Shoprite is leaving Nigeria after 15 Years | Man reveals How Staff Stealing From The Company is a Major Reason

Nigerians have taken to social media to express surprise after grocery retailer, Shoprite, announced its exiting the country after 15 years.

According to News24, the Cape Town-based retailer has started a formal process to consider the potential sale of all or a majority stake in its supermarkets in Nigeria, it said in a trading statement for the 52 weeks to end June released on Monday.

In the statement, Shoprite said the results for the year do not reflect any of their operations is Nigeria as it will be classified as discontinued operation.

International supermarkets (excluding Nigeria) contributed 11.6% to group sales, and reported  1.4% decline in sales from 2018.

South African operations contributed 78% of overall sales and saw 8.7% rise for the year.

As a result of lockdown, customer visits declined 7.4% but the average basket spend increased by 18.4%.

With a plethora of tweets to sieve through on this matter, most of which have fingered the president of Nigeria Muhammadu Buhari as the cause of Shoprite’s exit,  A Twitter user has blamed staff theft as one of the reasons why the South Africa owned retail outlet, Shoprite, decided to stop doing business in Nigeria.

The twitter user whose handle is @SamuelOtigba stated that the company must have decided to pack up do to theft perpetrated by its staff.

His thread reads: “Asides the political bottlenecks & chaotic business strains associated with doing business in Nigeria, one other silent contributing factor why Shoprite is closing down, is staff theft. In 2017 alone, a sales girl stole N553M, one month after securing the job. There are many.

“My friend’s father-in-law is on the board as an investor. This isn’t a singular incident, it has become an organised crime. From mid-management to staff. They had this issue from the first year of operations. Another issue is greed involving political tax masters. If you know…

“It was published in different News outlets in 2017. Inside story is, she came with her own POS machine & kept using it to collect payments during peak period. The receipt looked like an original Shoprite receipt till you look closer & notice the alteration.

“That’s just one incident they discovered after audit. Imagine the racket going on at their different locations across Nigeria. Firing & hiring is a regular exercise now. Most of these staff don’t stay up to a month again. The ones that snitch…(another story for another day)”.