Beyond skills, character is needed to thrive in business.

When people are admonished to learn a skill, one may not understand how important these admonitions are until you are faced with young people who have built thriving business empires with their soft skills in some cases which often is a deviation from the courses they studied in school, which are raw skills that they might have acquired from personal development. In a world where information communication technology is the new oil, the need to acquire such skills with which one can compete favourably in the IT market, albeit remotely, remains a task that faces the majority of young people.

However, away from these youths who might have had some forms of formal education that are players in the informal sector, there are some groups of artisans we wish to narrow down to address in this article. These are the artisans who are involved in all ranges of building construction who are based in Igbo land or, in some cases, who are of Igbo descent. The recruitment of these ranges of skilled craftsmen seems to no longer favour those of Igbo extraction in Igbo land.

The words on the streets in the East for the elites is that anyone who has a building project that he or she wishes to deliver in record time, the artisans from Benin Republic, Togo or Cotonou remains your best bet.

When I asked why it is so, I was meant to understand that despite being skilled at the job they do, majority of these foreigners have the firmness of character to come into a site after the price have been duly negotiated, to give their all to deliver on such projects in record time. A renowned builder in Anambra categorically said that he majorly works with these guys from outside the country as they give him peace of mind while delivering mind-blowing projects in record time.