By Ebele Orakpo

Mr. Ben Omakor is the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of Gestalt IT Limited, an IT training and development institute, and Dickson Jones Properties Limited, based in Lagos.

In a recent chat with Vanguard in Abuja, Mr. Omakor, a psychologist by training, lamented the state of infrastructure in the country saying it is one of the reasons the country will remain the way it is and unless government gets its priorities right, we will continue to grope in the dark . Excerpts:

After his first degree in psychology at the University of Lagos, Mr. Ben Omakor went on to do a master’s degree also in psychology and finished in 1985. His quest for more knowledge led him to do a second master’s in banking and finance.

Ben Omakor

Not a believer in Mark Twain’s popular saying: ‘Put all your eggs in the one basket and – watch that basket’, Omakor has his hands in research, consultancy, information technology and real estate.

“I have been in consulting for quite a long time and that enabled me to go into other areas that caught my fancy and one of those areas is the area of information technology and most recently, I went into real estate development,” he said.

Explaining the rationale behind his decision to diversify, Mr Omakor said: “We must appreciate that the economies of the third world are to a large extent, not stable because they are dependent on the vagaries of the world’s economy and because you really do not have a stronghold on any commodity, so many things happen that make the economy to fluctuate from one aspect of development to another.

For example, immediately after the civil war, the economy tilted towards the engineering field because people were trying to reconstruct and as such, architects, engineers and artisans made it.

Just before then, the people that were governing the economy were the teachers because we needed to hurriedly develop a manpower base and so teaching was very attractive. Gradually, the economy moved, things started happening.

During the structural adjustment programme (SAP), the bankers came in, the commercial people came in and as such, somebody who is smart and found the opportunity (anytime you have such shifts in the economic sphere, opportunities are created). That is the kind of thing the business people find themselves in.

I was into research originally because I discovered that Nigerians are not interested in research. They don’t want anything that will take their time.

They want easy money so some of us who went deep into research eventually found ourselves making some little money from multilateral institutions that had research jobs to give out.

From there, because of our background in human resource management, we went into training and outsourcing. But lately, because of the global meltdown, a lot of those institutions that usually outsourced; are rethinking their strategy.

For instance, one of my major clients decided to look the other way and because of that, so many things happened so you must think of something again that you have a passion for that can give you money.”

From research, Omakor went into IT because “we discovered that the population was highly deficient in this area so what we did was to deploy easy products that will train large numbers of people with very low basic IT software and as such, some of our clients were government parastatals.

In fact, at a point, Gestalt IT Institute was doing free IT training in partnership with the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) and it helped. We have trained a minimum of 1,000 people in basic IT software. Now, there is a lull in the business,” he stated.

When the nation began to experience a lull in the IT sector, Mr. Omakor felt it was time to move. Said he: “We discovered that in Lagos alone, we have over 12 million people so as much as possible, we know that shelter is a problem so we have just gone into real estate development.”

Speaking on the challenges facing businesses in Nigeria, the former chairman, Lagos chapter of Chartered Institute of Personnel Management (CIPM) said: “Obviously, you know that the environment has been very excruciating to work in.

For instance, we are in a service apartment, at a point we were paying between N150,000 and N200,000 monthly for diesel because although we are at the central business district, and you will expect reasonable amount of electricity supply from PHCN, but we pay that much and it’s been terrible. The rent too in this place is quite high.

I think that the nation doesn’t really have a policy on infrastructure. I think sincerely that government’s business is as much as possible to provide infrastructure. If they do that, the issue of employment will be taken care of.

I don’t think that it is government’s entire duty to start employing people directly just to help them get work. It is one thing to give them employment, and another thing to provide them work to do. They may have employment but no work to do. That is the problem of this nation.