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The ethics of petty businesses
2005-11-21 10:14:13
By Rayner Ngonji
At one time my neighbour’s wife engaged in a local brewing activity in an effort to supplement their family’s income.
Her husband was working somewhere in town as an office attendant earning something like 4,000/- which could hardly suffice the needs of his four children two of whom were already in primary school.
So the lady thought of venturing into local brewing, then a booming business in the city’s different localities.
The stuff was most favoured by middle and minimum wage earners because of their meagre salaries which in practical terms could hardly meet the cost of half a litre of beer.
The lady’s initiative looked good in business perspective.
In the evening people would swarm her apartment like bees to quench their thirst after a day’s hectic movements.
She started looking promising and some neighbours were even borrowing her earned money.
She was convinced she was on the right track as far as life was concerned.
But the elderly lady was using roughly 10,000/- to raise something around 8,000/- whenever the brew was out for sale.
A consd erable amount of the money was used for buying fire wood, the ’raw materials’, water and paying the locality’s levy.
That is a very big amount for a petty trader. It doesn’t guarantee progress as the income is straight away consumed by way of food and children’s fare to school and back.
When I learnt of the amount she was realising after all that torturing exercise, I thought I better advise her to either abandon that kind of business and look for another or improve it by reducing the cost of production.
There was the question of how I was to go about offering the free service especially taking into consideration the fact that she is married, her husband could interpret it negatively.
But since that was public business (public in the sense that it was carried out openly and any suggestion could be offered, I decided to pose as one of the customers and confronted her.
However, she was reluctant to accept my advice because she claimed she was making good money and there was no need to abandon it and shift to another business.
Business is one of the few areas that guarantees one of a quick rise to prosperity.
Experience has it that business people stand a good chance of getting to the top of the ladder of success more quickly than those in other sectors.
Not only because they have the power to buy everybody -the bureaucrats and the common man to dance to their tunes, but also the social trend set up operates well to their advantage.
This element is also shared by some people who hold that people graduating in arts subjects in higher learning institutions advance to success faster than their counterparts graduating in science subjects.
In essence it’s easier for an arts subject graduate to rise to a managerial position than for a doctor, engineer, veterinary officer or magistrate.
Indeed, with money at your disposal you can do whatever you like.
But to realise that you have to abide by certain rules of the game in as far as business is concerned.
These include keeping good records so that at the end of the day on closing your business you know exactly how many items have been bought and the amount they have been brought at.
The second phase president Ali Hassan Mwinyi used to dramatize that business without accounting records is no business but just a waste of time.
Because you will be operating without any transactions which is a crucial exercise in determining the trend of your business.
This is the area where many Tanzanians flawed. They do not do that deliberately but do so due to lacking the required technical know how and skill in running business.
If there is any one among the petty traders who has succeeded, then it is just by mere chance.
Success in business operations requires discipline and honesty in order to attract as many customers as possible and make profit.
Though commercial experts demand that it’s good sometimes not to try something new, but concentrate on the skills you already have, that too is subject to the circumstances.
The government has for a long time been trying to introduce different poverty alleviation schemes amongst the households.
Yet, it has been difficult to record success because of lack of technical know how and business skills.
Without skills you are bound to get stuck in your endeavours.
What petty entrepreneurs think about business is totally different from the reality.
For any success in business, the language is about comanding the change.
The change in new ways of work and new technologies, the way they have been running their organisations are challenging to most people.
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