Cover Your Rear As You Associate

The business environment has been variously likened to shark-infested waters in which companies in the same line of business are in sustained competition. Such competition could range from the relatively innocuous to the brazenly unhealthy to the cruel and the bizarre!

Sincere association among members providing similar services or producing similar goods may go a long way in serving common interests... pricing, memos to government and regulators, collective bargaining, commonality of utilities in industrial hubs, aggregation of funds to buy goods in bulk, use of common secretaries and office equipment.

I have had cause to write on industrial espionage and how companies invest huge funds in coding their activities, inventions and innovations to forestall the activities of spies... as they also spend huge amounts of money to infiltrate other companies!

How they combine these apparently diametrically opposed activities is what beats my imagination!

How do you associate with ruthless and unscrupulous competition while still covering your rear?

So, as doctors pretend to associate, they tend to snitch staff and patients of colleagues, undercut nearby colleagues by way of pricing and underhand pro bono service, take credit for the exploits of colleagues, backbite colleagues, gleefully eliminate colleagues' practices altogether and generally undermine colleagues!

Doctors who hold offices in such professional associations would for instance, negotiate blanket tax regimes with revenue services just to favour themselves... I know a zonal AGPMPN CHAIRMAN who used to negotiate a blanket tax sum of N50,000 per doctor with the Internal Revenue Service just because he owns a large practice... an impressive multi -storey affair! He would firmly stand down any floor member who suggested that colleagues with smaller practices may not be able to afford such amounts... or that taxation should be a function of income!

He would visit members ostensibly to snitch staff but under the pretext of checking on their welfare!

The funny thing was that while this particular chairman plied pressure on me to help him purchase land (for yet another branch of his hospital) in my locale, another colleague on my axis was busy convincing my landlord to eject me!

Considering their propensities to destroy, they should be able to neutralize each other now that I am out of the picture.

Shouldn't they?
Dr Tosin Akindele is a medical practitioner and public affairs analyst.