Business happens with or without electricity

I’m not sure if anyone noticed in that last post that my mental state was deteriorating as I was writing... On Sunday night, I was feeling the adverse affects of reaction to local food and dehydration. If anyone is travelling to Africa, I highly recommend bringing those electrolyte solutions – they really do you a world of good. I wonder what it was since I usually have an iron stomach.

Anyway, I digress, this post is dedicated to working in Calabar. For the next 4 weeks, the Assistant Director of the Planning, Research and Stats Unit of the Agriculture Ministry will also double-hat as our driver transporting us from our hotel to our office. Three cheers for Mr Charles Ofulue who seems to know everyone around town!

Instead of writing a tedious description of my first few days, I will make some observations to provide everyone a general idea of working state of affairs here:

• The Ministry has a very strong vertical hierarchy
• Staff have a strong respect for seniority and titles, for example, we must address everyone by their full titles such as Chief, Doctor, Madam
• Meetings never happen on time eg. on our first day, our 11am meeting with the Commissioner, Permanent Secretary and various department heads to discuss scope did not happen until 3pm that day :)
• Our “office” is the ministerial meeting room. It is actually very lovely and large but we have no internet and no flushing toilet. I am a gun at using a bucket now!
• IT infrastructure is virtually non-existent. For the estimated 800 staff, there are only about 12 PCs which are used as word processors ie. handwritten notes are typed into Word then printed. There are 2 printers but 1 is not working. The IT department has a desktop that is not plugged in nor used. Computers that do work have viruses on them!
• Electricity drops out often and we have a generator next to us to keep our fan going as the humidity is unbearable at times
• Nobody seems to go out for lunch… the humidity is suppressing my appetite!
• The most used phrase for greeting is “You welcome” which is used for a standard hello or welcome here. No book that I read on Nigeria mentioned that!
• Office hours are around 9-4pm. As there are no lights and electricity, nobody stays back at the office

I have been amazed by how quickly we have all adapted and acclimatised to different circumstances. To demonstrate this - as we are going through data collection, we realise that there are no facilities for printing or photocopying. The solution? Take photographs of the documents. Working here has definitely shown me that there are practical creative solutions to any problem!

I’m very excited about our work as I can see great opportunity to improve processes. We will spend the next few days requirements gathering, interviewing staff and understanding the AS-IS state. Then the fun bit will begin where we start solutioning and offering a roadmap. It probably makes no sense to anyone reading this what we’re trying to achieve but I will try…..

Essentially, the Ministry is currently making agricultural decisions based on reports produced by the PRS unit. Departments feed all their data in various formats to the PRS who keep all the data in hard copy eg. farm yield. In an ideal world, the roadmap will lead to a consistent centralised database where data collected are in standard templates across all the departments whether they be fisheries, vet services, livestock, pineapple, cocoa, cashew etc. The current situation is that data is all in hardcopy and in various formats. I won’t even mention that data integrity is a real issue, for example, a poultry farm of 300 chickens had recorded single digit eggs produced in one day!

The work is very interesting and the staff are very intrigued by the IBM “consultants”. :) We have lots of curious faces popping in and out all day. The Director of PRS wants me to get married in Nigeria and stay here! haha

The other teams’ Ministries have their own set of problems as well and it is interesting at the end of the work day to compare stories and ideas. It has only been a few days but we have really bonded as a team with good-natured bantering and support. It’s such a unique experience to share with such lovely people.

I have to run now to get ready for dinner and to watch the Nigeria vs Korea game with the locals! Poor Heeseok, he has been getting a lot of trash-talk.

My next post will be about the political situation in Nigeria as I understand it. If anyone has anything they want me to focus on, please let me know. More than happy to obliged.

Much love to all back home xx