Whether an economy is livid, languid, tumultuous, famishing or azure, lively, healthy, peaceful, uplifting and up-building, whoever will drown or float in it will do. It is not a question of the wickedness or of the friendliness of an economy. It is the degree of the heaviness or of the lightness or the player in it. Heavy persons tend to see no way out of harm’s way, whereas every way is an escape route from trouble for light persons. From this premise, I want to tell two stories today. One of them appears to still be legally immature and, therefore, unsafe to tell. So, about it I say… Hush! The other concerns a Nigerian company which has successfully replaced many foreign herbal medicinal supplements with local ones in Bayelsa State and, from that humble beginning in Nigeria’s choking economy, has made a brave go for Abuja, Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory (FCT), and Lagos, Nigeria’s economic and commercial nerve centre. That smacks of the proverbial mortal man fearlessly treading over where angels fear to fly. It is still about heaviness or denseness, that is sinking or drowning and lightness or floating and soaring and fluttering like a butterfly. Something is prompting me to tell a third story, to compensate for the first one which flew out of the window.
The second story is about Milnapath. The compensatory story is about Live Pure, a food supplement company from the United States, which had been here before, but, proverbially, put worms and maggots in the stomach of many of its affiliate distributors, threw them away like dirty, old socks or bras, and went back to America, only to indirectly return to Nigeria for business through Ghana, thereby making Ghanaians business bosses of Nigerians!
MILNAPATH
Milnapath recently got my attention in Abuja, where it had just celebrated one successful year in business, handing brand new cars to key players in its multi-level marketing business. Car gifts may dazzle new market players, they do not turn the heads which have voyaged on many lagoons and oceans. Business durability is what matters to old cargoes. Milnapath’s success wasn’t surprising to me. Its products are made from local raw materials and were, therefore, not intensely dollarised, making them cheaper than pharmaceutical products which were costing about 10 times more than they did a few months ago. Besides, many of the pharmaceutical products are now fake. Already, the authorities have shut down more than 300 patent medicine stores and pharmacies in Jos, the Plateau State capital, over this syndrome.
Neither the climate nor the weather is faring well for the foreign herbs and food supplements’ sky-line. I could never have believed that Neprinol, the tumour breaker, which cost between N20,000 and N30,000 last year, would hit more than N200,000 this month. Only last year, my favourite tea, the world’s first Alkaline Coffee made by Nature’s Way in the United States and marketed worldwide by Alliance in Motion Global (AIM GLOBAL or ALLIANCE) from the Philippines cost N6,000.But today, it goes for more than N20,000. What about Ubiquinol which rose from about N40,000 for 90 soft gels to more than N100,000? If I may describe as “shylock” economic forces behind Neprinol and Ubiquinol of today, I would describe as “prodigal” the directors of the once-thriving foreign company, Live Pure, who are trying to stage a return to the Nigerian market they once bastardised.
MILNAPATH
The plant medicines from Bayelsa State made by a company named Milnapath, an acronym (Milellum Nature Path) is said by the company to be a “new way to nature’s abundance”.
There are seven medicinal proprietary blends/products in its kitty, namely:
GYNOCARE…
For…”Female hormone balance, yeast infection and irregular menstruation”.
NAKOM OIL…
For…” Asthma therapy and to dissolve ovarian cyst”.
DETOX PLUS
For…”Body cleansing”.
GLUCO CARE….”To keep pancreas active, to increase metabolism, for heart care and blood glucose level”.
REJUVENATE STEM CELL
For …”Wrinkles and stress, mental clarity, fight cancer, immune boosting, weight loss and to relieve arthritis pain”.
CARDRDIO CARE
For…” Brain health, blood circulation, Parkinson’s disease and seizures, heart attack and stroke and for cardio issues”.
D-MAN
For…”To boost sperm count, libido, handles impotence and arrests premature ejaculation”.
I hope that, sooner than later, it would be possible to review contents of these products, for the hood does not make the monk. In natural medicines, it is the content, not just the name, which tells us what a medicine may be up to.
FOREIGN SUPPLEMENTS
We should not deceive ourselves. Foreign food supplements companies are in Nigeria for enlightened self interest, not on charity or on humanitarian grounds. They price their products well above market values at about N2,000 to the U.S. Dollar, pay their affiliate marketers bonuses rated at about N1000 to the USD, instead of about N1,400 or more on this publication date of May 23, 2024, keep the balance for re-orders or future import budget, thereby making no additional investment to keep the business running. When there is going to be a hitch, they quietly leave the market as Live Pure did about one or two years ago. That is why the products are scarce and shelf prices are outrageous today. The trend was predicted towards the end of the 1990s, when I began my newspaper reports promoting multi-level marketing (MLM), a job creator for a growing army of unemployed Nigerians. We had been dependent on government and multi-national companies for jobs which were no longer forthcoming. Now, we had to learn to become independent workers. Many MLM companies trooped in from abroad. Among them were G.N.L.D, Tianshi, Forever Living Products (FLP), Tasly, Green World, Nutri Health, Kedi, Fohow, Longrich, Norland, Edmark, Tahitian Noni, Dynapharm, Nature’s Gift For Life (NG4), and Eternal, among others. Some of them, like Tiansh, sold small dosages for the price of larger dosages. I still recall my shock at discovering that I had to swallow 12 tablets of Tianshi Zinc for only 15mg of this mineral whereas Nature’s Way, a direct sales company from the U.S. sold one 50mg of zinc capsule or tablet for a price much less than Tianshi’s 15mg. Alliance products were often no more than 10 capsules per blister pack at prices that, equated to 90 capsules or softgels for one month’s order, far exceeded the prices of standard packaging.
My defence of such anomalies then was that we had to pay a price to learn, to grow and to become our own masters. I gained this insight from my first visit to Europe in 1979. I was lucky to visit the site of a stone storey building where Bethoven was said to have written his music and directed his orchestra. I visited, also, another building where Handel was said to have written and directed The Messiah between August 22nd 1741 and September 17th 1801. These were great classical musicians. I thought about the state of housing in my village then. Had the missionaries not come, would we have been able to live in the types of houses in which we live today? In Lagos today, there are houses better than Buckingham Palace, home of the King and Queen of England, and 10 Downing Street, official residence of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. I was privileged to live on Femoy Street, London, where two bedrooms shared an only bathroom and water closet. I haven’t lived in such a house since 1990! There is no doubt forces of religion, business, and politics exploited the civilising mission of the envangelising missionaries and fighters of slave trade such as William Wilberforce. The bottom line, nevertheless, shows a profit balance in the ledgers of our people.
That was how I foresaw the onslaught of MLM in Nigeria of the 1990s. It taught us to remember our traditional medicines and to build our own MLM around them. It took me almost one week to register with Katine Communications under the bridge at Ikeja, Lagos, to sell cosmetic products called Carrot, which were made from Diatomaceous Earth (DE or Diatom). Katine Communications, a previous recharge card selling business, took Carrot products all over Nigeria, selling a million units of the products every day, before differences with the producing company killed the business. After Katine and Carrot came several others, including Friends of Nature which was domiciled at Gowon Estate, near Ipaja, Lagos. The CEO killed the promising business in my view, by reneging on agreements. One of them was that a distributor could earn the moon, even the sun, with the personal purchase of only one product every month.
One of the affiliate distributors, Edith Njoku, had no marketing gift but was a great organiser for recruiting marketers…. She disappeared as it were to the Southeastern states and to Port Harcourt in the Southsouth and grew down-lines by the thousands. When the cheque for her bonus was written and the CEO discovered she bought a product valued at only N200 for the month, he developed cold feet about paying her almost half a million naira. I remember him asking if anyone had heard of N200 yielding N500,000 anywhere on earth. The woman, a house girl all her young life, became agitated, tampered with some computers, and the police were called to take her away for a few days. All the affiliate marketers quit in protest, and the company failed.
MILNAPATH HOPE
My hope is that Milnapath will not let us down. Nigeria is a huge traditional and alternative medicine market. There are many plant medicines in the bushes, thickets and forests than we can identify for generations. Diatom is abundant in Bayelsa State and in the Southeast. It is not purified before it is eaten, and that is dangerous. It is called Nzu. In the days of the Goodluck Jonathan administration, this column suggested this would be a great gift he would give his people if he helped them to set up factories to conveniently mine and purify Nzu, which could then be marketed world-wide. At that time, the Canadians wished to sell theirs in Nigeria. I declined to be a party to that. All that we lack in order to seize the initiative is technology. Money is abundant. The only trouble is that politicians who are afraid to invest in Nigeria, money that they stole from Nigeria, believe other thieves like them will consume their investment. I once toyed with the idea of a small freeze drying machine in the U.K. It cost about €3 million then. With it, anything can be turned into powder with long shelf life and marketed everywhere. Name them – orange, orange peels, plantain, plantain peels, tomato, corn, okra, carrot, garden eggs, yam, mushroom, bitter leaf, ewedu (jute mallow), vegetables, peppers, cassava, nuts, etc. Are the governors listening?
Live Pure returns
Live Pure never really came to Nigeria, although it was in this country and did business with us. It ran on a business model which many MLM companies employ to minimise cost and maximise profit, The Independent Business Developer (IBD). This fellow is like the ‘Property Developer’ we are familiar with. He develops your property, shares the rent with you for a while and then goes his way when his purse is well stuffed. Ben Peter may have been an IBD for Live Pure in Nigeria.
An IBD in Nigeria protects the business owners far away against capital risks in an unknown terrain. He sets up the “company” with his own money. He is not a stupid fellow though. He appoints stockists of his products among Nigerians. These are the fellows who really fund operations. He gives them mouth-watering commissions for interfacing as wholesalers between him (and the company abroad) and the retailers (independent marketers or distributors). The IBD receives commission on every item sold in the country. He may lower business terms to speedily achieve his goal or, hand the business over to his principal and move on to open newer national markets. In Nigeria, the Live Pure IBD omitted Annual Subsciption in the terms of business to quickly grow the business. The subscription is compulsory in many Euro- American MLM businesses. At the end of the business year, the independent distributors “drop something” as we say in Nigeria, to continue to be in business with the company for another year. This may be as little as $100 USD. It may be a little drop of water in the U.S. where many of them make a “mighty profit ocean” but it is a big deal in a poor country. Imagine a company with one million distributors worldwide. $100 a year will amount to $100 million or N1,400,000,000,000 at Nigeria’s current exchange rate of about N1,400 to one USD. This is “profit after profit “or second-level profit.
Live Pure IBD let go annual subscription in the business to encourage business growth and hammered it into the business when the “cooking” was done with. It was a third major blow for independent Nigerian distributors before the company crashed out of business in this country. The first major blow was the abandonment of foreign tours for high flyers among them. The IBD did not envisage rapid business growth. About three times more distributors than were anticipated qualified. Happily, for the IBD, this was in COVID 19 season which was an opportunity to down scale foreign trips of the value of more than N5 million per person in cash or travel expense to about N500,000 per person. “Hungry” Nigerians jubilated nevertheless and enjoyed the crumbs. The next major blow was the abandonment of the STtockist business model. I am aware of a stockist who invested about N10 million on Live Pure warehousing. Imagine about 1,000 of such persons nation-wide. That must have meant about N10,000,000,000. That may have amounted to N10 billion cheap business capital provided the IBD by stockists.
Suddenly, the IBD abrogated the stockists’ position to directly interface with the market on an electronic platform backed with a grandiose motor bike courier delivery logistics programme. Stockists were stuck with stocks that could expire in their warehouses should they not drop prices. On top of all those financial problems for stockists, the IBD suddenly packed bag and baggage, and was gone. The Live Pure business in Nigeria collapsed. Surprisingly, the IBD tried, but failed, to introduce to Nigeria new products from another company believed to be theirs.
Now, the Live Pure business is on a rebound, however, from Ghana. It is possible the IBD has gone to open the Ghanaian market which is expected, through remote control, to drive the much bigger Nigerian market and make commission on every Live Pure product brought into Nigeria. This would also make Ghanaian up lines of Nigerians who would have to reregister under Ghanaians to do Live Pure business in Nigeria. Worst still for Nigerians, Ghanaians, buying and selling less in Ghana, would now earn biggers bonuses from the labour of Nigerians. In order words, Nigerians are going to be financial slaves of Ghanaians. This will be one of the drains on Nigeria’s U.S. Dollar earnings and push down the value of the Naira. As of today, the old-time Nigerian stockists are heading to Ghana to stock up Live Pureproducts from Ghanaian stockists, making the head become the foot, as we are wont to say in a YORUBA adage.
LOCAL PRODUCTS
It is against a background such as this that I found exciting the information that a sprouting of local Nigerian food supplements has erupted again, with MILNAPATH appearing to take the lead. I asked my wife, who lives in Abuja, to watch many of them, and give me an idea of what is happening up there.
She reports:
1) The Spice House Ltd, Olive Estate, Satellite Town, Lagos:
•Bay Leaves •Ceylon Cinnamon •Moringa Leaves Powder
2) GOTEA, Ilupeju Industrial Estate: •Cholesterol Reducing Tea •Immunity Tea •Eyebright Herbal Tea •Arthritis Herbal Tea
•Blood Sugar Balance Tea
3) Jamdah Worldwide Ltd, Sharada Phase 2, Industrial Area, Kano: •DAHIR Curry Powder •Black Seed Powder
4) Off Abacha Rd, Nasarawa State: •DIOGO Pure Soya
5) Rice Mill Rd, Gboko, Benue State: •Turmeric Powder
6) National Technology Incubation Centre, Farm Centre, Tarai LGA, Kano State: •Thyme
7) Toa Agro Allied Services Ltd, Dawanau Mkt, Katsina Rd, Kano: •Black Pepper Powder
8) Little Mayfield, Jos: •GOTEA-Antidiabetic Tea •Organic Kidney Tea
9) Vital Quest Nigeria Ltd, Yusuf Doma St, Kaduna: •Premium Black Tea
10) Home Affairs Organic Products, Mbubu Industrial Area, Imo State: •Mistletoe Tea
For this column, I thank my wife for linking me up with Zainab Ademola who works with Milnapath in Abuja. Zainab is herself a distributor of the products. This is indeed a critical time, hopefully, for an opportunity to monitor the growth of these new Nigerian plant medicines MLM company at a time we seriously need many of them in the economy. We should encourage them.
