How many times have people told you that you should buy quality things? Many times. There is nothing wrong with that. We all want quality in our lives. The problem is not the quality, but bounding the quality. Why? Quality is an illusion which cannot be left unbounded for it to make sense.

You have a small startup and you want to have the best stationery (yes quality papers) to send your business introductory letters. The imagination is that the best stationery will do the magic. That itself is not the problem. The problem is that you have not figured out that you could save money on the stationery and still get the same value.

Why should you pay for a laptop with 100GB of hard disk, when before you get to 40GB, the laptop has been decommissioned. Technically, you have simply wasted 60GB and the extra money spent for it. You rarely take the old disk into a new one. A new laptop will come with its own disk.

We waste so much money in the world. In the illusion of value, swayed by marketing, we make stupid decisions. The higher the price of wine, the better the taste, even though the makers of the win pour the same liquid and assign different names at different pricing points. We congregate and waste money.

You want to buy prescription glasses where one company controls more than “20 brands”. You happily select the  trendy one, which is always the most expensive. But behind it is the same product priced at different points.

When celebrities do this, it is not a problem. But when entrepreneurs do, I feel bad.

Entrepreneurs Need to Create Value

Creating value is not just in bringing more revenue. It can also come in the way you spend your investors’ money. For all the things Apple plans to do, on display, I know there is a physical limit, on the human eyes, after which improvement in resolution on the smartphone will not have any material impact.

Yes, most human eyes can do a resolution of about 180 dpi at 20-30 inches. So, if someone comes to you with 300 dpi with all the marketing, you need to understand that it makes no practical sense. As they increase the resolution in the smartphones, we all think we can get better value. Have you asked yourself the maximum possible resolution a human retina can resolve?

The fact is this: it is highly unlikely that any human can resolve the difference between 2160p and 4320p in a 4.3 inch smartphone. It is impossible for man to achieve that feat. But we are ready to pay and waste $500 extra for something that adds no practical value.

Yes, I have also heard people that can listen better with a $250 musical system cable. Yes, they are from the outer space. They can hear and listen better with better cables. Nonsense. You see them throw away $230 for something that is naturally indistinguishable by the human cochlear.

Sure, there are improvements but they are MARGINAL for the money we pay for them. Thinking of the Return on Capital Expenditure (ROCE), and  Return on Investments (ROI) must not be far away.

All Together

My point is that quality must not always be associated with price for the best derivable value. If you focus on the price of the item, you will miss the whole point. iPhone will continue to up the specs for years, even when the value is marginal. Yet, we will continue to spend that money. When we go to buy cars, we check at Honda and Toyota even though we know there are Lexus and Mercedes Benz. We want to keep that extra saving to deal with other things in life.

Here, we are thinking of value, bench-marking the money spent to the intrinsic value of that car. But when we come to electronics and IT, we lose that discipline. Marketing is to be blamed. In America, you do not need the fastest speed from Comcast or Verizon in your home because the average speed is just fine. Yet, they keep asking us to upgrade, spending and wasting money on things that offer only marginal value.

Do not fall for the marketing trap: be disciplined on the things that matter. That is one way your startup funding will go a long way. In all practical sense, a $2400 laptop is a waste of money and yet entrepreneurs spend that kind of money when a $700 one will do. That does not mean there is no technical difference, but the saving could have helped you add an intern to support the growth team.

Earning value through saving makes an entrepreneur an earned value entrepreneur, just as free media is earned media.

Jobberman pioneered the online recruitment industry in West Africa. It continues to connect employers and job seekers in the region. This is industry of the future because over time recruitment will move completely online. The firm was acquired by One Africa Media many years ago. One Africa Media is now executing an Africa-wide strategy which is very important: they need scale to have opportunities to unlock value.

Hiring the right candidate is important to companies because the ability to find the right skill and talent needed would largely determine the company’s success. To cater to this need, One Africa Media, which owns Jobberman and Brighter Monday, has set up a new company, which is offering cross border recruitment services in Africa.

The new company, known as “The African Talent Company (TATC)”, was set up to focus on Jobberman and Brighter Monday’s clients that were asking for more services across the borders of Africa. This company is offering better-bespoke services in terms of recruiting, consulting, in terms research work, salary surveys and more HR involvement.

Simply, Jobberman is taking the job it has left on the table over the years. Through TATC, among others, the following services will be offered to clients and partners:

• Recruiting
• Consulting
• Research
• Benchmarking (eg salary, etc)

As I have noted in the past, Jobberman must transmute beyond the direct online recruitment business to offer services which include:

• Job portal for job seekers
• Career Advisory Services
• Recruitment, HR Advisory, Headhunting
• Placement Services (executive search)
• E-learning (marketplace)

Through TATC, Jobberman will deliver most of these services at scale, across Africa. This will help it fix some challenges inherent, at the moment, in its business model: patronage of online recruitment in the public sector.

In Nigeria, there is a regulation that stipulates that important government jobs must be advertised. Online was not included. This means that government and its agencies can only advertise for jobs in print newspapers to comply with the regulation. I have noted that when a business cannot provide services to the public sector, in Nigeria, its capacity to grow will be limited. Government remains the largest spender and that is very important for any business and startup. As Jobberman goes Africa-wide, through TATC, it will expand its revenue base. This will help cushion the effects of the lack of major revenue from government.

Nigeria is an employer market as we have more job seekers than available jobs. That has been the reason why Jobberman started charging job seekers fees. The idea was that if there are limited jobs, you need paid access to even apply to them. There is a big problem with that model, which I am not a fan of. Growing the ecosystem and giving employers assurance that the best possible candidates will see their job adverts, irrespective of the candidates’ financial positions, cannot be neglected. You cannot charge job seekers and also at the same time ask employers to pay. That is a faulty business model. It needs to focus on asking employers to pay for services while getting job seekers to join the portal at scale.

In the past, Jobberman had advertised heavily in print newspapers to inform people of its job opportunities. Yes, an online recruitment was spending money on print newspaper. It made sense because the penetration of the web was not good then. But today, Jobberman does not need to do that. It has to find ways to save that money by making sure those corporate entities and high level executives know of its presence. It can have weekly free ad coupons maintained in some major airports. It can still put adverts in print, but not the jobs ads.

Generally, I do think that the future of the company will be finding a way to build a community of learners. This can be branded Jobberman Tech with services offered to companies and governments. If it develops a reputation of preparing post-NYSC graduates, it will essentially redesign the local job market. I envisage something similar to Udacity Nanodegree.

Aggregating The Vision

The Jobberman trio has a great vision as noted during their launch press many years: connect employers and job applicants in Nigeria, seamlessly.

The unacceptable high rate of unemployment got us totally perplexed and we decided to do something about it. We set out with a mission to organize, deliver and manage the largest catalog of jobs in Nigeria. Jobberman started out in the Garage-converted-to-Office of Ayodeji Adewunmi’s Dad in August 2009 and has its root at the Obafemi Awolowo University. The original founders were Opeyemi Awoyemi, Olalekan Olude and Ayodeji Adewunmi. We are proud of our rich history, the past has shaped the present and both will launch the future as we become the premier career destination site for active and passive job seekers in Nigeria.

They have to evolve to stay true to that vision. But as internet penetrates, more employers will be running their online recruitment portals. The implication is that more channels will exist for job seekers to reach companies that have jobs. As that happens, commoditization takes place in the online recruitment business. The winning model becomes who can aggregate all these jobs in one place. I see in the near future, the opportunity will be the company that can aggregate all the available jobs in Nigeria in an easily understandable way. As I have explained many times in the Aggregation Construct, the person that does the aggregation will rule the specific sector. Under the aggregation construct, the companies that control the values are not usually the ones that created them. By building this technology, Jobberman can win big by mopping the available jobs from all sources, before job seekers, monetizing through adverts.

Under the aggregation construct, the companies that control the value are not usually the ones that created them. Google News and Facebook control news distribution in Nigeria than Guardian, ThisDay and others. Because the MNCs tech firms “own” the audience and the customers, the advertisers focus on them, hoping to reach the readers through them. Just like that, the news creators have been systematically sidelined as they earn lesser and lesser from their works. But the aggregators like Facebook and Google smile to the bank. The reason why this happens is because of the abundance which Internet makes possible. Everyone has access to more users but that does not correlate to more revenue because the money goes to people that can help simplify the experiences to the users who will not prefer to be visiting all the news site to get any information they want. They go to Google and search and then Google takes them to the website in Nigeria with the information. Advertisers understand the value created is now with Google which simplifies that process.

All Together

Jobberman continues to redesign itself as it looks for growth, not just in Nigeria but Africa-wide, albeit through its parent company. The parent company needs to find ways to deepen its strength by creating a new unit that works on the premise of aggregation construct. As Internet penetration increases in Africa, more channels will open. Winning the job recruitment competition will now be dependent on the firm that can bring those jobs  in one ecosystem where job seekers can interact with them.The present model of paid service remains, even as the Jobberman parent firm adds the new service. In an employer market, it is always challenging to run a job recruitment business, since there are always more job seekers than available jobs, giving employers so much power.

The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), a union of university academic staff, is a great institution which continues to ensure that Nigeria has the manpower to compete locally and globally, besides producing graduates that will handle the affairs of the nation. We respect ASUU and certainly commend some of the most brilliant people, in their generations, who have stayed to teach in our schools.

Yet, ASUU is not blameless. The evidence-based and empirical constructs the professors teach in our universities do not apply to how they agitate, against the Federal Government of Nigeria. They make bold demands without examining the basis of such demands. Today, they are on strike, on the following demands:

Ogunyemi said that the industrial action which took effect from Sunday August 13, 2017 will be “total, comprehensive and indefinite action whereby no form of academic activities, including teaching, attendance of any meeting, conduct and supervision of any examination at any level, supervision of project or thesis at any level would take place at any of the government universities”.

In 2009, after a strenuous and painstaking three-year renegotiation exercise, the federal government had signed an agreement with ASUU on the issues of conditions of service, funding, university autonomy and academic freedom.

—“Of all the items contained in the MoU, only the N200b out of a total of N1.3trn of the public universities revitalisation (Needs Assessment) fund was released.

Simply, ASUU wants four things (yes, five things):

1. Improved Conditions of Services.
2. More Funding (for the universities)
3. University autonomy
4. Academic freedom
5. Pending N1.1 trillion to be released to public universities.

If you check these five items, there is no way they could be in our sentence or paragraph, realistically. Why? You cannot have university autonomy and expect the government to be funding you nearly 100%. So, the governor or the President will always like to run the university as a “business” because the school is part of the line cost item. If you think a governor will fund a state university and leave ASUU to appoint the Governing Council, which provides a good avenue to settle political associates, you are dreaming. If you think a Vice Chancellor will adhere to ASUU when the governor is the one that ratifies anything he does, you are wasting your time. The Vice Chancellor, largely, is a political appointee disguised on an academic robe.

The fact is this: ASUU cannot eat its cake and have it.That is a conversation that must happen in the Nigerian university system. ASUU needs to understand that it cannot have autonomy when government funds more than 90% of its budget. For autonomy, it needs to ingenuously expand our university funding base away from government. This should be so clear to ASUU by now. So, that #3 should not be there,where #2 exists in excess of more than 90% of school budget. Government is made up of humans, the politicians, and where they allocate resources, are where they have influence. Administrative autonomy in our schools will not be possible without financial autonomy.

The #1 (improved conditions of service) is simply about salary and wages. Sure, I support that our professors be paid well. But here, ASUU has to be totally honest. I have seen adverts where ASUU professors compared themselves to MIT and Harvard professors who make $500,000 per year. Doing that is just unfair, on the following grounds:

• MIT is in a larger economy. The U.S. economy is more than 30X the economy of Nigeria. There is no way such translations can happen in wages. Google will not pay a Nigeria-based software engineer who is at the same level as another engineer in Silicon Valley the same wage. Besides the purchasing power parity and cost of local living, the size of your market matters
• MIT professor mostly gets paid through grants. In some cases, no one pays him/her from university funds in the summer where the professor has to pay himself or herself from grant money. Nigerian professors are guaranteed salaries for 12 months in a year. If an MIT professor or any top U.S. university professor does not have a grant, nothing for that person for three months during summer
• MIT professor may be paid $500,000 because he/she has a patent the University receives more than $10 million per year. But because the rights of the invention go to the university, sometimes, the school finds a way to make them happy so that they keep working. Being a university professor is challenging because you can create an idea that makes people rich while you toil.  As Amazon, Uber etc go into U.S. universities to lure professors, schools  are fighting to keep them, with better packages. That is why they are paid that much. In Nigeria, we do not have that problem and we cannot expect to compare linearly with the compensations of these U.S. teachers.

Also, if ASUU thinks that Nigeria can afford to inject N1.1 trillion in our universities, at this time, it is not simply honest. ASUU has this upper hand because its products, the students, affect everyone. There is no other sector that can make this type of demand and get away with it: government will simply ignore. But because of the students, ASUU comes up with demands seasonally. While they have the rights to demand, it is very important we look at these issues fairly. I must note that, generally, our schools are not well funded. But that is not the whole story.

The Problems

Nigerian university system has a real funding problem. Everyone knows that. However, what ASSU is doing is not helping. Nigeria needs to expand capacity but ASUU has not brought leadership in that space. I explain thus:

• Government keeps starting new universities at federal and state levels. ASUU never mounts any HARD challenge to the governments to be smarter on this policy. For ASUU, more schools offer more rooms to be VCs, HODs, Deans etc. They never care that education budget is not technically growing despite the expansion of university bureaucracy. ASUU could have recommended putting the new schools under the existing ones thereby reducing administration cost, even when expanding access to education for our students. In Rwanda, they technically have one university with campuses around the country. That saves massive cost which goes into improving teaching and research. Imagine having only 10 VCs in Nigeria. The saving on cars, housing etc will be massive to actually improve basic things in schools.
• There is no hard evidence that shows that more money is the problem. ASUU keeps making this an argument of more money, but it is yet to provide empirical data. The fact is this: even as government pumps more money, the quality of our graduates continues to drop. ASUU needs to answer that question. You can pump money for VCs to be buying Mercedes Benz instead of Honda.
• ASUU does not want partial privatization of public universities. And yet, it wants more funding in the public schools. Please note that government does not have limitless cash to solve ASUU problem. Nigeria is a poor country. Our annual budget may not even cover South Africa’s health budget. Forget the optimistic GDP data, the key is the money in the bank. Nigeria does not have it. Yet, ASUU does not want private support in the funding. Why? ASUU is afraid of accountability.
• ASUU has avoided providing benchmarks upon which government can use to tie this funding need. That is what the private sector will likely demand. You go to the CEO of a university and ask: if I provide this more funding, what do I expect in outcome? Today, state and federal governments do not know what to expect from ASUU with more funding in measurable and concrete ways. Governments have rights to those and ASUU must provide them to boost its arguments of more money.

All Together

I am a big advocate of quality education, not just at the university level but also at primary and secondary levels. Nigeria needs one. I enjoyed my time in Federal University of Technology Owerri, despite having to go to class at 4am for a lecture starting at 10am, to “colonise” a seat in the front. ASUU demand makes sense – more funding could have solved that problem. However, I have also noticed that it was not just about funding when I made it into U.S. It was more of an efficient utilization of capital and factors of production. Yet, we can talk about those even for a university. Most U.S. university leaders are professional managers who are well experienced in managing large organizations. That a crop scientist professor has published many papers does not qualify him or her to be running a university when he/she cannot read a simple balance sheet statement.

And because of ego, the professor may not even ask anyone for help. So, you see this problem that unless it is crop science, vision is stunted. In U.S. university presidents’ offices, you see a mini investment banking office with professionals working as though they have come to exponential grow alpha. The quality of our university administration is a fair game if ASUU wants to improve governance and prudent management of our university resources.

Nigeria needs to find the right mix on university funding. Also, we need to empower private universities not necessarily through funding. In U.S., the private schools put pressure on the state schools, which always lag the private ones. Private institutions are always better managed. Nigerian kids have limited choices to attend our private universities because of the cost. If there are frameworks to make some of the private schools affordable, ASUU will find that not many people will take up its illusive demand.

But I must say that the government must be honest on how it handles our professors. You cannot sign a document with full awareness that you would not implement it. That is degrading and insulting. Everyone has a role to play here because at the end, only the students suffer. Where you know you do not have money, stop opening new public universities. Rather, make it easier for the private ones to meet the demands of what you have in mind, while supervising them for quality. Nigeria, by now, should not be closing universities on strike. The fact that we continue to close universities is a shame. It needs to stop.

Nigeria needs a conference on how to fund education in the 21st century. Our students deserve better. For more than 30 years since ASUU was established, it has been making this argument from military governments to civilian ones and nothing seems to be working. The government cannot always be at fault. ASUU may be having issues explaining what it wants.