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I will start this intervention with the background to the study and definition of terms.
Work ethic has been defined as ‘a set of principles that guide individual behaviours and attitudes towards work’. A good work ethic has these elements: diligence and responsibility. reliability, and professionalism (if you are a carpenter, carpenter well), respect, integrity, and accountability. Integrity is the quality of being trustworthy and having strong moral principles. It involves honesty, ethics, consistency, and accountability (you should not say ‘it wasn’t me’, even when caught pants down like Shaggy, 15 years ago). From another perspective, integrity is an uncompromising commitment to doing what is right and proper. Entrepreneurship is the process of scanning the environment and taking the risk of exploiting opportunities and creating values (especially inimitable ones) for which customers are willing to pay.
Entrepreneurship, beyond the vision and the visionary, needs human capital to partake in the value creation process. For the human capital to be enablers of value creation, they have to be engaged and committed and should possess the appropriate work ethic and be people of integrity so that their ‘aye’ is their ‘aye’, be able to take and execute instructions, and be trusted to do what is right at all times and should neither engage in petty or large-scale thievery nor intentionally sabotage the vision. Unfortunately, all layers of the business ecosystem are populated with workers of poor work ethic and integrity deficit. Let me share some stories relating to small- and medium-scale businesses, including people in commerce.
“Unfortunately, all layers of the business ecosystem are populated with workers of poor work ethic and integrity deficit.”
I spent my recent leave at IgboUkwu (I am a village man), and I was engrossed mostly with social activities.I needed to discuss an issue with the chairman of our socio-cultural organisation, a farmer. All efforts to track him down proved abortive. It had not always been like this. One day, I visited him by 6.30am, and he told me his story. The yield (eggs) in his poultry suddenly started dwindling, and he decided to find out why by being a hands-on farmer. Since then the yield has increased by up to 10 crates per day, and he now stays fully on the farm. This has scuppered most of his social engagements, including appointments.That day I caught him at home; he was interrogating his water-tanker driver, who would claim that there was no business during the day but operate at night so as not to render any returns! Within this period, another townsman based in Lagos was at home with the key to his warehouse because there was nobody trustworthy enough to take charge in his absence. I also encountered a visionary entrepreneur who was risk-friendly enough to establish a factory and local Silicon Valley in Igbo-Ukwu. He had sustainably tackled the perennial problems of light and communication networks and had started operations. He left some cartons of bricks in the complex, and when he needed to make use of them, they had vanished. He was redesigning his security architecture as I left. He also told me how his driver and security man conspired to steal all ‘stealables’ from his Port Harcourt home.
These recent stories reminded me of stories I have heard from the victim-entrepreneurs in the past. Not so long ago, an oga went to his apprentice’s village to inform his parents that he would settle his son by December 2025. He missed his way because a two-decked building had replaced the wretched bungalow that was there when he visited years ago. He turned back, and as he was trying to make enquiries, the apprentice’s father emerged from the complex and profusely thanked him for being God’s instrument in the socio-economic transformation of their lives. What happened? The apprentice had stolen enough from him to build a double-decked complex, but the father believed that the Oga was privy to that ‘business’. Don’t ask me the type of internal-control system that the Oga adopts in his business.
A townsman and friend owns and runs a diversified medium-scale business. A few years ago, he told me that his greatest problem was finding trustworthy people to share in his vision. He was continuously hiring and firing them, but nothing changed. Another townsman, the BIGGEST Dangote cement distributor, lost a truck with its content to one of his drivers. In my younger sister’s school in Okota, parents would enrol their children, accumulate debts and migrate to another school; accumulate debts there and still change to another school, leading to a generation of migrant students who wouldn’t know the alumni association they belong to.A colleague of mine had a transportation ‘hustle’. One weekend, he decided to handle the steering. What he garnered that weekend was more than the monthly returns from his driver. He SOLD all the buses the following week.
With these few stories of mine, I hope I have been able to convince you, not to confuse you, that most of our human capital have poor work ethics and suffer from AIDS (acute integrity deficit syndrome). So, what should these struggling small- to medium-scale enterprises do? Close shop? Scale down? Operate a real one-man business or beg God to send down some angels to work with them?
Ik Muo, PhD, Dept of Business Admin, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye. 08033026625
