Mr. Victor Famuyibo, the Executive Director, Human Resources, Nigerian Breweries Plc, has cut a niche for himself in HR profession. In his desire to become a well-rounded expert, he read law and as he tells ADEOLA BALOGUN, legal education has been of tremendous help
Can you share some of the challenges you face as the human resources manager of a large organisation like the NB Plc?
Human resources management itself on a generic level comes with all kinds of challenges, especially in our country Nigeria. In HR, what you are doing really is making sure that you have the right number, calibre and quality of people who together can help you to achieve the set objectives and deliverables of the organisation. When I say people, we’re looking at people from cradle to grave. So, right from how you bring them in which is what we call attraction, recruitment and selection, to how you manage them while they are in the organisation, how you up-skill them, how you give them the right level of competency, so that they can be useful to the organisation; to how you plug the various holes, the vacancies that occur; putting the right people in the right positions at the right time so that you are always right on time in order that you can then deliver the objectives. If you look at that broad spectrum, it comes with a whole lot of challenges, especially in our country because right from the point of recruitment, attraction or selection, your main challenge is how to attract the right people. You can say how can we have a problem like this when we have more than a hundred public and private universities, polytechnics, technical colleges? There is a difference between quantity and quality, so for us, the challenge is getting the right quality of people. We have had interviews over and over again where people who have been through the university appeared before you and you start wondering if they have been to secondary school. And if you are a company that will not compromise on a standard – and we don’t at NB – the fact that you appear before us at interviews is not automatic. Our recruitment and selection is very fool-proof; it is watertight, you can’t influence it, no matter how big or highly-placed you are either within the company or outside the company. So, people will go through those decision gates based on set criteria, and therefore, if we have a hundred people coming and they still don’t meet the requirements, we don’t take. So for us, that is a major challenge but we have a way around it.
How?
We try to look for a way around it. For example, those coming in to the core operation (brewing and engineering), over the years, we have invested heavily in an in-house training school where the curriculum is so highly-developed and tailor-made to suit our operations. We look for the raw materials through our selection process; we bring them in raw but they have to go into our training school.
Are you implying that they don’t get enough training in the various universities?
The universities are grossly underfunded. The universities have lost a lot of focus. The university programmes are every now and again disturbed by incessant strikes, either by the lecturers or by the students; so there is always one dislocation or the other, there is no continuity in the learning experience of the people who go through our universities. And therefore, sometimes, they have half of the ideas theoretically, what they need to complement that practically is always absent and we then take it as part of our responsibility to ‘finish’ them. So for us, they come into our technical training school, which is about 12 months and 18 months, depending on whether they are into brewing or engineering. It is fully residential, where we not only pay your full salary as a training manager, we give you everything. The whole idea is, let us take all the problems of the society away from you so that you can concentrate adequately and all you are doing for those 12 months is a combination between classroom learning and practical attachment in the brewery. So, if you look at that, there is no way anybody would have been through this kind of learning experience and would not be thoroughly ‘finished’ after 12 months. By the time you are getting your first assignment, believe me, you are very good. Our experience is that some other employers even come to poach because they don’t want to spend money on their employees.
But would it not be better to collaborate with some universities and recruit directly from there?
That is what we do but we don’t want to limit ourselves to just one school. In everything we do here, we always want a national flavour to it; therefore, we spread our tentacles. We have a campus management scheme where we visit universities in all the geopolitical zones of the country. We go into the administration and ask for the top performing students who are in their penultimate year; those who are likely to end up with first class or second class upper. So, our engagement is very well spread out and national because one of the pride of this company is our diversity. As I said earlier, we don’t care who you are; as long as you are good, you can’t only get into the company, you can also rise to any level. Maybe another challenge we have is occasionally, keeping our best hands because when you have invested so much in them both here and abroad, when you have such people and other employers out there who are not prepared to invest so much money, they want to pay a premium to come and get your people. So, managing the career of our people in such a way that they don’t become victims of poachers is another major challenge. Again, we’ve done very well because the voluntary resignation rate is not embarrassing. It is within our defined parameters, but on top of that is the fact that we are able to always fill our talent pipeline adequately such that at any point in time, we don’t have a big gap in the system.
Why would anyone want to leave after the heavy investment in their development or is it that you believe they have become your property after the training and can decide to pay them anything you like?
Not that they would want to leave, they are approached to leave at a higher price. If I’m currently paying N20m to a manager who is very well trained; and another company comes, they invite him to dinner and ask him how much he is being paid, and he says N20m, they say, ‘Guess what, I’m giving you N30m,’ let’s be honest, we’re human beings. That is always the lure. Occasionally, they are lured away but as I said, it has not been embarrassing. It’s been very minimal. Once in a while, you also have a few people who are asked to leave for one thing or the other. As far as we’re concerned, there is no regret in that because in an organisation, you will always want some people to leave so that you can bring in fresh blood into the system.
Have you had any experience where somebody with a first class got in here and you discovered that the first class was a fluke?
No, it has not happened. You can have first class but you really have to be first class for you to go through our recruitment process and succeed. So, if your first class degree is questionable, we will also know because our recruitment is very competitive. We put you in a basket with so many other first class holders and you have to be very good. Because we will give you aptitude test, we will give you professional test; we will bring you into an assessment centre, which is a full day where we will do all kinds of testing; we invite professionals who are like consultants and they are sitting around the panel. So, by the time you arrive here to discuss with me, I don’t even have to check whether your first class is good because you will never get here unless your first class is spot on.
You were in the University of Ibadan as a student; how would you compare your days there with what goes on there today?
The conditions have changed significantly. I have been back not only to UI, but also other universities The learning environment has changed significantly compared to when we were there more than 30 years ago. When we were there, it was a citadel of learning as it were. Once you entered through that gate, you knew that you had entered into a different place. I miss that today. Even the way the learning is organised, I’m not sure it’s the same as it was then. Lecturers were very dedicated; they had no other calling but to teach and to research. But today, you see a whole lot of distractions to lecturers. They are involved in politics and everything all geared towards survival. So, there is a rat race in the larger society and it has affected events on campus. In those days on campus, you were proud to be a lecturer; it was something to behold. Even those of us who were students, we were envious of their status, their lifestyles. All of that has disappeared completely and if you look at the facilities on campus at that time, they were of international standard. When I go in there now, it is a different ball game. You will easily find university chemistry laboratory without reagents, without water. In those days, it was unthinkable. Every laboratory on campus had everything that a student needed for his learning. Sometimes, you had your own micro private lab as a research student on campus. These days, you only read it on the pages of books and handouts. What happens now, lecturers sell handouts and if you will not buy, then your future is compromised. So, there are so many reasons things have become very different. With all due respect, I honestly don’t believe that this country needs as many universities as we have now. We don’t have the infrastructure to support such because we are thinly spread out easily. People who in those days, would be struggling to be senior lecturers, are now professors. What have they contributed to research that is deserving of professorial appointment? The only reason is because there is another new university which should have professors, that is all. So, I’m afraid things have really changed for the worse and it is a pity, a shame that many of us who benefitted from the best in terms of university education in those days are no longer proud to send our children to those schools. We are now proud to send our children abroad or Ghana. I have been to one or two universities in Ghana and you can still feel the same flavour of the ’60s and ’70s in those universities.
You said that we probably don’t need as many as the universities we have now but you discover that only 20 per cent of about one million candidates who write the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board exams are absorbed. So, what happens to the other 80 per cent?
Because there has been a distortion in our educational system, that is why a million people will end up writing JAMB all wanting to go into the university, which is not necessary. But we’re a country that prides itself on paper qualification. We’re very happy to flag the next certificate; we create so many universities because we want all of these one million to be fixed in, so what happens when they graduate? Where are the jobs? We don’t need so many universities; we don’t need so many students being channelled to go into university. We need an educational system that will separate people into where they should go to like vocational skills. Who says that if you are a fantastic carpenter, that you can’t be richer than a fantastic university professor? I have lived in another country where people are diverted into the areas that they have their best competency and not necessarily into the university environment because for those who go to the university, what you are saying is that they are the theoretical people. But there are people who are best at using their hands, why don’t we channel them appropriately into vocational schools, give them the right tools and wherewithal to set up their own businesses and see whether they will not make better human beings? I think in the end, they are better off with that than going through years in the university and only at the end of it finding out there is nothing to do. Last week, we did a test for brewers and engineers and the minimum qualification was second class upper, about 4,000 applied and we tested 1,700. It is not necessary because this can only happen when there has been a distortion in the economy. We’re pushing so many people through university but at the end, there is really nothing. It is a challenge that this country has to resolve and the earlier the better.
Today, you are being referred to as an HR expert; did you go into the university to train as an HR person? How did it happen?
It happened by coincidence. I went into the university to study political science. In the first year, I started having a change of mind; I found another sister discipline in the faculty, which appealed more to me and this was sociology. Therefore, I decided to switch over from political science to sociology in 1976 at UI. I found out that I was interested in what made human beings tick. I started developing affinity towards the science of society from my second year. I went for the National Youth Service in Minna, Niger State, which was just created and my primary posting was to the Niger State Water Board in the HR division. They didn’t give us a lot of work to do. As a youth corps member, they gave you a house, a driver to pick you up to the office but they didn’t give you much responsibility. The fact that I didn’t have a lot to do gave me time to reflect; to watch how people were being managed. It set me thinking on what I would like to do post-NYSC and I then started to think more towards HR (then it was personnel management). I picked it up from there and later after going into core personnel management, I found that there was something I could also do that would help even more and this was law. Because, every now and again, in HR, you come across some issues which are very legalistic and only a good understanding of the legal basis would help more. Therefore, I made up my mind to delve into law after my post-graduate studies and I must say that I’m very glad that I did. Now, I have a very well rounded perspective to any topic around HR that is being discussed, even if it has a legal flavour; I know exactly what it is, where it is coming from and what it is all about and how it should be solved. It is something I recommended to quite a lot of friends and they took the advice.
What was then your first job or was it HR?
Yes, it was HR but more into administration and this was about 11 months spent in the office of Governor (Lateef) Jakande at that time. I was directly working with one of his key permanent secretaries, Mr. Tunde Fanimokun, who was like the eyes and the hands of Jakande. We were responsible for building all the Jakande houses. My boss was directly in charge of that, managing also the LSDPC and I was like his admin person, which gave me great insight into administration and how you could get things done by pushing people. I saw it live; all our countless meetings with the governor and I took all the minutes, I was in all the discussions, all the site visits, monitoring what was going on. That was my first job. Obviously, I didn’t want to be a civil servant but it was a great experience. I didn’t stay long enough because I didn’t think I was cut out for civil service job but where I was at the time for the 11 months was not civil service as such. It was running outside of civil service framework because Jakande was in a hurry to make a mark on the society. He knew that if he put the department under the civil service structure, things would get stuck in bureaucracy; so, what he did was putting it directly under himself with Fanimokun in charge reporting directly to him and I was supporting him. So for me, that was a great public sector experience in the civil service but 11 months later, I moved on to a private organisation in Ikeja, where I then became a personnel manager as it were and I worked there for six years before I moved to NB almost 25 years ago.
Having worked so closely with somebody like Jakande, were you not tempted to delve into politics?
No, I knew that politics would always be politics; it would come to an end someday. He was a political head but he was very efficient and very self-driven. I just knew it would come to an end and it is not when it would come to an end that I would have to leave, I probably would have been transferred into another department but I knew my career did not belong there and had to move on.
What would you attribute the success of the labour force at NB to?
It is simply because everything we do is on world class standard. We operate locally, but we behave globally. Two things help us; we control everything that happens. We’re performance-driven, we track people based on their contribution; we reward people based on their contribution; so, it is not a typical Nigerian company where it is a case of man-know-man. Here, we set target for you and we either smile or frown with you based on how well you have done with your target. So, we use the carrot and the stick approach to get people to contribute their own quota. Everybody here has their core objective they are working towards. People are supported to contribute at their maximum and we reward adequately when you contribute based on agreed objectives and penalise you based on objective criteria. For us, it is not good enough to simply look at what you have contributed, we also look at how you have contributed it. We target the objective as well as the behaviour; we don’t want somebody who says he delivers his targets and he has a very dishonest behaviour.
Everybody says Nigeria is a dangerous terrain for business but NB has been here for 61 years. Is it that Nigerians so much love to drink to be able to sustain you or what?
In any case, Nigerians don’t even drink enough; we have a way of enjoying ourselves in this country and we’re very moderate in our drinking pattern. Consumption per head when you compare Nigeria with any country in Central Africa, we’re in fact less than a third of what is consumed there. So, generally speaking, Nigerians don’t overdo it when it comes to drinking and we support that. I’d been working in Amsterdam for seven years with Heineken, our parent company and I know what happens in Europe when you talk of binge drinking. In my last job in Amsterdam before I relocated to Nigeria, I was human resource director for Africa and Middle East for Heineken and in that role, I travelled extensively and if I compare the drinking pattern of people in that region to Nigeria, we don’t drink enough. For NB, what has sustained us is that we do business in the right way, being a good corporate citizen. All we need in a country of 150 million is for one person to open one of our brands per day or even per week.
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