Post COVID-19: The evolution of work culture in Nigeria
Imagine a Lagos state with tamed bus stops, uncrowded motor parks, and rush hour commutes that still moved in a steady pace. A Lagos with enough space to actually walk on pedestrian lanes. One where a journey by 8am across 3rd Mainland Bridge would not consume the bulk of the energy you had stored up for the day. Imagine a traffic free Aba road in Port Harcourt, one where journeying from Artillery to Trans-Amadi would be a breeze, that you could navigate the city with ease despite the poor road connectivity. As early as December 2019, some of these might have seemed like a farfetched dream. Recently, it has become a more likely reality as the world tackles the swift riding, aggressively contagious novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and the pestilent COVID-19 disease that it brings.
The Nigerian culture surrounding work, efficiency, and productivity is undergoing a shift, forcing businesses into an untraditional way of operation. A shift that the country is ill-equipped and unprepared for. The electricity situation is epileptic at best, coupled with sparse availability of affordable and reliable internet connectivity. In many government offices, transactions are still manually driven with significant amount of information stored in physical files.
