When I was a PA

I realised how much of a security risk a PA and a driver are to any man or woman who is of moderate means in Nigeria.

PA’s earn very little, and so do drivers, but they have access to the life and real-time information of their boss and his entire family.

They know when the boss is flying out of the country, when he will return.

They know when the boss’s wife and children are flying out of the country, they know when they will return.

They know the schools the children are attending, they know the resumption time and the closing time

They are sometimes detailed to pick the boss’s children from school and take them to the mall or anywhere else they may desire to go.

They know things about the boss’s family that other members of his own family do not know.

For example, If the boss is having an extramarital affair, the PA knows, and so does the driver.

The boss’s children’s girlfriends and boyfriends, which the boss doesn’t know, the PA knows, and so does the driver.

The life of the boss is an open book to the PA and the driver.

To make matters worse, most of the bosses treat the PA and driver u professionally and shabbilly.

This leads to resentment and offence, which the driver and the PA hold against the boss but are powerless to express because they want to keep their jobs.

The exposure to the boss’s wealth also gives the PA and driver a sense of entitlement like no other.

I have been in situations where we dropped off the boss for a meeting and had to wait for him with other drivers and PAs outside the meeting venue.

The drivers and PAs begin to talk, and their talk is always about their mean bosses, the mean boss’s family and how unfairly they were being treated.

Some drivers would joke that they were tempted to turn the car towards an angle on the expressway, just to get into an accident to get rid of their bosses.

The other drivers will laugh.

I always observed such discussions, and it didn’t help that I was a PA to a Pastor and all the other drivers and PAs at such meetings also have clergymen as their principals.

I must say that no PA or driver that I know ever carried out the evil they often talked about against any of their bosses.

It was all talk.

“Our boss is stingy”

“Our boss would rather allow things to rot and waste rather than give us such despite knowing that we don’t have much”

“Our boss is a wicked and uncaring man who paid us only our salary and wouldn’t even give us a loan in times of emergency”

One of the drivers I know deliberately remained a muslim because he claimed that he had driven his boss for over twenty years and the boss never set foot into his house to visit him.

The boss kept their relationship professional, and he felt that was the height of callousness.”

This is why I don’t have a PA.

I don’t think I can ever have one.

I also prefer to drive myself, despite having four drivers under my employment at the moment.

I keep them strictly on the job and off my personal life and space.

It is better to eat your dry morsels in peace than expose yourself to people who come into your space looking for employment only to turn against you and open the door for kidnappers, armed robbers, assassins and other evil.

My opinion.

-GSW-