Feyi Fawehinmi

Around mid-April 2015, a friend of mine who works with Kaduna DISCo sent me a message saying they were recruiting for a significant number of positions. He then said if I was interested, he would give consideration to anyone I recommended. Basically, he sent me the link to the job openings and said I should ask anyone I know to apply and then send him their details.

Sounded good to me so I thought, why not. I first thought about sharing it with my network privately but I decided to throw it on twitter.

1. If you’re looking for work and you’re open to Kaduna, have a look at the jobs on this list for Kaduna Disco | https://t.co/kBrMv4nKJI

— tyro (@DoubleEph) April 14, 2015

I then asked people to apply and then send me an email with the details of the job they had applied for.

2. Once you’ve applied for any of the roles, send me an email at feyi (at) aguntasolo (dot) com with details of the job you applied for

— tyro (@DoubleEph) April 14, 2015

The plan was to then pick the standout CVs and send to my friend at KEDC and leave it there. My preference for things like this is to not influence things too much if I can so once I gave him the CVs, that was the end for me.

I got a number of CVs but I think because the jobs were in Kaduna, my inbox wasn’t overrun with a deluge of CVs as you might expect if the jobs were in say, Lagos. Indeed, only about one or two of the CVs I got were from people who said they were open to relocating to Kaduna from somewhere else in the country. This probably says something about labour mobility in Nigeria but that is a story for another day.

I’m struggling to recall now but I reckon I eventually sent about 10 CVs in total to my friend for his consideration. I did not previously know any of those people. So really, once the connection was made, it was down to their own effort. My friend eventually told me they picked about 2 of the CVs for interview.

Stephen

One of them was a guy named Stephen. Each time there was an update, he would email me to let me know. At this point, I couldn’t do anything about it so I just wished him luck and left it. On the day he got a text message inviting him to an interview (July 3rd), he sent me a screenshot of the text message. Again, I wished him luck.

And then in August, he sent me another email saying he had been offered employment in the Marketing and Customer Service Department. Again, I congratulated him and wished him all the best for the future. I was due to be in Kaduna in September so I promised to meet him while there. In the event, I did go to Kaduna and even visited KEDC offices but it was such a hectic day I completely forgot about trying to meet him.

My friend at KEDC who asked for the CVs asked me not to mention his name to Stephen. I became friends with my KEDC friend by pure chance as well. One day in late 2013, I went to get lunch at McDonald’s near my office in London and he tapped me and asked if I was ‘Aguntasolo’. We laughed and struck a conversation. He remains one of the nicest people I’ve had the good fortune of meeting from blogging and tweeting (believe me, the competition is tough — I’ve been fortunate to meet some incredibly brilliant and kind hearted people purely from this blog or twitter).

Today, I got an email from Stephen updating me on how he was doing at KEDC. He attached the following photo.

 

I don’t really know how to turn this into a story about how x is the reason why y is the way it is. I suppose the only obvious thing about the story is that it’s a good one. Two promotions in 4 months and before this job, he had been unemployed for some months.
Just in case anyone wants to misunderstand my point about writing this post — I hasten to stress that this had nothing to do with me. Beyond sending his CV to my friend, I did absolutely nothing and if he never emailed me to let me know what was going on, I’d have completely forgotten about it.

This is more a story that proves the aphorism that ‘talent is universal but opportunity is not’. Further, I’ve often felt that discovery remains a big challenge in Nigeria. If something good worth backing and supporting happens in a remote corner of Ebonyi or Kwara, what are the chances of it getting found out? You can’t really blame employers in a lot of cases —finding that one good CV inside a pile of 5,000 is really hard work. So most people resort to man-know-man or word of mouth recommendations or just employ their nephew who has been sitting at home doing nothing.

Signaling

The slow-burn decimation of Nigerian education has also made it practically impossible for potential employees to signal their qualifications to employers. Professor Michael Spence won a Nobel in Economics in 2001 for his insight into job market signaling. My favourite example of this is a drug gang that needs to hire foot soldiers. It will have so many people to choose from ranging from the jobless guy who just wants to earn some money and go get a proper job later to the guy who wants to impress a girl and thinks joining a gang will do the trick to police who want to infiltrate the gang and gather evidence to break it up to informants of other gangs. If you’re the leader of the gang, you don’t really want any of these people. The person you really want is the committed gang banger who will kill and maim for you and will be focused on being a part of your gang for life.

So how do you find that guy out of such a pool of people? You tell potential employees to get a tattoo of your gang in a spot that cannot be hidden like the back of their hand or back of their neck or even their forehead. With that, you automatically eliminate all the people you don’t want. If your plan is to get a job later, you really can’t put a gang tattoo on your hand because it guarantees no employer will touch you later. Likewise, it’s not really worth it for a policeman to get a tattoo on the back of his neck for obvious reasons.
This goes some way to explaining why people in Nigeria go abroad to do Masters. It’s not so much what you get taught there. It’s about signalling to potential employers your commitment in that you gave up your pay for one year and spent a decent amount of money at the same to go and study in a foreign land. If an employer is looking for someone who can leave her comfort zone for a period of time and is motivated by the long term and not so much immediate pay, a CV with a (foreign) Masters is a good signal for them.

But how many Nigerians can go abroad for a Masters? And even if you can’t go abroad, how many opportunities are there inside Nigeria for people to add a signal to themselves? It’s incredibly hard. Some people try to learn new things by taking online courses which are good and often free. But believe me, actually going to a school to study is far easier than taking an online course. The amount of motivation you need to start and finish an online course is beyond most people (myself included).

So we have this sad situation where it is incredibly hard for talent to be matched with opportunity. God knows how many billions of dollars are trapped in that dysfunctional equation in the Nigerian economy.

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Stephen’s story makes me really happy. Salute to you brother. But even at that, I’m not ignorant of the fact that it took a bit of man-know-man to make it happen. It’s not even a sustainable way of doing things — it was limited to my twitter network (what if you are a talented guy but unemployed and had no money to buy data on your phone that day? Or what if you were on Facebook instead?) and still subject to my own biases, one way or the other.

Still, the credit goes to KEDC who actually did their best to conduct an open recruitment. From what I recall, about 80% of the roles they hired were thrown open to the general public. That is, ‘only’ about 20% were reserved for the Ogas. In Nigeria, this is a big deal. Look at the mess going on with the Police trying to recruit 10,000 people. Indeed, I wrote about this last year in my TWOTS notes. I was talking about KEDC though I didn’t mention it at the time.

The human capital of the state is lying prostrate on the floor — beaten down and run over. Kids hardly progress from primary to secondary school. A friend whose firm recently oversaw a recruitment exercise told me how people would bring their whole family to thank you simply for ‘giving them a job’. Yet, these people got the jobs after taking a test and passing an interview. But the idea that you can simply get a job on merit is almost unheard of that people are overcome with emotion.

I don’t really know why I wrote this post. But I’m hoping it makes some sense to you.

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