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.
An alternative approach to CSR is called the Social Capital Approach to development and it is nothing but a social appeal. The theory and practice of social capital suggest a networking system of development. There are four dimensions to it – group formation, horizontal networking of groups, vertical networking of groups and network synergy.
Group formation can be occupational, communal, gender-based and generationally homogenous – here, people come together to increase productivity or establish a development process by leveraging on collaborative efforts. Horizontal networking of groups is the working together of established groups at the same or similar level of value chains. Vertical networking is the deliberate effort of established groups to hang on to groups ahead of their value chain. This could also be the other way round – where established groups hang down to groups beneath their value chain. Network synergy comes when the relationship moves in both directions – randomly- vertical and horizontal.
The social relationship of concern here is the vertical networking where established groups hang down to groups beneath their value chain. The Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria calls it Village/ School Adoption Scheme – a situation where an organisation under the council has to adopt a village and/or school to support in the area of the latter’s needs.
This approach is noble because it is a people-based – not some propaganda. A situation can be arrived at where every community, health centre and school is affiliated with particular corporate organisations. A small picture of this idea is the common trend of companies branding houses along the highway with their themes. This is expected to be a standard indicator of CSR, not ones popularly termed “scams” like the jet promo above, but the ones that drive healthy competition among corporations, relieve Nigerians of heavy burdens from the inadequacy of basic amenities and further expose the failure of the public sector.
This article was taken from here.