By Onuwa Lucky Joseph
Charity begins at home, so they say. And so it ought to be. And so it’s been demonstrated by Abdul Samad Rabiu, Founder/Chairman of the BUA Group and currently the 4th richest African.
Saturday December 13th, at the BUA Night of Excellence Long Service Awards at Eko Hotel & Suites, Victoria Island, Lagos, the man did the cash confetti, doling out $20.7million to nearly 1,800 long serving employees.
The number 1,768 says something about BUA and its convivial environment that serves to retain staff loyalty through downturns and upturns. Are they putting in their best? That cannot but be our deduction, going by the stratospheric rise of their boss’s fortune who started 2025 as the 6th richest African on the Forbes List. Mike Adenuga and Naguib Sawiris of Egypt were ahead of him. But by December 2025, Abdul Samad Rabiu’s wealth had ballooned all the way to $8.5billion dollars, from a ‘modest’ $5.1billion early in the year.
The man’s reckoning, we think, was, hey, I didn’t do this alone! I can’t chop this alone. And therefore, the idea for the long service awards, for all the folks who’d been pulling with him all the many along. Didn’t the staff come in all decked to the nines?! But beyond the shimmer were the huge expectation. As happens in these situations, the corporate grapevine had disgorged unverified intel about some of the things to expect, information that was not readily available on the corporate intranet.
The evening ended up a mindblower for the beneficiaries, staff, customers, investors and, if you like, fans of the business who were cheering wildly from the crowd.
Let’s get into the figures, with a realistic conversion rate of N1,450 to the dollar:
- Five employees received $691,000 each = 1,001,950,000. Five billionaires emerged.
- A further five were awarded $345,000 (= N500,250,000). Five mid-way billionaires right there.
- The greater number of awardees (mostly junior staff) received sums ranging from $3,450 to $13,810 ($3,450 = N5,002,500/ $13,810 = N20,024,500) You wan try junior staff millionaire?!
- One awardee, the Group Executive Director Kabiru Rabiu, went home a very happy man, even though the humongous figure, we can safely assume, allotted him, was not broadcasted. The corporate and public grapevine will have a lot of say on that matter…
But the kernel of the matter is that your people matter. The business is not doing well unless the staff have their hands diligently on the plough. In these days of AI and all the automation technologies, businesses are scrambling to rid themselves of the human beings who now seem more of a dispensable cost element than anything else. It takes a certain kind of mind to appreciate what people bring to the table; how their presence and contributions impact positively on the bottomline.
CSR that thinks solely about the external publics will not get buy-in from in-house. And every business needs in-house buy-in for authenticity reasons. If you do well externally while getting bad mouthed inhouse for your lack of care, the word soon will get out about your fakeness (or is it fakery?), and how everything you do is about image management rather than a well thought through responsibility exercise that staff can testify to.
Our thinking here at MomentumCSR is that more Nigerian businesses will jump on this and we’ll see a slew of imitations. But that’s all good. BUA has charted the course for employee loyalty and the dividends accruable therefrom. If this spreads beyond its immediate sphere, it would be a good thing for long suffering Nigerian employees and a game changer with regards to staff welfare.
This is not to say that long service awards were not in place before now. What BUA has done is to take it beyond gold watches (some of them fake), and to bring real world substance that validates their many years toiling for the same company.
