Thank you fuel scarcity for ruining my week!
My goodness, Lagos is becoming unbearable! This week has been intense! Being a female entrepreneur in Lagos is not an easy business at all. These past 10 years have been a journey of love, hard work, and perseverance, dotted with failure and yet sprinkled with hope for every milestone achieved. There have been moments when I wondered what I was doing running a business, especially in Lagos. Half of the time I would be running my generator so the students in our vocational center would not rain abuses on our head on account of the very hot environment in which they were learning not minding the fact that fans were on to act as a palliate in the situation. The other half of time, I would spend crunching numbers with my accountant trying to manage our overhead so it didn’t skyrocket off the rooftop! Such is the everyday existence of this Lagos female entrepreneur.
The past two weeks have been a nightmarish experience going to work. I don’t know about you but from where I am coming from, being stuck in traffic to and from work because of the fuel queues is no joke at all. Between the Federal Government and the Oil Marketers, whoever is behind or involved in this scarcity, is trying my patience. Recall the saying that when two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers! In this case, we the entrepreneurs are suffering. If you are running an SME like I am, you will agree with me that overheads have sky rocketed due to the increase in fuel pump price. Meetings have also been either postponed or cancelled and clients have been disappointed.
Talking about meetings being postponed or cancelled due to this scarcity, let me share my experience this week especially since the recent scarcity started again. My colleagues and I were preparing to host a reading competition for primary and secondary schools in the Agege community this coming June. As time for the competition fast approached we scheduled to meet this week with all our prospective sponsors to get a definite progression on our plans. My own assigned duty was to pursue a lead on the mainland. I succeeded in scheduling a meeting for 5pm in Maryland. Unfortunately, this fuel scarcity chose that particular day to reach its peak! I queued to refuel my car as early as 7am. Unfortunately, the filling station where I queued stopped selling five cars from mine! Imagine my frustration! After almost 3hrs of queuing – talk about wasted hours that could have been applied to productive use other than sitting in my car! And with the clock ticking closer to my meeting, I became desperate.
This was a meeting scheduled with the MD of our proposed sponsor. This meeting was very important. In desperation, I reached out to my usual ever-efficient and affordable cab driver who has bailed me out since this scarcity started. Unfortunately, he too had queued up in a station in VI and to my surprise, they too had stopped selling before they got to him! What fate is working against me, I wondered! I dialed my colleagues to see who could come to my rescue. Unfortunately again, everyone was moaning about the same predicament. So, I ended up paying N15,000 to go from Victoria Island to Maryland in Ikeja to meet my appointment. Now, as I am not yet a Dangote or an Adenuga and neither am I yet an Alakija, this money I spent dug a big hole in my pocket. To some of my established CEO’s, this might be a walk in the park, however, in the world of startups, we could well use this 15,000 naira I paid for cab fare to buy a new butterfly-sowing machine that my students can learn with. Now I don’t know if I made the right call, but at that time, it looked like the best option if I was not to disappoint my team.
The oil marketers might well have a legitimate reason for going on strike or hoarding fuel to cause this scarcity, the truth is that it has become a burden for business owners especially SMEs and the entire residents of Lagos State. It is fairly obvious, going by the statement made recently by Mr. Tonye Cole, the Sahara Group Managing Director, on the reasons the scarcity will continue, and why the lamentations of Lagos entrepreneurs especially this female entrepreneur will by no means end anytime soon as we are fighting against powers that be and circumstances beyond our control.
Mr. Cole had in his statement, given three reasons why the fuel scarcity would continue as follows:
1) Change of government
2) Prospects for removal of the fuel subsidy and the
3) Weakening naira
This is only a tip of the iceberg in the vault of experiences I have faced as a Lagos entrepreneur. My colleague Ijeoma Nwakuche has eloquently captured this feeling of frustration and helplessness with a dose of common sense advice for budding entrepreneurs in the following write-up tagged “The Monologues of An Entrepreneur.”
MUNA ONUZO