“Do you know how much a measure of beans is in the market?”, a housewife queried her husband. “With what is happening now, you will need to go to the market yourself to buy what we need for the house”, she continued.
Angry and silently nursing his bruised ego, the husband picked his handset and went on his favourite social media platform to catch up with posts on the news feed. Scrolling a bit, he saw a post made by one of his friends, “the way gas price is increasing almost every day now, I doubt if we won’t have to switch to firewood very soon”. That’s what contemporary time is dictating. Day unto day speaking loudly and night unto night showing forth knowledge. But are we even hearing anything at all or when the loud words are coming out we hardly understand until we are confronted with the realities? Nigerians hardly prepare to mitigate shocks. Rather, we would make noise, rant and grumble. Thereafter, life continues and we move.
When the latest business dispensation was surreptitiously announced about two months ago (August 2021) with a broadcast, I immediately did a quick analysis which reveals that there will be astronomical increase in prices of commodities and a serious shift in consumer behaviours will occur. Just two months down the line, everything is going haywire.
It’s not possible to take water and pepper soup the same way. If you are expecting a date to be fixed when new prices of commodities will take effect, you are waiting for the Armageddon. The change in prices of commodities, one after the other, and the major shift will be gradual. But when you measure the costs and commodity prices over a very short period, you will realise that we are already in a new dispensation. Everything is now at the mercy of the market forces. Every service provider or product seller will be responding to the changes in the costs of her business inputs to fix her own new product price.
What is the long term implication of this?
Anyone trying to do business today the way it was done 10 or 20 years ago is already preparing a recipe for failure. The new business dispensation we are in is going to rely much on scale and reverse strategy: backward integration. With increasing costs of doing business, contemporary business delivery is going to be about collaborations as against individualism of the past. I am emphasising this line of thought. Because of intense competition, businesses, this moment onward, is going to be about taking control – taking control of the production, taking control of the market, or taking control of the policy framework by exercising great influence on policy decisions. For this to happen, it means one must be able to play big in the sector of one’s choice by working through a well-structured entities that are strong enough to make things happen. This can also be referred to as ‘cooperative economy’.
But how many Nigeria entrepreneurs are ready to embrace the concept of innovative collaborations to drive the transformation of the economy. Even where we have cooperatives, they seem not to understand the magnificent capacity they have. In a report on Cooperative Economy (2015), Nigeria failed to feature in a pool of 3,000 groups that are driving economic activities in 76 countries.
In November, 2017, a three days summit came up in southern India. The event, ‘Global Entrepreneurship Summit’, was designed to encourage collaborations and lasting relationships between business leaders and investors with international counterparts. To you the budding entrepreneur, the take away from this information is that doing business has gone beyond the realm you still think it is. Now, real business men want to achieve more with less effort. The earlier you key into this new dispensation the better for you and the scarce resources at your disposal for business.
Ola Emmanuel is a business planning and cooperative consultant
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