By Okechukwu Onwuka
I had hoped for this piece to be concluded last week but it should this week. I had started on the story of how I was assigned to understudy an expatriate specialist (Wim) who was retiring from the company about 16 years ago.

My problem was how to get into his confidence to share tasks and project execution work with me, given his clearly telling me that my Nigerian manager and myself were not competent engineers. Although I was newly employed in the company at the time and he had no way of actually telling the level of my abilities, the obvious lack of progress by Africans and Nigerians technologically did not help my case. Regardless, I had to find a way to break into him and earn his confidence. Otherwise, I would fail in the assignment given to me. Excuses never produced any worthy results. Read on.

On the job learning is the fastest way to knowledge acquisition and growth. I soon found out that he was having problems analyzing pressure and flow dynamics within the facilities and Equipment under study. With my previous computer analysis knowledge, I ran independent computations, calculations and analysis.

I printed a number of results over some data input range. Slowly, with fear and trepidation (inside my system, not very visible outside.), I approached his table and dropped my study report sheets in front of him and asked him to see if the simulation methodology will add value to his analysis and troubleshooting.

At first he did not want to acknowledge the print outs but I suspect one graph caught his attention and he started to look through the documents. With rising expectation, he studied everything and asked me what software or program I used? He asked if I can run further analysis with some raw data he could provide?

I said I sure can. By the close of business that day, he had split the project workload into two parts. He handed over all the analysis and calculations to me while we both conducted field trials to validate our theoretical computations. In less than a week, he could no longer take any technical decision without my input. When he eventually retired, I automatically became the Project Engineer/Manager and successfully commissioned the project and win the company’s top management performance award in the process.

The dollars came in handy at the time too. The project also provided background for my first paper presentation at the International Society of Petroleum Engineers’ (SPE) conference in San Antonio, Texas, USA.

That experience re-enforced my conviction that the best way to prove critics wrong is to back-up your convictions with performance.  Very few people care about verbal expressions.

The many after-benefits would all have been lost if I allowed myself to feel inferior or terrible at being classified as incompetent, on the basis of being Nigerian or African.

Reality is that performance is critical. Nigeria and Nigerians will be taken more seriously when we can show through measurable deliverables that we are capable. Foreigners will not take us seriously, simply because we express desire to be respected.

The respect we give to the Americans or Europeans is not because they make positive confessions. It is simply because we all see what their forefathers have done and the continued efforts of their present generation of professionals. On a number of occasions when I facilitate study sessions or workshops involving Nigerians and foreigners, I find a common occurrence.

If an expatriate team member challenges my viewpoint, majority of the Nigerian team members support the view of the expatriate, regardless of the veracity of his viewpoint. But based on my experience on subject matter, when I finally drive home my point, all the ‘oyibos’ become my friends and the sessions flow smoothly. Once they trust your judgment, they never trouble you again.

As for some of the fellow ‘Nijas’, even if they don’t understand the fundamentals behind the discussion, they quickly align with the flow; not because they are convinced that I was correct in my assertion but more because if the ‘white’ man agrees with me, then I must be right. Such tendencies reveal a more disturbing fact: we don’t even trust ourselves.

Why do we not trust ourselves, given that everywhere you go in this country, people are filled with positive confessions about their expected personal fortune in the future? The simple answer is that we all know that very few of us are able to match our confessions with the right attitude to sustainable success. Simply put, if you want promotion, exceed the expectations of your supervisor.

If you want to become the market leader, propel yourself or company by delivering your products or service at exceptional quality at great price. We feel bad about racism when we are in Europe or America because racist remarks remind us of our collective incompetence and underperformance.

If we are a productive group, racist comments will have the opposite effect. We silence critics by measurable performance. We achieve measurable performance by using and applying competitive knowledge, skills, effort and wisdom. If critics and competitors don’t know we possess these attributes, we have an even better chance of sneaking up on them and proving them all wrong.

The Ibo have a saying “Anytime a man wakes up becomes his morning”. Those who choose to wake up now have an unlimited harvest to reap from. Are you ready to wake up?