The global meltdown should attract new businesses our way

Mrs. Florence Seriki established Omatek Computers about 21 years ago. The company has assembly factories in Lagos and Accra. Seriki is considered an IT Amazon in Nigeria’s burgeoning technology business sector. In this interview, she speaks on getting round the global meltdown and how government can take advantage of the meltdown to build a sustainable economy that thrives on ICT.



Building an institution in this environment is tough, what is the greatest fear that you see when you look at the task ahead of you?
I have been building Omatek for the past 21 years and I have tried to balance the home, the children and the office. The bottom line is the children shouldn’t get cheated, their time is very important. You have to plan it from day one. The greatest challenge I would say I ever had is managing people in Nigeria’s business environment. Many Nigerians are, I should say, short sighted. Some see the growth in the company and the rapid evolution of things they want to be part of the growth; they learn a lot and we try to do as much as we can to send them on practical training. But the challenge is just like you have in the banking industry, people are always migrating. It is not even the money, sometime it is just a lack of foresight, that ability to look ahead. Sometimes, they think the business is going down, they do not know things going up, they just jump from one place to the other.

But the one that stayed, are always better for it. In fairness, I have learnt a lot overtime from the rapid growth of the company. I think the challenge is with the Nigerian environment itself. It is a tough terrain to do business. But Nigerians are rugged people in the sense that in an environment where things do not work they still persist to bring out products that would compete with those of people from outside. My friend came from Singapore. She now understands when I say Internet is not working and there is no electricity. The very first four years of our operation at the factory, we were purely on generator, there was no electricity. We had to buy a transformer, it didn’t make any difference. We then went to buy a second generator.

These are what the Nigerian staff need to understand for them to be more determined. The government itself needs to start changing things especially with this global meltdown. About 30 years ago, India took a decision to use software to drive the economy; they took a long, medium, short term approach. Hardware was what Taiwan took as a decision and they went to the drawing board. In the last administration, the former president, President Olusegun Obasanjo, set up a committee to develop a long, medium, short term range of planning to make us level up with what China is today. I was a part of that presidential committee. The government can take a global outlook and develop its own core planning for ICT to encourage a lot of local factories in ICT. Most state governments and universities are now building ICT laboratories. The ICT laboratory is one the factors needed for ICT dissemination in this country. Our success to grow ICT must start from this springboard. We don’t want to be going to foreign countries importing ICT solutions. We don’t want to be just employees for them. We want them to come and set up side by side with Nigerians in a Joint Venture kind of thing. When we talk about the global meltdown, the question is how much of business are we doing there in the global world for it to affect us much.

Is that to say the global meltdown is not as bad as we see it?
It is not supposed to have affected us the way it is. But the problem we have is that the government itself is yet to come up with a strategy to curb it. Government of a country especially in these hard times should come up with something. Remember, when the first conference came up, the former Minister of Finance, Mrs. Ngozi Iweala, said this is the time to bring out some of the reserve and use. The money we have been saving for the raining days should be spent now when it is about to rain. This is the time to plan properly for it. I was in Asia, 90% of their business is with Europe and America, the global meltdown has affected this people. The Chinese people are now saying, Florence, what kind of business can we do with Africa? We have the population, which means we can even take advantage of this global meltdown to attract people and businesses our way. We can create initiatives, create skills that would allow us to go and bring business from this area and begin to produce here. Let the government use this money to give us power; it will reduce the cost of production. Government need to spend on infrastructure now.

In essence, the global meltdown offers the Nigerian government opportunity to invest in infrastructure?
Yes, use whatever money they can use to invest in infrastructure, it will reduce the cost of doing things. More SMEs will thrive, and employment would be generated.

You have made remarkable progress in Ghana’s hardware market since you opened an assembly line there over two years ago. How would you compare your experience of doing business in Ghana with doing business in Nigeria?
I am not saying that the Ghanaians are different from Nigerians but I commend the Ghanaians. In Ghana, it would be the first time in my life that I would see continuity in government. A government that is conscious of continuity, I mean a people that really take their nation seriously. A Singaporean loves his country, an American loves his country that is what I would say of the Ghanaians, they are proud of their country, they don’t care which party wins power, and to them it is a political game. What matters is getting the nation moving. We did business with the first party, we were about to launch. The minister in the past government told us to wait for the new minister coming in.

We thought he was joking. We were rushing to launch. He felt that he was leaving anyway, that his term was running out, he felt that he is not coming back if his party won anyway. For him, whether his party won or not, let the next person launch it. Again, that shows that they are not selfish, because he would have launched it and take the glory instead of his colleague, even if it is in the same party. We were scared when the new party came. It was an opposition party. We went to approach them. We made our presentation to them. The new minister said he would pick it up from where his predecessors stopped, since it is a good venture and he made pronouncement to this effect to the public. We went to the vice president, the same thing happened. Even the old minister joined us in the team; he was in the convoy beside the Minister of Communications. They belong to different political parties but to them, it is a ministry affair not a party affair. Their common interest was in Ghana.

So with Ghana, there is hope for the black man?
There is hope for the black man. Ghana has a lot of lessons to teach us. We still need to be magnanimous in the way we think in politics. We need to get more educated in politics so that we don’t let politics distort the unity of the country.

You are a woman entrepreneur and have spent over 21 years in this business, would say that the environment has treated you fairly or that the environment could have treated you better if you were a man?
When you are doing this kind of business, you better not think of who you are in terms of whether you are a man or a woman, because it doesn’t work out that way. You got to do what you need to do. You are running a business. You have so many staff, it doesn’t matter whether you are a woman or a man, and salaries must flow. Business is not emotion. However, sometimes I wish I could go out in the night like it is done in Abuja to meet people properly to seal a business but I can’t because I am a woman with a family. So I balanced it. I take maybe one day in a week to sleep over in Abuja, so I have to do a lot in a day. Sometime, I don’t sleep early, I wake up very early, because may be if I went in the morning, I have to come back tomorrow evening. So those two days, I would do the job of two weeks. I cannot be in Abuja, and sleep in Abuja the way some people in business would do, because the children are at home and they got to see your face. So I minimized the number of times I stay out.

How did you feel when you were called to receive this national honour?
Sincerely speaking, God is wonderful. That award, maybe I should say it publicly today, that award came exactly one year that I went through some turbulent periods. To me it was a gift from God. The December before then I had a mandate from the bank, that if I do not pay the overdraft we had with them, within seven days, that is the Christmas period, they would liquidate the company. They had already classified the account and this was not small money. It was Christmas period, the time we had tied money down with inventory because of Chinese New Year that is always in January, so it was a very traumatic period. In fact, I could not meet the deadline. I had to fight for an extension, so at that time I just decided that we have to look for the loan and move on, so it wasn’t an easy task. That award for me was a special gift from God because I didn’t expect it.

What has been your saddest moment as an entrepreneur in the last 21 years, when you had your greatest fear that things could go wrong completely?
Let me take the first one, the worst part of my years in the last 21 years was the experience of getting out of the challenge with the banks. Some how, they narrowed down our loan payment terms to a small period. The conditions were almost impossible to meet and it was like losing all you have done in 21 years. It was a difficult period for me because that kind of money was not what I could get so easily. For me that was the toughest moment as an entrepreneur. So many other things were happening at about the same time. That was the same time that Microsoft came around to say that Omatek was using 419 [fake] licence, that we had no license and the rumour kept spreading around like wildfire. That was the time we were having issues with Intel; and I decided we were not going to patronize Intel because we felt they cannot be selling raw materials to us and at the same time be selling finished products to compete with us; and they were busy through out this period fighting and trying one thing or the other to kill Omatek.

So many things were happening at the same time. Crises were not dropping. They were raining on us. But I kept faith with God and held closely to that trust that I have always had in him. That faith saved us. I didn’t cry. I just kept running to get the problem solved. A lot of people thought we were broke, that we didn’t have money again, the competitors were taking advantage of us, and we just stayed calm.

For me, in times of crisis, you don’t sulk. You just keep praying; use your head, don’t let your heart take over. If your heart takes over, you are gone. I kept thinking and working on what next can be done. At the end of the day, all those things I started doing helped. If I go to this organisation or person and he says he can’t give me money, I think again. I kept moving as God directed me. I believed that faith brings option. I tell God that there is no way any one could  go through all these at the same time, and if I survived it, please take me to the next level. So the bottom line is do not sulk. Use your head and trust God.

 

More…..

Back To Top