Employees leaked messages from Bento Africa boss Ebun Okubanjo and it looks bad

It's no longer news, of the series of toxic going on in the workplace, especially with startup companies in Nigeria.

Is the workplace to be identified with tyranny and toxicity?

Can a workplace, especially a startup company survive in an atmosphere of tyranny?

A glimpse at the chaotic culture of bento Africa below will give us a clue to the above questions.

“Bento grabbed everything from me—my sense of humanity, sanity, confidence, and trust,” Pascal, an ex-sales executive at Nigerian payroll startup Bento Africa, asserted about his job working there. “We worked around the clock.

 Ebun [CEO and co-founder of the company] would send you messages by 2 AM and await a reaction asap. No rest. We went to bed every night praying our jobs would still be there when we woke up the next morning.”

On March 18, 2021, Pascal’s prayer, which had seemed to work for over a year, stopped working. He was unexpectedly blasted from his job. He chops down into a depressive state, and everything paused making sense. He ceased socializing, and his relationships with friends and family sulked. Even though he asserted serving at Bento for over a year had been torture, it was all he had at the moment.

Bento Africa (previously inferred as Verifi. ng) was founded by Ebun Okubanjo and Chidozie Okonkwo, his buddy, career collaborator, and Bento’s Chief Operating Officer (COO). Headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria.

Bento procures payroll management software to 900 companies, entailing Tangerine Africa, Paystack, Kobo3606, Branch, and LORI Systems.

Okubanjo and Okonkwo created, and nonetheless, run multiple businesses together. While both co-founders flock together, they aren’t relatively of the exact feather. All ex-employees who spoke to Techcabal described Okubanjo as fire and Okonkwo as neither water nor fire; Okonkwo simply remains in the background, silent and barely immersed in the corporation’s day-to-day undertakings.

These ex-employees, accordingly, understand that Okonkwo’s personality outsources all administration to Okubanjo and encourages his toxicity.

In Okubanjo’s termination email to Pascal, he was discharged because of a “lack of cultural fit and poor performance”. But Pascal wondered: “How could I have been culturally unprepared and ineffective after serving you for over a year? Why did it take you that long to measure my incompetence?”

"Ebun Okubanjo, co-founder and CEO at Bento Africa, asserted breaks are for pussies and fuckers, and whoever takes time out of the office for a whole week is a weak member of the team and not needed in the organization.”

He asserted respective of the day-to-day verbal onslaughts he suffered in the hands of Okubanjo, all he yearned to do was to be the adequate agent in the corporation and make his employer proud. He hadn’t done a considerable job in sales previously to Bento, so he lay in the work. Within 5 months, according to him, he had the second-highest figure of customers on their sheets at the time. He secured some of the enormous clients—some of them with over 1,000 workers and a monthly payroll worth ₦15–₦20 million (~$47,000).

Despite his performances, nonetheless, Pascal did not achieve in rendering his boss proud. “There was no unrestricted day from Ebun’s verbal abuse. If he wasn’t naming me a worthless individual, he was intimidating to crush me up,” Pascal asserted. At some juncture, while reviewing his knowledge to TechCabal, he halted to catch his breath.

Pascal related his moment at Bento as the grimiest epoch of his life.

Pascal described how workers would cry during the sales team’s check-in call at 8 AM every weekday. Okubanjo severely criticized their work and was frightened to sack them all at these consultations.

Ezekiel, who had served with the corporation’s growth marketing team, shared his knowledge with TechCabal. He had enrolled one of the sales calls and heard Okubanjo naming them “pussies and deadweights”. He also learned Okubanjo tell the team that they sniffed. “Even though he never assaulted me privately,” Ezekiel said, “I always marveled how anybody could go through that every morning and stay sane.”

Ex-employees also conveyed holes in Bento’s employment agreement, particularly where break days and time off were related. Okubanjo guaranteed workers that they could take moment off when they desired it, but Bola, another ex-employee from the corporation’s sales team, dispersed that agreement as lore.

“I can estimate on one hand how many people took leave during my stay there. Ebun asserted that breaks are for pussies and fuckers, and whoever takes time out of the office for an entire week is a weak member of the team and not needed in the organization,” asserted Bola.

“Ebun scarred me,” she asserted. “I have consumed cash on medication, yet, I still suffer from anxiety.”

In her first days at the startup, Bola inquired a lot of people to come work with her at Bento. At that moment, she was ignorant of Okubanjo’s “frightening personality”. “Had I comprehended about it, I wouldn’t have to implore anybody to enroll into Bento. Now, when a forthcoming Bento worker reaches out to me, I just warn them to run!”

Corresponding to the sources we communicated to, Okubanjo barely accepted alternative viewpoints and monopolized creating major office opinions; the penalty for criticizing his opinions was the abrupt termination of his job. For a quantity of Bento ex-employees, end solely involved halted Slack accounts and emails.

Tinu, who had been steamed from another corporation to join Bento, came around one day and found out she’d been sacked and logged out of her Slack and work email. She’d barely been with the corporation as Communication Lead for minor 3 weeks.

“It was a nerve-wracking ordeal and the dreadful 5 months of my adult life,” asserted Amaka, who was thrilled to engage a tech startup in Nigeria after completing her analyses in the US. She was sacked after tolerating Okubanjo’s injustices and unnecessary remarks over her body.

“I’m a plus-size woman and Okubanjo would constantly have viewpoints about my dressing. He once warned me to quit wearing clothes, that I need to wear jackets, trousers, and a suit all the time (probably to cover my breast) after his girlfriend Alice stated that she loved my breast. What did I wear? Formal dresses that even my mother endorsed of.”

Amaka equated the day she was sacked for to a scene out of a movie. “We were on a sales call, and Ebun kept asserting I consumed company reserves while procuring zero value.” Okubanjo indicted her of charging her Bolt ride on the corporation’s debit card, unaware that Amaka had quit using the card completely and operated the corporation’s chores with her automobile.

After Okubanjo’s indictment, Amaka implored that the card is audited to confirm whether she had certainly been squandering the corporation’s money. Okubanjo surveyed the card and realized that she hadn’t been consuming the card for private expenditures. Instead of apologizing to her, he shifted direction and commenced indicating her not functioning.

“He named me useless and instructed me to f*ck off from the call. The ensuing thing I realized, my colleagues were texting to notify me that he’d sacked me after I declined off the call.”

Similarly, when Kunle, a lead engineer who serialized the company for about 2 years, was fired last November, he only found out about it when he couldn’t access his Slack and work email the subsequent morning. “Ebun fired me because he feels like I was trying to wrest authority from him,” asserted Kunle.

“Leave Ebun, that man can assassinate you and boast about it. He’s that nasty,” Ezekiel had remembered while speaking to TechCabal. Ada, another ex-staff, had also specifically declined to speak to us because she was worried about her safety, fearing that her former employer, could hurt her.

The day before Kunle was fired, the company’s CTO Lede Adeniyi was on leave, so Kunle stepped up to lead the engineering team. Kunle recollected that one of the account administrators had notified him that a prospect needed a component that was not in Bento’s product roadmap for the year. Kunle asserted he elucidated to the manager that the corporation had prioritized other fixes and features for the year and would include the requested feature on their early sprint in 2022. He, nonetheless, proposed that if the prospect needed the feature added shortly, he could discuss it with Okubanjo.

“I related the manager to Ebun because Ebun had already indicted me, formerly, of setting priorities behind him. Nevertheless even that was a crime,” asserted Kunle. The manager reached out to Okubanjo with their proposal, as Kunle had proposed, and all hell broke loose.

“I recall how Ebun appeared to scream at me: ‘Hey motherfucker, what did you say to a prospect over their request?’ He shut me up before I could answer and called me names, which was normal. I was his usual point of reference whenever he wanted to benchmark weaknesses and redundancy in the team. Imagine being disrespected in front of your team members every day.”

Now, before the November firing, Okubanjo had fired Kunle once before. It happened on a trip to Ghana. Kunle had asked Okubanjo to stop calling him a monkey. Okubanjo responded to that by firing him on the spot. “He told me to find my way back to Nigeria, and that he didn’t care how I did it.” But then, he called Kunle after a few hours to give him his job back, knowing he needed him to sort out the business operations they had come for in Ghana.

On November 22, when Okunbanjo fired Kunle for the second and final time, he refused to pay his November salary and severance pay. Kunle reached out to Adeniyi, the CTO, to help him speak to Okubanjo about his owed payments, but Adeniyi couldn’t do anything about it. “You know Ebun does what he wants,” Kunle recalled Adeniyi saying to him.

When TechCabal reached out to Adeniyi for comment on the incident, he confirmed Kunle’s report: “Yes, Kunle asked me to follow up with Ebun, which I did, and Ebun promised to pay him.”  It’s been 4 months now and Okubanjo still hasn’t paid Kunle.

But after Kunle got fired it seemed his former boss wasn’t done with him.

“Last month, just when my mental health was getting back in shape, Ebun popped up on my LinkedIn, offering me my old job back,” Kunle said. “I declined. Such effrontery! No form of apology. I haven’t found a new job yet because I’m scared of working in another Nigerian startup.”

Ebun Okubanjo reached out to Kunle* 4 months after to offer him his job back

Kunle claimed that Ebun sacked his friend John*, a former member of Bento’s design team because John was talking a lot about web3 on social media. Okubanjo accused John of finding Bento “less interesting”.  TechCabal reached out to John through Kunle but he hasn’t replied.

“You can’t give Okubanjo notice period when you’re leaving the company. He’d fire you and tell you off,” Ezekiel said. “When Ebun fires you, he tells you to watch how he’ll make sure you don’t get a job anywhere else in the ecosystem.”

Tare Johnson, Bento’s ex-accountant and financial analyst, believes this was why he couldn’t find a job for 6 months after leaving Bento in August 2020. When Johnson joined Bento in February 2020, his contract stated that he was coming in to lead the finance team. He would later find out that there was no team, and that he would be leading himself while reporting to a “narcissistic boss”.

“I was the only one handling all the company’s finances. I was also doing clerical jobs and running errands like a personal assistant, which was confusing and not even remotely close to my job description,” said Johnson. “My initial thought was, ‘It’s a startup and things move around a lot.’ But I was wrong. This place was designed to break employees. Ebun abused me verbally, which is standard behavior for him with employees. He’d call me a motherfucker, dullard, and every vulgar word in the dictionary. He even insulted my family.”

Johnson, running a one-man finance team, was stuck in a mess he hadn’t bargained for. The pandemic lockdown hit barely a month after he got the job, locking him into the job at a time when companies were laying people off and not hiring. So he stuck around and took all the verbal abuse Okubanjo hurled at him. After 5 months, he figured he was coping, until an event on Monday, August 17, 2020, made him resign without notice.

That Monday, Johnson—like he had done every morning—shared the company’s daily bank statements to Okubanjo and Okonkwo on WhatsApp. Upon receiving them, Okubanjo replied with: “Bro, are you drunk???” Johnson thought he must have made a mistake somewhere on the statements, so he quickly double-checked before re-sharing the statements with Bento’s founding team. Okubanjo was still not satisfied with the statements. Some recent transaction hadn’t been reflected yet in the company’s account at the time Johnson compiled the statement; there was no way Johnson could have included it in his report. But Okubanjo, “in his usual fashion”, asked Johnson to fix the spreadsheet or he’d fire him. Finally fed up, Johnson resigned with a simple message: “No need, I quit” and exited the WhatsApp group. An hour later, he sent in his resignation letter.

For Johnson, joining Bento Africa was “a bad idea” and leaving “the best thing he’d ever done for himself”.

Why were Okubanjo’s red flags ignored?

Some of the ex-employees said Okubanjo’s ruthless leadership style was obvious from the first day they met him. “The day I met him for my interview, he told me he could read poverty all over my face,” said Kunle.

“On the first day, we met,” Johnson said, “I witnessed an altercation that ended with Ebun threatening to punch a stranger in the face.”

Amaka, on her part, said she recognized Okubanjo from a video that had gone viral a year before, where he was in a heated argument with a female customer of Fitness Central, a gym he co-founded with Okonkwo. In the video, Okunbanjo’s frightening temperament was obvious and an enormous display.

So, why did these past Bento staffs accept to work for the corporation after observing these red flags from the CEO?

“I felt horrible, but what can I do? I desired employment. I was just working out the HNG Internship,” asserted Kunle.

“The cash was reasonable, for a person who hadn’t performed the mandatory, one-year National Youth Service Corps (NYSC),” asserted Amaka.

“I had stayed  7 months without employment, after NYSC, and was even planning to go back home [which is outside Lagos] when the employment came. So, it was my adequate alternative at the moment,” asserted Adanma*, a past employee of the corporation.

Culture panic after vacating Bento

Past workers who communicated to TechCabal asserted to encountering culture panic at their ensuing employment.

Adanma “couldn’t speculate it when my recent boss asked for my viewpoint on stuff. “For the initial few months [at my new job], I was too frightened to express a viewpoint at conferences, for anxiety of being named stupid.”

Bola “was amazed when my new boss asserted switching off Slack notifications is decent to ameliorate tension, and that we should all utilize it.”

Corresponding to McKinsey, hundreds of investigations indicate that clashes with rude, abusive, and demeaning people undermine employees’ accomplishments, involving their decision-making capabilities, productivity, creativity, and enthusiasm to work harder and encourage coworkers.

Okubanjo repeatedly alleges that Bento is “a mission and not a company” hence his iron-fist administration.

Nonetheless, Bento is toxic

Three current Bento employees reached by TechCabal were sensitive about their acknowledgments, but they agreed that everything this review has discovered about Bento Africa’s work culture “is not false”.

“One minute, its silence; the next it’s chaos. It’s unsafe here, and the anxiety is too much,” one of them asserted.

“I’m not frightened,” the second worker asserted. “My discarded place of work was also toxic, so I’m kinda used to it. At this point, I think all startups are the same.”

The third employee wouldn’t “deny that Bento can be toxic for some people but not in my private knowledge. We labor exceptionally hard, and we play tougher. Vastly people on the team adore their jobs. It’s not for everyone,”

While several ex-Bento workers agree that the corporation has an enormous and significant product, they think both founders in charge of the startup are incapable of their roles. The corporation’s Glassdoor checks divulge supplementary messages of its unconducive work culture.

In December last year, Bento broadened into Ghana, Kenya, and Rwanda, with strategies to erect systems in 6 other markets—Egypt, South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, Angola, and Ethiopia—by the end of this year. The corporation also leveraged the prominence of music veteran and record label boss Don Jazzy to thrust a movement aiding the African entrepreneurship spirit—a movement that arguably strengthened its pan-African trademark equity. These steps suggest that the corporation is evolving to a degree where its obvious inadequacy of configuration, process, and attention to employee welfare can no longer be ignored. 

Reached out to Okubanjo and Okonkwo for statements. Okonkwo didn’t concede, but Okubanjo did. In his reaction, he called our then-developing tale “fiction” and posted our email request to Twitter, asserting our story was a “hit job”. He has observed his tweets with a procession of harsh emotional messages to members of the TechCabal team.

While Johnson, Bola, Amaka, Kunle, Ezekiel, Adanma, and others still scared to speak up have licked their wounds and moved on, Pascal’s family refuses to let the abuse he suffered at Bento slide. They have sued Okubanjo. “I just want him to rescind the lies he told in the termination email to me, I have all the evidence to prove he lied,” Pascal said.

Besides Tare Johnson who precisely implored not to be unspecified, other names have been altered to preserve the individualities of those involved.