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How staff theft is quietly killing Nigeria’s service economy — and what it will take to stop it

There is a saying Nigerians know in our bones: every day for the thief, one day for the owner. It is meant to be a reassurance. Justice is slow, the proverb suggests, but it is coming. Sit tight. Be patient. Your day will arrive.

Through Nidacity, I spend roughly ninety percent of my time with entrepreneurs — in their businesses, on their platforms, at their elbows as they try to build something real. And what I have concluded, after months of those conversations, is that the old proverb needs updating.

In Nigeria’s service economy today, it is every day for the thief — and no day, ever, for the owner. This is not simply a story about declining values or individual morality. Criminologists have long understood that behaviour is shaped less by the severity of punishment than by the certainty of consequences. We have built an economy where the consequences of stealing from your employer are, for most participants, essentially zero. And we are living with the results.

What the Entrepreneurs Are Actually Saying

Founders in hospitality, retail, and food service — hotels, restaurants, logistics operations, beauty businesses — are a resilient bunch, but their conversations almost always arrive at the same place. Not electricity, though that comes up. Not interest rates, though those do too. What makes the eyes go flat, what produces that particular exhausted fury that only comes from a problem with no visible solution, is the theft. Staff theft. Internal theft. The quiet, systematic, organised extraction of value from businesses by the people they hired.

For my podcast, I have interviewed two hotel owners, both victims. One had a fifteen-year employee he had treated like family — bought him land, paid school fees, covered medical bills. It did not matter.

The impunity is staggering. And it is not accidental. It is the logical outcome of a system with no consequences.

The Victim-Blaming Must Stop

Better controls. Tighter reconciliation. CCTV. I hear this so often as a recommendation that I have started laughing. I qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 1993 and am a former internal auditor. With the greatest of respect to those offering these prescriptions: you do not understand the size of this problem.

The person running two restaurants is not a surveillance operative who can abandon her floor to watch twelve hours of CCTV footage every day. Suggesting she should reveals exactly how completely we have outsourced the problem to its victims.

To those who ask how much the staff are being paid: I pray that you will one day open a business in Nigeria and find out that it had nothing to do with salary or benefits. The woman who opens a bank account in a name similar to her employer’s business and arrives to work with her own POS terminal is not hungry or desperate. She is a thief, and a well-prepared one. The first money she steals is her insurance — set aside to settle the police if she is ever caught.

And to those who insist the auditors should have found it: I ask how many small businesses can afford an auditor? And even some that can find their auditor is part of the same collusion.

What is most disturbing is the pattern of coordination. Very few of these thefts are solo operations. The person currently awaiting trial on remand whom my team interviewed had recruited the security guard and three regular customers into a systematic five-year operation against a woman whose only crime was trying to build something. This is organised crime — more disciplined in its structure than most legitimate businesses.

If we opened the floodgates and asked business owners to share their stories, I think we would have a day of national shame.

Members of the public have a small but real role to play: be in the business owner’s corner. Be suspicious of the non-working POS machine followed by an offer to pay into a personal account. Avoid cash. Do not collect the personal phone number of staff, or encourage them to do private work on the side at the expense of the employer whose generator is running.

The Police Problem

This is where the conversations with Otunba Femi Okenla — entrepreneur, Nidacity podcast guest, and owner of the IBIS Hotel — and Ayodele Ogundele of Davies Hotel became something I could not unhear.

He told me what it costs to get the police to prosecute someone caught stealing from your business. Not the theoretical cost. The actual, itemised, out-of-pocket cost he personally paid: logistics, the informal fees understood by everyone involved to be the price of admission to a system that is theoretically free. He paid them — not because he wanted to, but because the alternative was watching the thief walk out and the next employee draw the obvious lesson.

What Otunba Okenla described is not an exception. It is the structure. The police will not pursue a staff theft case without inducement. Courts move at the pace of an institution never designed for its current caseload on its current budget. By the time a case resolves — if it ever does — the business has absorbed the original theft, financed the prosecution, lost a staff member, found a replacement, and is running on less capital and more cynicism than it started with.

The rational conclusion is unavoidable: theft works. The expected cost of being caught is so low that the calculation is not even close. This is not a moral peculiarity. It is basic criminology. When consequences are absent, behaviour follows. We have built — or failed to build — an environment in which internal theft is, for many participants, essentially risk-free. What we observe is the predictable result.

Most business owners simply sack the thief, who walks free to find another job. The cycle continues, and the thief re-enters the workforce more experienced and emboldened.

What It Costs the Economy

We frame staff theft as a business problem. It is that. But it is also a labour market problem, an investment problem, and a youth employment problem — and the connections deserve to be stated plainly.

The scale of this problem is not Nigerian folklore. It is documented global economics. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners — the world’s recognised authority on occupational fraud — estimates that organisations lose approximately five percent of annual revenue to internal theft and fraud. The median loss per case in their most recent global study exceeded US$145,000. Small businesses suffer disproportionately, because they lack the internal controls that larger organisations deploy. Nigeria’s weak enforcement environment almost certainly pushes the cost higher still. When businesses that account for roughly 48 percent of Nigeria’s GDP and employ well over 80 percent of our workforce are being systematically weakened from the inside, staff theft stops being a private matter between an employer and a dishonest employee. It becomes an economic policy issue.

Nigeria’s service sector is the natural engine of entry-level employment for young people without capital or connections. Hotels need porters. Restaurants need floor staff. These are real jobs — the first rung of the formal labour market, the roles that build credit histories, generate pension contributions, and create the track record that allows someone to borrow, to grow, to become something other than a daily earner with no institutional footprint.

The entrepreneur who has been repeatedly stolen from is not a neutral actor when she hires next. She hires fewer people. She pays less, because the margin that would justify a better wage has been extracted. She automates where she can, not because the technology is obviously superior but because a machine does not steal from the till. She does not expand, because expansion means more people and more people means more exposure to a risk she has learned is unmanageable.

There is a second consequence that rarely gets named. Owners who are scared to expand beyond what they can physically supervise are already a tragedy. But the more dangerous trajectory is this: increasingly, employers tell me they believe expatriate supervisors or foreign middle managers are less likely to participate in internal theft. Whether that perception is fair is almost beside the point. Perceptions shape hiring decisions. If that perception solidifies, Nigerians risk being systematically relegated to entry-level positions in the very sectors — service and light manufacturing — that have the capacity to absorb workers at scale. That is not a hypothetical. It is already happening.

The Hope: State Police and the Possibility of Consequence

I am not a pessimist. But the hope I am about to describe is contingent on political will, and political will is never guaranteed.

The ongoing establishment of state police forces is, for Nigeria’s service economy, the most significant governance development of this decade — if the political will is there to use it. For the first time, individual states will be able to design their own enforcement priorities, set their own prosecution standards, and — if they choose — create fast-track mechanisms for commercial crime that the federal structure has never been capable of delivering.

A caveat is required. State police are not a panacea, and history offers no automatic comfort here. Poorly governed forces could simply replicate the same dynamics that make federal policing so costly and so unreliable for the business owner trying to report a theft today. The value of state police for commercial enforcement depends entirely on design: transparent commercial crime units, investigators who are trained in financial crime rather than generalists pressed into service, and measurable performance standards that allow the public to hold them to account. Without those features, we will have devolved the problem without solving it. With them, we could materially change the calculation that currently makes internal theft essentially risk-free.

My argument to state governments is direct: staff theft is not a victimless crime against wealthy business owners. It is a tax on the employment capacity of the most labour-intensive sectors of your economy. Every business that fails because the margins were stolen closes jobs and reduces tax payments. Every business that does not expand because its owner was burned once too often never hires. The cost falls on the person waiting for work, not just the person who built the business.

A state that creates a credible, accessible, fast-track mechanism for prosecuting internal business theft — one that does not require the owner to personally finance the investigation — will see investment move toward it. Entrepreneurs who have been burned elsewhere will be willing to try again. The deterrent effect of genuine consequences is, in every jurisdiction that has studied it, more powerful than any camera. Cameras record. Courts decide.

The difference between a recording and a consequence is the difference between a business that keeps hiring and one that quietly gives up.

Every day for the thief. That has been the reality. But it is not a law of nature. Nigeria is not short on entrepreneurs — it is getting short on confidence that what is built will be protected.

It is time to start.

Kemi Adeosun is a former Minister of Finance of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and former Commissioner for Finance of Ogun State. She is the founder of Nidacity.com and the Dash Me Foundation. She writes from Lagos.