Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is the code that companies have to live by in order to ensure that they go about their business helping all the way and not hurting anyone and anything. This is done by having high business ethics and moral standard. There is always a tie between CSR and BP (Brand Promotion) that refers to raising customer awareness of a brand, generating sales, and creating brand loyalty. The subject of concern is that brand promoting is increasingly promoting a moral decline in Nigeria.
This is because many BPs are planned and executed based on the knowledge of the negative culture of Nigerians underestimating sequential nature of phases of life and sizes of humans. For instance, an average Nigerian wants to jump from riding a motorcycle to flying a jet, or move from living in a one room apartment to living in a mansion. This culture is in the way of the nation’s development and it makes youth – the so called future leaders – lazy, uneducated, unskilled, unemployable, unemployed and unprogressive.
In 2012, MTN, one of the leading GSM service providers in the country launched a brand promotion termed MTN Ultimate Wonder promo in which the star winner would be given a jet, a Cessna 182T aircraft, valued at N64 million. It was simply preposterous. Many other companies promise and give exotic cars, houses and millions of Naira and spend so much on musicians’ endorsement. This is done to the point where many youths now only aspire to become musicians. Such lottery is not socio-economically sustainable because it plays on, and to people’s fancies.
Some lose the affluence to vices like drugs and prostitution. Some intimidate others to the point where they decide to employ desperate wealth making measures like sorcery, robbery, sharp practices, prostitution and illegal drug business, among many others. Some others squander the wealth till they lose all, and start to employ desperate measures to return to affluence. These sorts of brand promotions are morally questionable and it is a question of business ethics, which should be the core of all BPs and CSRs.
Another issue with CSR in Nigeria is that it is largely city-based, widening rural-urban inequality even further. The continued lack of basic amenities in the rural communities will only add to the intensification of rural-urban migration and its attendant ills. Agreed that companies are established to make money and not to give handouts, but there has been a shift of the average Nigerian’s trust from the public to the private sector, because the public sector has failed monumentally and now has close to zero vote of confidence. The overrated public private partnership and privatisation prove this. If citizens cannot effectively influence their public sector, they should at least try to influence the private sector, since both sectors owe citizens’ rights.
