"WE HIRED 7 PH.D HOLDERS AS DRIVERS" EDWIN DEVAKUMAR GMD OF DANGOTE CEMENT

For the Group Managing Direc­tor of Dangote Cement, Devaku­mar Edwin, doing business with multiple challenges of power, poor infrastructure and others may not be easy. There was a little bit of misun­derstanding. What we did was in order to bring down the level of accident, we need to have somebody at the wheel of the truck or a bus who is level headed. Apart from the people on the road, they are also car­rying some passengers. They carry heavy loads, if they are careless or reckless, they can endanger so many people. So

we realize that what we need to do is to get many educated people to operate the truck. So most of our drivers are graduate, so we decided to go a step higher, that is what we did and we advertise. It is true that about seven P.hd holders applied, there are several M.sc and MBA holders who applied as well. What we are just trying to highlight is how bad the unemployment situ­ation in the country is. But we took most of them and use them in other vital areas of our operations. Some as transport officers, fleet officers. It’s not that we just took them as drivers, we’ve taken much higher qualified people in the past as driv­ers, people who are more educated to drive. In this instance, though many qualified M.sc and MBA and doctorate holders responded but we took them to better positions because our company is expanding and there are other roles available. But we also took qualified people to ensure that our trucks are durable.

Apart from the fact that we want­ed the drivers to be more conscious and to drive safely, a graduate would be more conscious and would not just put his life on the line through careless driving. Unlike somebody who attends primary school, who would not mind smoking indian hemp and drinking ‘ogogoro’ and still drive on the roads. Those things would not be there. Apart from that, now we have started exporting cements to the outside Nigeria, we have over 300 pilot trucks, just to take cement outside Nigeria, in such a case, graduate drivers will be in the better position to driver across the countries to reflect the company’s image and also manage the custom­ers across the border.