Bureaucracy ” excessively complicated administrative procedure.

3rd week of January 2020, there is a repeat of our national embarrassment; the constant collapse of the electric power grid, and as usual fingers were pointed here and there at the leaders of those parastatals .

I’m writing this in fairness to the head of those organisation and also a way to share my experience when I interned with a government parastatal in 2010/2011.

As a computer engineering undergraduate, I was quite knowledgeable about all the computer in the organisation and my joy is for everything to work smoothly since I’m the only computer engineer in the facility.

As a good staff, I ensured everything is serviced as at when necessary and working when needed by the staff…..but my colleague who studied physics then randomly turns some things off and I was always at loggerheads with him.

One day I confronted him in one of the lobby and asked why he does it and he said

You have to create chaos for them to understand how important you are in the organisation.

I refused to agree with him , doing things my way and also taught one of the HR guys ( worst mistake) how to operate the routers in my absence.

In my own small mind, I believe organisational efficiency is more important than my personal gain.

I even replaced laptop power adapter with original ones rather than the short-lived fakes which he buys.

I did all this with the hope of being employed as a full time staff but alas I was the first person to be asked to leave when the organisation experienced some allocation challenges with the state government.

My salary was the lowest 25,000 at the time yet I was asked to leave even when there are other redundant heavyweights in the company.

Years afterwards , I had this discussion with one of the senior staff then and he made it clear to me that I was the odd man out, a big threat to my peers and they were fast to vote me out as the staff to go and HR couldn’t defend me because I’ve also shown them I’m dispensable.

He also said HR would av called me back if a catastrophe occurred after I left but since everything worked fine,no need .

Which brings me back to the National Grid issue, energy optimization/ automation will constantly fail when job security is only measured by how dispensable the staff are.

Humans are naturally selfish and Nigerian workers aren’t different, they all want their work appreciated and adequately compensated ( a very big topic for another day) and will go to any length to protect it irrespective of the value being derived from it.

This also drives home Pastor Sam Adeyemi’s comment during the last election in the attached video.

Our challenges as a nation is hierarchical and needs to be solved on every rung of the ladder.

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