Poverty: An economic woe in Nigeria: Video shows...

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Excavation (by some residents) of 'poisonous' packets of chicken that were intercepted and buried by the Nigerian Customs a few days ago. Nigeria is known as the most populous and richest country(by GDP) in Africa. With a growing population that currently stands at about 170 million, poverty still plagues certain areas across all fifty states in Nigeria.

Note from our source:

"We are advised to exercise restraint in the rate of our frozen chicken consumption."

The Nigerian Custom Service at Onne  intercepted six containers laden with frozen chicken certified by NAFDAC to be poisonous and unsafe for human consumption and were buried in a pit. However, desperate persons numbering over 200 went to the pit site the next morning, dug and carted away the poisonous frozen chicken and is currently on distribution in our markets. Please be guided and alert others too.

Dear All,

We saw scores of people in Eleme/Onne axis (just before trailer Park) carrying raffia bags full of exhumed 'frozen' chickens and turkey. The Nigerian Customs buried them Tuesday 28 October 2015 after seizing them from the importers.

Please if you live in Rivers State, especially in Onne area, cascade this post to people around.

You might also want to stay off frozen poultry for a while."

Source: vimeo.com

To Become a Leader, Think Beyond Your Role

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The world is full of people with opinions. Television, radio, and other media are brimming over with commentators making suggestions and offering seemingly authoritative advice to government officials and corporate executives about what they ought to do. At dinners and cocktail parties — and around the water cooler at work — we talk about what others should do or should have done, or the flaws of our bosses.

In our jobs, we may give our opinion on an issue from a functional or departmental point of view — in other words, a limited perspective. Or we may give an opinion without fully thinking about the issues and weighing the interests of various constituencies that our boss has to consider in order to make an important decision. We may do this because we don’t have access to additional information or, alternatively, because we believe that broadening our perspective simply isn’t part of our job description.

This kind of opinion giving may be quite appropriate and adequate in any number of situations, but it doesn’t constitute leadership. Leadership requires much more. It starts with taking on a broader perspective in figuring out what you truly believe should be done — that is, as if you were an owner.

I Thought I Did a Good Job

Jim, a vice president of a consumer goods company, called me to discuss a problem he was facing. He was a former student of mine and was calling to seek advice. He had just had a jarring experience, and he was trying to make sense of what had gone wrong.

Jim had been working on the launch of an important new product for his company. He was a key member of a multifunctional launch team that was headed by the senior vice president in charge of one of the company’s key divisions. The team was charged with conceiving of all aspects of the new product’s design, packaging, marketing, and distribution strategy. This product was vital to Jim’s company, because the market share of several of its core products was eroding, and senior executives urgently needed to find new avenues for growth. They thought that this new product would address an important consumer need and reestablish the company’s position in the minds of its customers.

Each member of the project team was assigned one aspect of the new product and its launch. Jim’s responsibility was to focus on the point-of-sale promotion for the product. He felt this wasn’t the most critical assignment, but — given the importance of this project and the high quality of the other team members — it was still a good opportunity.

After several weeks of work, he came up with a detailed plan regarding display and placement for the product within each retail context: grocery stores, drugstores, and other consumer outlets. In addition, he developed alternative point-of-sale materials to be used in some of the regional product tests that were about to be conducted.

During this period, the project team met once a week, with each member of the team reporting on his or her area of responsibility. The senior vice president wanted every team member to be aware of the plans for all aspects of the launch. He hoped that team members would question each other and learn about each other’s assignments, and thereby produce a more effective launch strategy.

Initially, Jim was very pleased with his work on this project. “I thought I did a very good job,” he told me. To come up with the detailed plan, Jim had assembled a subgroup comprising several of his subordinates. He felt great about how things were going, which was why what happened next was so disconcerting.

At one of the late-stage project team meetings, Jim was asked to present his final recommendations. To his surprise, several members of the project team roundly criticized his proposal. They felt it was out of step with the nature of the product, price point, and likely consumer buying behavior. In particular, the members of the larger team felt his point-of-sale positioning was more consistent with an impulse purchase, whereas they believed strongly that this product should be positioned and priced as much more of a premeditated buy on the part of the consumer.

Jim was shaken. After the meeting, the team leader took him aside and asked him how much he really understood about the product being launched. “I’ve been in every meeting,” Jim replied, “and I’ve listened carefully.” If that was true, the team leader asked, how could he be so out of step with the team members regarding the product’s positioning? Jim countered that he thought he had responded well to what he had heard in the meetings, and that he had also drawn effectively upon his past experience working on other successful launches.

The team leader proceeded to ask Jim a series of specific questions: “Who do you think should buy this product? How should it be priced? How should it be packaged?” Jim admitted that he hadn’t really thought about these issues because they weren’t explicitly part of his specific assignment on this project. Other team members, he argued, were supposed to be worrying about those questions.

The team leader was exasperated by Jim’s comments. Before ending the meeting, he gave Jim some pointed advice. He urged him to think about how he would answer these questions if he were the team leader, rather than simply a member of the team with a narrow set of specific responsibilities.

Jim thought this was an odd recommendation. He called me to get my reaction to what had happened and to ask for suggestions regarding how he should respond to the project manager’s challenge. My reaction was straightforward: “Jim, your team leader has given you some great advice. I agree with him. Pretend that you’re responsible for this situation. Really try to think as if you were the boss, or even owned the company. Imagine that your life depended on getting every aspect of this launch right. How would you do it? You’re a talented guy. Think like an owner and use your talents to answer his questions.”

Jim acknowledged he hadn’t thought about this approach, in part because his current and previous bosses had never encouraged him to think or act this way. “That’s going to take a lot of thought and analysis on my part,” he said, “and maybe even some serious soul-searching. Are you sure this is really my role? Do I really have to do all that?”

“Yes,” I responded. “If you want to be a leader, you absolutely do.”

He decided to take this challenge seriously. He interviewed other team members and applied his broad skills and talents to think through every aspect of the product positioning. He even conducted some of his own research at selected retail outlets, looking to see how competitive products were being positioned. After doing all this work, he began to realize that his initial recommendations were at best superficial, and at worst radically misaligned with what he now thought would work for this product launch.

He came to a disturbing insight: he had done a lousy job. He had not applied a leadership mind-set in his work on this project assignment. As a result, he had done inferior work and made himself look bad to others in the company. He decided to summon his courage and apologize to the team leader and the entire project team.

The project team members were gracious about his apology. They were impressed that he had had the guts to admit he was wrong, go back, and redo his work and rethink his recommendations. He proceeded to explain the new positioning recommendations, which his teammates quickly approved. He felt as if he had been welcomed back as a valued member of the team.

He realized that he had learned something valuable from this experience. This was reinforced when the senior vice president, who was widely recognized as a rising star in the company, told him, “From here on in, Jim, I hope you’ll act like a leader in this company. You have great potential here, but only if you start thinking like an owner. Define your job broadly, rather than narrowly.”

Jim promised himself that in the future, he wouldn’t think like a narrow functionary, but instead approach his work as if he was an owner of the company. This new mind-set helped make his thinking much clearer and his work much more effective. He had a new prism for judging his thinking and his actions.

Developing Conviction

It sounds simple: “Think like an owner.” In fact, it is hard to do. It requires you to put yourself in the shoes of the decision-maker. You may realize that you prefer not to be in those shoes. There’s too much pressure; there are too many considerations; there are too many constituencies. With all the complexity, constant change, and myriad of issues in the modern world, it may be easier to rationalize more narrow thinking: Dammit, it’s not my job!

Yes, it is your job, if you want to be a leader. If it frustrates you, or makes you agonize, or even creates a heightened level of stress for you, then you need to get used to experiencing those feelings. The more you practice this, the better you’ll get at doing it. I would urge you to begin to believe and internalize the view that thinking like an owner is central to your effectiveness in your job. Thinking like an owner means getting to conviction. “Conviction” is meant to describe a threshold level beyond which you feel a high level of confidence about what you truly believe should be done.

Many leaders spend their lives striving to get to conviction about what they would do in a particular situation. The reality is that, much of the time, they may not have a strong point of view. They keep gathering information, agonizing, and assessing until they reach a threshold level of confidence.

On the other hand, some leaders need to be wary of getting to conviction too quickly, or having such a strong initial point of view that they fail to take into account key considerations that are crucial to making a good decision. Each of us has blind spots, may be prone to ideological points of view, or may be unaware of our own subtle biases. As a result, we each need to also take sufficient time to gather information, consider alternative arguments, agonize, and make sure we are arriving at a balanced judgment.

The point is that the process of searching for conviction can be very challenging. The contextual factors and considerations are changing all the time; competitors take significant actions; products get commoditized, and so on. In addition, different people looking at the same situation may come to different points of view about what should be done. To cope with all these factors, leaders need to perform analysis, seek advice and input from others, debate alternatives, and generally ruminate. Much of the time, this process may feel like a grind.

While you’re going through this grind, you don’t always need to know exactly what to do; you don’t always need to have the answers. However, as a leader, you do need to be constantly striving to get to a level of conviction on key issues. How do you do this? You and your team need to focus your efforts on taking the necessary steps that will help get you to a sound judgment.

With practice, you will learn to understand yourself better and increasingly learn what conviction feels like. As you search for it, you will get better at gearing your efforts to work in a way that will help you get to that feeling. Leaders don’t look for excuses for why they can’t act like an owner. Instead, they embrace the challenge of ownership and encourage their teams to do the same.

Source:  HBR.org.

Online One-Stop Print Shop Serving SMEs in Nigeria

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Oluyomi Ojo is technological start-up entreprenueur, who graduated in 2008 from Ladoke Akintola University,Ogobomosho with Btech in Applied Mathematics, with experience in graphic design and printing gained from family business prior to graduation, he and his team established Printivo.com, an online one-stop print serving SMEs and blue-chip firms. The firm recently got a grant from EchoVc, a Venture capitalist. In this interview with ADEYEMI ADEPETUN, Ojo spoke on the challenges and prospects of being having a startup firm in Nigeria, with a clarion call on government to support business development Excerpts.

What inspired the establishment of printivo.com?

Printivo is an online print shop offering small and Medium scale  Enterprises (SMEs) and blue chip companies affordable quality print easy for SMEs to market their business. We take off the stress of companies’ officials leaving their offices to look for print office. We are unique because, customers can design their products on our website themselves there are so many designs on the site that customer can actually customize to his/her taste in real time. We are an online shop with offline face and we began operation last year. In our website, as you are picking the quality for printing, it is telling the customer the price. It is 100 percent transparent to customer selects his/her design, order for it and pay, it is printed and delivered to the customer anywhere in Nigeria.

What about customers that are offline?

When we have customers offline we attend to them but larger base of our customers come online which is convenient. Whether from Ibadan, Port Harcourt or Kano, you can and order for your print without coming to Lagos. We have a department that addresses that side of market. We have a team that is dedicated to dedicated to offline orders. However, we are getting customers both online and offline.

Why did you go into this on line niche market?

If you look around you, the internet is changing how to do business. There was a time that the only way to buy anything was to step out of your house. Now, with the world going online and the way we interact with our phones, using it to find people and information at your fingertips, we realize that we can serve the large SMS market operators who actually need small print to drive their business. The operators in this segment of market are going around so much to find a designer, printer and looking for where to print it cheap and that is why we came on board to serve this market. We print a lot of products including stickers, roll up banners, labels, flyers, handbills backdrop banners promotion items such as mugs among others.

As a tech startup, how is the business getting funded?

The founders arwe three persons- Adeogun, the head of operations; Oloyede who is the head of graphic design and myself, the CEO. Based on our background in graphic designs, we started off with our own funding. For several months of the business, the customers were the only source of funding for other projects. We grew with customers funds and we got a couple of grants for expansion. Recently we also closed an investment from EchoVc which is part of our expansion drive.

Can you expatiate more on the involvement of EchoVc?

We are partnering with the venture capital EchoVc. This shows that they have confidence in the company. I will not go into the details of the venture but it is a six figure in dollars. EchoVc is Pan African technology venture capital investment companies across Africa for growth. It is an investment company with deep knowledge about tech companies and I strongly believe that the partnership will work for both parties. The fund will work for both parties. The fund will be used to significantly broaden the company’s product range and scale the business.

Printivo will soon be two year in operation, what have been the challenges?

The first challenge any business in  Nigeria that uses heavy machinery is electricity. When we started that was our major challenge. Adequate supply of electricity is central in growing business. Another challenge we had was outsourcing large portion of our production. Then we had issues with managing orders control in the quality and control in the time of delivery. This challenge our core value we are selling to our customers, We therefore decided to run the business end to end , meaning we control largest portion of our orders. Now, we have reduced outsourcing to the bearest minimum to uphold our core values. Our USP is pricing, quality and delivery and time frame. We want to build a brand people can trust . We spend less about 60 per cent on added electricity. If SMEs spend less on electricity they could do more and employ more people. Every generator takes job of two people on average for small businesses of below 15 staff.

In what ways can the government encourage startup and SMEs like yours?

One of the things government needs to do is to make the environment conducive for business. We talked about electricity but also consider logistics and infrastructure . Create rail lines for movement of goods and make the environment investment friendly. There are opportunities and when we get to that point when the environment is enabling enough in terms of infrastructure, security, low interest rate, SMEs will grow on their own.

 Source: ngrguardiannews.com

Finance Supervisor needed by a Payment Terminal Service Provider in Lagos

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A payment terminal service provider is currently in need of a Finance Supervisor (1)

Location: Lagos

Exp: 4-6 years in similar position

Qualification: Bsc. in accounting / ICAN certified or equivalent

IT Skills: MS Excel/Word, PPT.

Industry: telecom/Gaming/Payment Terminal Service Providers(PTSP)/IT services

 Job Description

• Account reconciliation and analysis: Prepaid Expenses, Deposits, Accrued Expenses, Investments, Capital Leases, members Equity, Inter-company balances

• Journal Entries including maintenance of recurring journal entries and allocations

• Coordinate the monthly book close

• Preparation of operational data/analyses

• Plan, coordinate and execute annual financial audit

• Assist in the compilation of information for the Company’s annual tax returns

• Develop and implement policies and procedures with emphasis on internal controls

 Requirements

• Must be ICAN Certified.

• Minimum B.Sc. in Accounting 

• Have a flare for numbers, work well with people, aggressively anticipate impacts of workload/issues to team deadlines and have a very positive work attitude including willing to work some longer hours during peak periods.

• Strong experience in income statement analysis.

• Advanced Excel skills, ability to work with lookups and pivot tables.

• Proficiency in Microsoft Word, Outlook and PowerPoint.

• Strong organizational, analytical and interpersonal skills.

• Strong verbal and written communication skills.

• Self-motivated to learn new concepts and participate in new projects

Qualified candidates should send their CVs  to info@deecla.com.ng

Operations Supervisor needed by a Payment Terminal Service Provider in Lagos

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A payment terminal service provider is currently in need of an Operations Supervisor

Location: Lagos

Experience: 6 years and above at Supervisory Position

Qualification: B.Sc. in relevant discipline

IT Skills:MS Excel/Word, Powerpoint

Industry:Telecom/Gaming/Payment Terminal Service Providers(PTSP)/IT services

Job Description:

                   • Configuration and deployment of company android POS devices

• Installation/Upgrade of our device system and applications.

• Providing technical expertise and support to merchants on malfunctioning devices.

• Providing support and maintenance for devices deployed to clients on the company platform

• Organizing regular training sessions for agents and junior operations staff on the recommended use of company platform and terminal

• Reviewing agent credentials and ensuring consistence with company policy 

• Providing regular feedback to technical partners on the Company platform

• Managing the training and customer service unit.

• Managing key client relationships with vendors and banks 

• Monitoring and reviewing device activity 

• Managing and  actively responding to all agent operational issues 

• Liaising with the sales department on all agent operational issues

• Testing and quality control check of new devices delivered to the company

• Preparation of Target vs Achievement reports- Daily/Weekly/Monthly

• Supporting  large geographical agent locations

• Large team Management

Requirement:

• Proven work experience in a similar role.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including ability to effectively communicate with internal and external customers

• Excellent computer proficiency (Google & MS Office ‑Word, Excel, PowerPoint)

• Must be able to work towards meeting deadlines, while maintaining a positive attitude and providing exemplary customer service

• Effective time management for work flow and delivery of results within parameters of instructions given, prescribed routines, and standard accepted practices

• B.Sc. in relevant disciplines (minimum of 2.1/ upper-credit)

Qualified candidates should send their CVs  to info@deecla.com.ng

Sales and Marketing Manager needed by a Payment Terminal Service Provider in Lagos

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A payment terminal service provider is currently in need of a Sales and Marketing Manager

Location:    Lagos

Experience: 6 years and above at Supervisory Position

Qualification: B.Sc. in relevant discipline

IT Skills: MS.Excel/Word/Powerpoint/Google application

Industry: Telecom/Gaming/Payment Terminal Service Providers(PTSP)/IT services

Job Description

 • Recruitment, screening and selection of agents for registration

• Managing agent relationships 

• Develop marketing and sales strategy for agent acquisition 

• Developing lists of merchandising items required to facilitate marketing and sales strategy for agent acquisition

• Organizing below the line activities to enhance sales

• Allocating agents to specific coverage areas and districts 

• Managing and developing sales and sales support staff

• Driving agent daily sales target

• Liaising with the operations team on all agent operational issues 

• Preparation of daily sales report

• Preparation of Target vs Achievement reports- Daily/Weekly/Monthly

• Perform other duties as assigned  

• Managing large geographical agent locations

• Large team Management

Qualified candidates should send their CVs  to info@deecla.com.ng

'Meet world's only combined heart and kidney specialist doctor, and he is Nigerian'

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During a visit to Nigeria late in September/early October, Jide Akintunde, Managing Editor, Financial Nigeria Magazine, and Director, Nigeria Development and Finance Forum, sat down with Olurotimi Badero, a Nigerian U.S.-based interventional cardiologist, nephrologist and peripheral vascular specialist to discuss his amazing, superlative training in medicine, becoming the only doctor in the United States or anywhere in the world to have full specialist training and certification in nephrology and cardiology. Dr. Badero is Executive Director, Cardiac Renal & Vascular Associates.

Jide Akintunde: There is a string of professional titles to your name. What is your training?

Olurotimi Badero: By training, I specialised in internal medicine, cardiovascular medicine, invasive & interventional cardiology, nephrology and hypertension, interventional nephrology & endovascular medicine, nuclear cardiology as well as peripheral vascular interventions. Putting all that together, I would like to think of myself as an interventional cardio nephrologist as well as a peripheral vascular interventionalist.

JA: How did you come about this extensive training?

OB: I came about this training as a result of the things I had to go through in the United States and also because of my personal quest for knowledge. I started from one specialty to another, and kept looking for answers. I have a passion for patient care; and a passion for creativity. When you put that together, a rare opportunity is born. The ability to make a difference between sickness and health is one of the greatest forms of wealth and
that doesn't stop as long as you continue to strive to get better.
  
For me, it was just a continuous process of trying to get better, staying the course and finding the things that really define who I am and what I really want to do to make a difference in people's lives.     

I've always been a competitive person right from childhood. I attended St. Mary's Private School where I skipped 4th grade due to my academic performance; and then Federal Government College, Odogbolu, Ogun State, for my high school education. In my fifth year, I, alongside some students, won a nation-wide science quiz competition in the country and that heralded a quest for professional dominance. That marked the beginning of a journey for me. One that will eventually lead me down the path of medicine. I gained admission into University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) to study medicine. I really didn't want to study medicine, but my dad, who was a great man, wanted me to be a physician.

When I graduated from medical school, I moved to the United States where I began my specialist training, first in Internal Medicine at State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, in Brooklyn which was a three-year programme. Following the completion of my programme, I proceeded to Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, for a two-year Fellowship in nephrology and hypertension. Following completion of my Nephrology training, I returned to State University of New York Downstate Medical Center for another three years of Fellowship training in cardiovascular medicine. Upon completion of my general cardiology training, I gained admission into the prestigious Yale University School of Medicine for two fellowship training in invasive & interventional cardiology as well as peripheral vascular intervention, a fellowship training I completed with distinction.

I then returned once again to State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn for yet another year of fellowship training in interventional nephrology, dialysis access care and endovascular medicine. Altogether, I spent ten years of continuous post-graduate medical training which I later found out was unprecedented. I currently specialise in seven different areas of medicine. I am a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, a Fellow of American College of Cardiology, a Fellow of the American Society of Nephrology, and a Fellow of the Society for Cardiac Angiography and Interventions.

JA: Perhaps you would like to elaborate more on your personal motivation for the pursuit of this incredible professional excellence, particularly because Nigeria is noted internationally for the conflicting profile of churning out con artists, some of the world's best professionals, and inept political leaders?

OB: I learnt very early in life that a goal without a plan is only a wish and that there is no testimony without a test. The only time that success comes before work is in the dictionary. I also learnt from my dad the value of hard work as well as perseverance and not letting the moments define you but defining the moment by embracing the challenge. I remember when I was in primary school, I would be top of the class on many occasions, but my dad was never really satisfied. He always told me to do better. I couldn't understand why he wanted me to do better when I was scoring around 96 percent on average.

One day, I summoned up the courage and asked him why he wasn't completely pleased. He said, “Even though you were top of the class scoring 96 percent, the fact that you didn't score 100 percent means that based on the standard of your school, 96 percent was good enough. I want you to get to the point where you tell yourself '96 percent is not good enough for me' and start to set your own standards.”

I learnt from that early age to set my own standard. That is where my motivation actually came from. I am aware that some people get involved in activities that don't uplift the image of Nigeria which in actual fact happens in many countries in the world as well. However, there are equally a good number of people who have done Nigeria proud.

For example, the first-ever black neurosurgeon in the United States was a Nigerian. The man who discovered the post-concussion syndrome amongst NFL (U.S. National Football League) players is also a Nigerian.  

Nigeria has produced very brilliant minds, not only in the field of medicine, but also in science and technology, music, arts and in other fields. That is always refreshing to see and hear about. I believe there are a lot of other young people in Nigeria today who are doing marvelous things that the country needs to recognize. And there are Nigerians that will still do greater things than we have done. We shouldn't only hear about the negative things Nigerians do but recognize the good things they do as well because that's a platform for motivating the younger generation.

JA: I learnt you have the distinction of being the only doctor in the United States to hold specialist qualifications in cardiology and nephrology. Why did you find it necessary to acquire these qualifications, and what difference is this going to make in managing heart and kidney diseases?

OB: That is an excellent question. The heart and the kidneys are very closely interrelated. We learnt that in medical school. The heart is a very fascinating organ as well as the kidneys. The heart pumps blood all over the body to supply basic metabolic needs. Twenty percent of that blood volume goes through the kidneys. That tells you why the kidneys are very important. The heart and the kidneys are so closely linked, that whatever happens to the heart, affects the kidneys and vice versa. That is a major concept emerging in medicine now called cardiorenal syndrome and renocardiac syndrome because we are now recognising the interrelationship between these two organs.

While I was in training at Emory University School of Medicine as a kidney specialist (and by the way, Emory has one of the most intense Nephrology training programmes in the United States), I quickly found out that the commonest cause of death for the patients that died was heart disease and not kidney diseases. And we were doing a great job taking care of these patients but ultimately they died from a disease I didn't have much control of as I would have loved to. That was a challenge I had to embrace being someone, whose decision to be a physician was to make a difference. I realized it was very difficult for me to make that difference, albeit we were taking care of patients and they were living longer.

So that set the stage for me to decide if I wanted to explore ways of becoming more effective. I started toying with the idea of going back to specialise in cardiology because I really wanted to get to the bottom of the problem. This meant another three years of specialist training in cardiology. I was initially discouraged by some of my friends at the time who felt I was spending too much time studying. But for me, the value of knowledge is worth the time one spends in acquiring it. And there is never a time that is too late to acquire knowledge.

My training in cardiology as well as nephrology gave me a 360 degree view of a patient with a near total approach to their disease state. I think it puts me in a better position to actually treat these patients. I realized quite recently I was the only one with such formal training, holding certifications in both fields. I currently hold certifications in six different specialties in medicine.

Source: - 'Financial Nigeria'