Transcorp: Messiah or another White Elephant.

This is my edited response to this topic on Nairaland.com (a Nigerian forum).

Transcorp can never and will never pull Nigeria out of the economic mess she has been wallowing in for years.

I see this Transcorp thing as a big way of deceiving Nigerians into believing that an economic Messiah has come. When flamboyant people whose motive in life is all about how they can increase their own net-worth teamed together to form a mega-corporation, what you can/must expect is nothing but a big failure.

Nigeria does not need a big corporation to get out of the economic quagmire she’s in right now. What we need is/are SMEs and unflinching support from the government. The US economy is buoyant because they give qualitative support to their SMEs, they value them more than corporations like Microsoft, IBM and Boeing.

SMEs have the potentials of creating more jobs in many regions of a country than any corporation, a small SME also do have the potentials of becoming a big player in her own sector too; Microsoft, IBM, Dell etc are classical examples.

What those founders of Transcorp are trying to do is to compete with foreign multinationals, they will fail woefully because they don’t have what it takes to match these people. Though they may have the financial and political muscle, Transcorp does not have a veritable original economic, development and innovative blueprint to become a world-class player overnight like they planned to.

What Transcorp has succeeded in doing to date is buying lucrative and already money spinning companies like Nicon Hilton, I wonder where the much touted new jobs will be created from when they are buying already running companies. I think they should have aptly call themselves “NigeriaWeAreBuying Corp, (NWAB Corp)”

Mega corporations are not the saviour of any nation’s economy because those that run them are mostly people that are out of sync with what’s obtainable on the street. Enron, Worldcom are veritable examples.

I hope Transcorp will not be just one of those SMEs killers here in Nigeria. Another important fear of mine is that some unscrupulous politicians will even use the company as a front to invest their stolen billions since Baba OBJ has now made London and Swiss banks a danger zone for them, (Bravo Balogun).

When the NSE DG is also a director and one of the “owner” of Transcorp, I wonder how she will be able to sanction the company (Transcorp) when they violate set standards (if there’s any) of NSE.

Meanwhile if you don’t know, Transcorp is owned by “sons and daughter of Mr. President” (that’s what Stella Obasanjo called most of the core members). For a start where did they get the money with which they bought NICON Hilton from?

Anyway, time will tell if Transcorp is a blessing or a curse.