See ehn! The Nigerian employer is almost always a hard nut to crack. He wants an employee less than 32 years of age with at least ten years experience. Wait! Did you get that? I have taken time out to think about the possibility of such a demand in a country where you spend almost the whole of your 20s in a tertiary institution bedeviled with strike actions from multiple unions. The employer’s demand is not only strange; it is also insensitive given that the educational system is in a bad state. It doesn’t add up to any sense whatsoever to think this through to any meaningful conclusion.
Again, this employer wants a first class graduate or at least, one with a second class upper division to take up the employment. He fails to understand that academic brilliance hardly ever transmits into practical competence in the workplace. It is all about paper certification which constitutes the only evidence he yearns for at any cost. Now, don’t get me wrong. The prospective employee with such a degree may be good and equal to the task but sometimes, the candidate’s abilities stands at variance with his claim. The sacred totem he flaunts as a certificate of privilege is thereby questioned for all intent and purposes.
At times you just may be surprised at what the employer may have you do for him; that is if you eventually get the job. He leaves your job description undefined. At one point you are his secretary; at another, you are his cleaner and messenger. Your resumption time is defined but your closing hour is left open-ended. You dare not leave the office while he chats with old friends in his office. He calls you intermittently in between loud laughter sessions with these friends and they stare at you to pick on whatever value that is left of your over worked image.
If you work with the very big boss, then you will have to put up with the boss’ mistress. She only appears during office hours to catch official romance. She will always have you do something for her, so her individual responsibilities become an extension of your job description. She will correct you repeatedly, report you to your boss for insubordination and make you subservient to her directives, which you never subscribed to as an applicant. Your boss has a daughter who visits the office too with her own set of rules. These rules widen the scope of your activities and your pay remains as it was from the beginning.
Then, if you work in a bigger company, the management gives you a target which often runs against common sense. It is either you meet the target or face imminent retrenchment. You are employed yet your burden is as heavy as the unemployed. You put in ten hours of your time every day to work and the remaining hours of the day, you use it to think about the same job that takes half of your life away from you. Just when you are set to resign, you find out that you‘ve got no benefits at all. Your pension managers are on the run, the firm is either insolvent or on tax evasion list.
Before long, you find your bills growing geometrically and your means of income crawling arithmetically. Your landlord needs another one year’s rent in advance to enable him multiply the number of wives he already keeps. So he knocks at your door and calls you “my pikini!” (That is if you are not in arrears of rent) so that you can find reason with him to pay more money in advance. The company’s management feels justified holding back your salary and when you ask for it, they remind you of your inabilities to meet up with your target.
With your experience, you could start up your own business but you must have one of the attributes of God to succeed: you must be all-sufficient. You must provide your own electricity, get your own water, pay rent and still pay tax to the government that denied you these facilities. You must be a god to do business in this hostile terrain. The banks don’t believe in your proposals. They think your business ideas and projections are unrealistic because you are a struggling man. Now you have left your job. Your wife warned you, now you are at constant war with her for taking a costly decision without a clear line of action thereafter.
It is obvious that you and your employers do not know anything about each other’s duties under the laws that regulate labour matters in Nigeria. We operate under high level ignorance.
You can find out what the law says about your rights so that you can guard against infringements of any kind. We should not grow the size of our ignorance into a mountain. Just a little search and we will unravel mysteries within our orbits.
About the Writer: Evans Ufeli is a lawyer and the author of acclaimed novel, ‘Without Face’. He is also an Alumni member of the Writers Bureau, Manchester, a highly sought-after conference speaker with a passion for the concept of change. He lives in Victoria Island, Lagos. You can contact him via Facebook: Evans Ufeli, Email: evanylaw@yahoo.com, Twitter: @Evansufeli and Phone: 08037712353. He blogs at www.ethicsafrica4u.wordpress.com.
