the lack of documentation or proper information will just not fly as an excuse, even if both parties are aware of it.
Roger wants us to accept the situation and work on improving it from there. Lourens hears ‘accept’ and is up and is up in arms. He doesn’t take kindly to ‘accepting’ things if it is not to his liking. Me neither, but I will at some point give up and consider an alternative (which can and is being interpreted as the pessimistic or negative way. ‘Never say die’ is considered the positive response I guess. I would like to believe though that I understand both points of views but agree more with Roger’s. I think Lourens is like the wolf trying to blow the brick house down and he is getting worked up. Me too, don’t get me wrong! I’m certainly not Mary’s little lamb being led to the slaughterhouse, but I think the best approach here is to rather be the wolf in sheep’s clothing and first get into the house. Then only we can try and rearrange the furniture. A Trojan Horse of sorts.
On the way to The Palms Mall they sell everything along the street. There are people holding these cute puppies up for sale. I’m not sure what they eat or drink during the day or how well they are treated and I cringe every time I see that. Smart says that people do buy these puppies, even at the price N55,000 (R2250). I can only trust they get good homes and are well cared for.
Nigeria is having their 50th anniversary of independence from the UK in October. Next year it’s election time again. Needless to say that there is a lot of debates going on currently. Current president, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan took over from his predecessor when he died. Everyone I’ve been talking to likes Dr. Jonathan, but according to the papers, he is not assured of a victory in the elections.
Nigeria’s biggest issue in terms of economic growth and establishing themselves as a power house in Africa is their energy crisis. Many parts of the country are still without electricity and most of the country has their share of load shedding – where they only have power during the day and has to rely on generators at night. Even though the Nigerian economy thrives on their oil reserves, they don’t refine it themselves. Despite the fact that all their oil are exported and reimported as petrol or diesel, they only pay around R3 per litre.
Few cities are guaranteed 24-hour electricity, probably only Lagos and Abuja and within those cities not all buildings and businesses are ensured 24-hour power. Even those building that are, like this Southern Sun hotel and MTN head offices, suffer constant power failures, albeit only for a few seconds at a time. It is not strange for the power to go out on average 5 times per day I would say. Most lifts have a warning to say that should the lift stop, one should just wait a few minutes and it will be merrily on its way again – something that happened to me here at the hotel.
Dr. Jonathan has vowed to slowly but steadily address this issue and has shown remarkable progress.
When I had the discussion with the supervisor about why he wants to settle in South Africa, electricity, traffic and money was his main concern.
I must admit, it takes one to be in a country like this to appreciate things we have back home. Our roads are in a really good condition compared to the roads here. I traffic flows much better even in rush hour traffic. And we do get more money.
It’s just unusual for South Africa to be considered as the land of milk of honey.
*Not real name