The tragedy of acquiring a job in Africa

The tragedy of acquiring a job in Africa. People with good ideas are not employed while people without good ideas are employed.

It has appeared that most people who acquired jobs genuinely are few in Africa but the rest always pass through the faithful trend as I call it.

This time round, acquiring a job in Africa depends less on your abilities to deliver but rather depends highly on whom you know. But this is a very good question we can always ask ourselves. Why is it always the case that before you can acquire a job it will depend on whom you know? How can we stop it?

The whom you know is a perspective in Africa for acquiring a job that brings about the faithful trend. What's whom you know? It’s a way of getting a job through someone else that has to intervene with or without the rightful and moral procedures of getting that job and what's the faithful trend?

It's a way of paying or showing gratitude to the person that has helped you get a job by also passing through the unduly ways of getting his or her person a job. Why do I call it "faithful trend" because you will tend to be unfaithful to the person who once used his or her powers to give you a job whether fit or not, when you sat in your office knowing that you wouldn't have been there without the intervention of somebody and all of a sudden a call from this person that helped you get the job comes and he or she is asking you to help his or her person to also get a job.

Let's be frank here can you boldly tell this person that, you can't do such because it's against the laws of the country and your moral principles? Almost all of us will find it very difficult in telling this person that I can't be of help because it's against our morals and constitutional laws. Even those that will try in a way to break this trend by telling this patron that helped him or her into the work is seen as the ever ungrateful man by the society and human beings as we are, our conscience always tells us things when it comes to doing right or wrong.

So I think this faithful trend of acquiring a job in Africa is not just a today's problem but one can trace it back to centuries. Of course, some people have actually tried breaking these "whom you know" or the faithful trend, but guess what always happened to them, their mortality rate in their respective institutions are lesser than that of a mosquito, if you care to know.

Africa still has a long way to go as in how we see things; how we do things and even our behaviors towards the public sector. Unlike the other continents where the physical institutions are working perfectly, but Africa is an exception to that.

Where we have the invisible institutions also working under the visible institutions, these invisible institutions includes bribery and corruption, favoritism, nepotism, tribalism, ethnocentrism and these things work effectively more than the visible institutions when it comes to acquiring a job, but we seems to be hiding our heads under the sun and pretending not to know these things are happening, when in actual sense they are happening right under our noses.

The issues of whom you know, and the faithful trend of acquiring a job in Africa is not just something that we can easily do away with, because these things are built on strong foundation and strong by laws and whoever is been blind to these invincible institutions will always be of determent.

Africa is a tragic continent.