I want to train graduates –Cane weaver

The cane village is not where you expect to see a graduate of Mechanical Engineering. But that is exactly where you will find Ol­adele Oluwatosin, a native of Oyo State.

He learnt the trade as a child while watching his mother do it. His mother reg­istered the business 32 years ago. Oladele comes from a long line of cane weavers.
“It is a trade that belongs basically to the Urhobos in Delta State,” he told Sun­day Sun. “And my mother is from Urhobo. She married my father who is from Oyo State. My grandfather started the business in Lagos.”
But as a child, he did not love the job. He even wanted to get out of it. “Nobody really enjoys work as a child. There is no work that you do as a child that you enjoy. Even going to school, you will probably prefer to stay home and watch cartoon than go to school. It is when you grow up that you can become grateful for the things you learnt as a child. At a point, I left home and I felt good. I was happy to be away from the work.”
When he left home, Oladele went to the Yaba College of Technology (Yabatech) where he studied Mechanical Engineer­ing. When he left school, he worked in a school, at the airport, at a pharmaceutical company, advertising agency and finally an IT (Information Technology) company where he eventually resigned and returned to cane weaving.
Talking about that decision, he ex­plained to our reporter why he took that bold step four years ago. “At a point in one’s life, certain things will make you have a rethink about what you are doing. It is good working with people because it gives you the experience you need to run your own business. I was working with an IT company before I joined this business. Before then I had worked in the cargo section of an airline, a pharmaceutical company as an operations personnel; an advertising company and my first job was in a school.
“I decided to reach out to people more. It is not just about making more money. Coming to the cane business, you have to do what people can see and appreciate. You have to do a lot of research in order to come up with things that can be exported. Somehow, we have been able to achieve that.”
After these years, would you say that business has been good? You asked this cane weaver. “Yes, it has been good,” he replied. “The business has sustained me and my family. It has also allowed me to reach out to friends and families.”
He could almost swear that it is much better than what he was doing before now. “Of course, it is much better. Above all, I have time for myself and my family. I don’t have to wake up so early in the morning and end up in traffic in the eve­ning. Though it is a little bit more tasking running your own business than when you are working for somebody.”
Oladele is working hard to improve on what his mother has been doing all her life. “There is so much that we are doing right now. We are speaking with the Lagos State Government to see how we can re-introduce crafts in the school curriculum. We have written to them, but they have not responded. We are hoping that one day somebody will see what we are seeing.
“We are also looking for capital to enlarge what we do now. The problem is that most of the time when you approach banks for loan, they will ask us what we do. When you tell them that you do basket, nobody wants to borrow you money because they don’t believe that basket can be profitable.
But does he think that it is a bankable business? “For God’s sake, for the little capital that I have been able to borrow, I have returned it with interest and I even had excess for myself. Even with the account books, they still feel that they cannot give me loan to make basket. The interest rate they are giving is out of place. Once we even got a chance, but when I saw the interest rate, I knew that it would kill my business.”
How about the microfinance banks? “Some of them don’t also believe in the basket business. The kind of business that we do, you don’t make sales every day. Every microfinance bank is looking for businesses that can give you sales every day. The kind of need that we meet is not the kind that comes up every day. If I do basket for you, it is not supposed to spoil in the next three to four years. So, to keep yourself in business, we are trying to recreate the need for ourselves.
Apart from baskets, what else can be made with cane? “My God, we can make chairs, mirror stands, garden chairs! We can weave the pillars of your house and even the walls of your room. There is so much that can be done with cane. It is as far as your imagination can take you.”
One of the major reasons Oladele is seeking additional fund for his business is to be able to make his goods more market­able. He told Sunday Sun: “We are looking at getting a befitting showroom to display our products. We cannot just send people out to get customers when we do not have the right place for them to come in and see what they want. And our products are not water resistant. So, we cannot hang them outside all the time.
“People will like to come to a place that is well kept, see what they want, pick their orders and go. By the time we get a showroom, it will give us the opportuni­ty to employ more hands; get marketers to go out and sell our products. We also have plans to spread to other parts of the country.”
He also intends to empower young graduates with the skills they need to succeed in cane weaving. It will be his contribution to reducing the high rate of joblessness in the country. “As time goes on, we intend to talk with the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) because cane weaving is a very viable business to venture into. I want to see if we can bring in corps members, train them to help reduce the joblessness in the country.
“As a person, I have given it a careful thought. It will be free, but the returns will be a plus. It is just like when someone says he is paying you N250, 000 as a staff. Then you should know that you are worth more than that sum. Whatever work you are doing is giving your employer more than twice the amount he is paying you. While I am training them, they will also be working for me. Even if I am to pay them, it will not be as much as what I am paying my regular staff. One of my own ideas of wealth is that you have to invest in lives. My concept of being the richest person is adding value to people’s lives,”
Oladele has nine people working with him. Surprisingly, they are all Ghanaians. “In Nigeria, there is no job integrity. Nobody respects this kind of job. If I tell somebody that I am going to work, and it is not in a bank or an oil company, they will kind of sniff at it. It is only in Nigeria that people do not understand that the road sweeper is as important as the managing director of an oil company. This is because if the road is not clean, it can cause an accident that can even kill the managing director. A lot of Nigerians don’t want to do it because it is a dirty work.”
Oladele has a huge dream for his business. “In the next 10 years, we will be doing business in the whole 36 states of the federation.”