Trust me, running a business in Nigeria today is not for the faint of heart. One wakes up every day thinking about diesel, electricity, salaries, rent, taxes, exchange rates, and the next client who wants premium work with a 50 per cent discount.
Diesel has gone up so sharply it now deserves its own seat on the management team.
Power is as reliable as a politician’s promise, so you cannot run a serious business without a generator, inverter, batteries, solar, or all four praying in shifts. Add it up, and you wonder whether you are running a company or moonlighting as your own power utility.
Clients are squeezed too, so they ask you to cut your fees. The trouble is, your suppliers, staff, landlords, banks, and the government have all decided that reducing anything for you is not on the menu. Everybody is passing the pressure onto each other.
Salaries are another headache. Many employers have raised pay, but it evaporates by the second week of the month. Food, transport, rent, school fees, data, and fuel have all auditioned for the role of “things I can no longer afford,” and you see the struggle your staff have.
You want your staff to survive, but cash flow does not care about your feelings. A business cannot run on sympathy and motivational quotes. It needs money coming in, ideally on time, which these days qualifies as a miracle.
After decades in business, you begin to ask tough questions. Keep pushing? Scale down? Sell? Or hold on because, against all evidence, you still believe in Nigeria?
These are the quiet conversations many owners are having, even while smiling for photographs and saying, “We thank God.”
This is why the political noise feels beamed in from another planet. Government supporters talk as though every complaint is impatience. Opposition voices talk as though the country is about to collapse.
Both miss what small businesses are living through.
The SME owner is not living inside party slogans. He is living inside invoices, payroll, bank charges, tax demands, and diesel bills. He knows reforms take time. But patience does not pay salaries, hope does not buy diesel, and patriotism has never once settled a supplier’s invoice.
Yet most owners are not giving up. If they had lost faith, they would not still be opening offices, training young people, and paying taxes. We complain because the pressure is real, but show up because the belief is real too.
What SMEs need is not endless debate. They need power that works, fair taxes, reasonable credit, stable policy, and clients who pay on time. Until then, owners keep wondering whether the people arguing on TV live in the same country as those keeping the lights on, literally.
For the SME owner, the real state of the nation is in the diesel tank, the payroll sheet, the unpaid invoice, and the quiet decision to keep going every day regardless.
@Aderemi Ogunpitan on Facebook.
