Culture and the Nigerian workplace

By Ifeanyi Uddin

… It is very easy to presume that the intersection between our culture and modern workplace warps both morality and common sense. But in reality, something far more prosaic may be afoot. There is not much that is modern about the Nigerian workplace vis-à-vis our ossified cultural practices.

My 35 years of post-school work (in Nigeria) divvies up (not particularly neatly nor with much pre-thought) into stints with the civil service, the not-too-formal private sector (where monthly pension deductions from your salary simply vanish into a black hole) and Nigeria Incorporated. And, diverse, though experience in all of these places have been, two key threads run through them: A near pathological obsession with hierarchy; and a riot of bosses and a dispiriting dearth of leaders.

One could explain the hierarchy thing in terms of the cultural context within which much of our work takes place. And I have often wondered if cultures built around elders and the daily obeisance that younger ones must pay to them do not lead directly to workplaces built around hierarchies. That the Japanese “sarariman” regularly offers up this same kvetch is sufficient indictment of the cultural integuments of our workplaces.

Especially when this is argued as one reason why the Japanese economy scores relatively low on innovation, vis-a-vis its peers.
How do you explain the paucity of leadership, though? Japan, to stretch our preferred example, may have more than its fair share of jerks as workplace bosses but it hasn’t wanted for leaders so much that society’s progress has stalled in result.

That there are few leaders in our local civil service is understandable. Purpose is the one concept that that workplace so badly needs. As a civil servant, you went to work and came back every day with no sense of where what you’d done fits into or with anything. Hardly surprising, then, that most civil servants find more creative uses for their offices and time.

Unfortunately, as with the setting up of whistle-blower infrastructure to help fix corporate governance shortfalls, feedback mechanisms designed to improve corporate cultures are as performative as have become most of the masquerade festivals in our villages. Like those events, they simply validate tourists’ experiences.

It is no surprise either that the private sector and its need to turn a profit to recompense investors whose money the business runs on, is spared the civil service’s mission creep. Yet, or may be because of this, Nigeria Incorporated is the most obsessed with driving change and organising the retreats that supposedly bring this about. If you can ignore the fact that these retreats nearly always mask an advance of processes in the wrong direction, I have learnt three lessons from attending more than my fair share of these.

First, while most businesses in what we describe as the organised private sector have no difficulty denouncing most forms of bullying (indeed, a few have generally-accepted procedures for calling out, sanctioning, and trying to remediate jerk behaviour), not many have thought through the definition of and the management of sexist conduct in the workplace. A few oases aside, key elements of corporate Nigeria are as patriarchal as the Nigerian village nearest to them.

Tribalism, on the other hand, despite having implications for merit and a motivational effect on high octane employees, is protected by the Constitution of the federal republic. Unfortunately, as with the setting up of whistle-blower infrastructure to help fix corporate governance shortfalls, feedback mechanisms designed to improve corporate cultures are as performative as have become most of the masquerade festivals in our villages. Like those events, they simply validate tourists’ experiences.

Second, in the contest between global best practices and local constraints, the latter triumphs all the time. The fact that the most visible players in corporate Nigeria boast some association with leading global business consultancies provides useful contrast for this point. In the tension between consultant-types and the rest of us, the unspoken requirement is that “If you’ve seen something work well elsewhere, the onus on you is to localise the experience”. Alas, because this requirement is never ever met, and this is the third lesson, I can confirm that “culture eats strategy for breakfast every morning”.

I find that especially in our leading corporations, we have allowed a fossilised view of cultural expectations to drive the modern workplace. This is what allows a boss to tell his subordinate that an apology is all that is due from her each time he expresses displeasure with the quality, direction, and or pace of her work.
Does this not return me to where this conversation took off from? I find that especially in our leading corporations, we have allowed a fossilised view of cultural expectations to drive the modern workplace. This is what allows a boss to tell his subordinate that an apology is all that is due from her each time he expresses displeasure with the quality, direction, and or pace of her work. Up until I turned 20, the cultural conversations around the workplace that I picked up from my parents centred around the practice where the wives of salarymen went to carry out domestic chores in the boss’ house as a condition for their husband’s preferment at work.
Not much of that happens these days, thankfully. But then, the brown-nosing has not gone away. It has simply evolved. How much of this has been helped by (it is not an erosion of values, but) our failure to build strong value systems and the institutions that underpin these elsewhere, including robust thinking around regulation and how this is organised? In search of an answer to this question, it is very easy to presume that the intersection between our culture and modern workplace warps both morality and common sense. But in reality, something far more prosaic may be afoot. There is not much that is modern about the Nigerian workplace vis-à-vis our ossified cultural practices.