by Tunde Fagbenle

All over the place, both in public and private offices, the attitude to work is so sickeningly casual and lackadaisical. We have lost it.

I had an experience last weekend that troubled my mind and got me really thinking about the enormity of the challenges facing us as a nation and as peoples inhabiting this geographical space which by ordinary civilised urges, we should all be engaged in trying to make better and better still.

There was I, with my family (of wife and child), in Ijebu-Igbo for my wife’s annual ritual (well, she would not be Ijebu otherwise!) in memorial of a father who departed three decades ago. It is not in my place to criticise my in-laws (not publicly) but really, isn’t there some other way to memorialise the dead than feeding the neighbourhood and quaffing beer? But that is not the issue here, before my mouth gets me into Ijebu trouble.

As I was saying, we were in Ijebu-Igbo. We did not plan to spend the night there but night caught us (surprise?) and since I’ll take anything but having to travel once dusk sets in, Mrs said we should move on to Ago-Iwoye, a neighbouring town of tolerable distance and kill two birds with one stone: visit some relation of hers and spend the night in some hotel.

Cut a long story short, we got into our (“Presidential” –haha) suite in this “top” hotel only to discover that water was not running from the taps, and did we need a wash badly! I am usually not calm when I think I’m getting less than I paid for, or in plain language, being ripped off, but I managed to keep my cool on learning that it was merely a minor problem which a technician was looking into and water would soon be restored.

So we left the suite to bide the time at the restaurant. Before long, the sky was heavy with impending rain and storm was afoot. Then I saw the “technician” also come into the restaurant to “relax;” his job done, water was back. My mind immediately went to what that could mean for the many hotel baths, showers and water basins that might have been turned on and left so when water was not running.

“Hello, Mr Technician,” I said to him, “I think you or someone should go round all the rooms and ensure no taps are running now that water is restored. Otherwise there is danger of flooding from unclosed taps.”

“Thanks, sir,” he answered but did nothing simply carried on with his “relaxing”. I drew my wife’s attention to my concern.

Again, cut the long story short, an hour later, we were back on our hotel landing and what did we find? Lo and behold, the corridor was a pool of water. From two rooms on just our landing alone, water that had overfilled the sinks and baths had flooded the rooms and seeped through the doors to form a confluence on the corridor!

Alarm went out and panicky staff went “fire-fighting” something that did not have to happen in the first place. The mess, the damage and the loss can be imagined!

It got me thinking. This has nothing to do with our leaders, this is a people’s problem; our work ethics. We are in real big problem in Nigeria. All over the place, both in public and private offices, the attitude to work is so sickeningly casual and lackadaisical. We have lost it. Everywhere, everyone is there to just do as little as possible and make as much as possible – even more.

There is little real interest in the job for which we earn a living (true, most jobs do not pay a wage to live on). There is little concern for the protection of the provider, be it a small or a big corporation or government. We hardly take pride in our job. And so, it is always a relief, a thing of joy, to see the rare exceptions of someone really enjoying his or her job and going the “extra mile” to do the job as it should be done whether someone is “watching” or not.

It is always a joy to see the traffic controller who is pacing up and down and gleefully directing traffic; a cleaner humming and moon-walking as he/she does the job; a nurse or doctor truly concerned to get the patient back to good health and so checks even outside the usual working hours to say hello; the teacher who is absorbed in his/her teaching and lives it, wanting and striving to have a 100 per cent success rate of his/her students in examinations; a governor who with rolled-up sleeves is seen paying surprise visits (without sirens) to construction sites, schools, hospitals, etc in his domain; a government official doing his job without waiting for an inducement or egunje to work on a file; and so on and so forth.

Never met her but I won’t forget the features editor (she knows herself) in this newspaper (PUNCH) who took so much joy in her job that she always sent me a “thank you, sir” whenever I emailed my column early enough, as if she owned the paper. She is no longer on the desk but she was an example in “joy in the job.”

Let us go back quickly to the hotel. By morning, I woke up to find some unusual serenity around; an abandonment with no worker in sight. It turned out it was prayer time of whatever faith the owner held. Everyone had been herded into a part of the premises into enforced devotional service. This, it was learnt, was observed every day. Perhaps it was the proprietor’s way of “putting the fear of God” in the workers, perhaps it was his way of atoning for his sins about the way he makes his money. Whatever. It clearly had not helped in improving the workers’ devotion to duty beyond also looking for ways to help themselves to whatever they safely can.

We’ve got a long way to go

A friend posted something on his Facebook page a few days ago. It was a set of photographs taken by a tourist, Michel Denis, on the Safari in Kenya. They are amazing pictures of some sibling cheetahs that came across a young impala and rather than pounce on it and kill it, they caught and patted it playfully awhile before walking away without hurting it. It carried a caption: “The Law of the Wild Says Kill Only When You Are Hungry!”

I posted a retort of an observation: “We must be worse than the wild (jungle) in Nigeria then since we kill (loot the treasury) even when we are not hungry; stealing more than we may need in many lifetimes! Shior.”

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.