Lagos to Douala: The Boss Is Still Always Right, Just Less Loudly

🇳🇬 Nigeria · 🇨🇲 Cameroon

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

More than 169,600 Nigerians already live in Cameroon, according to the International Organization for Migration's 2024 World Migration Report — enough to put it among the top five destinations for Nigeria's famous "japa" wave, ahead of Italy and just behind the United States and United Kingdom. Most go for business, family, or the shared border, not the paperwork. What they find, if they end up in an office, is a hierarchy they recognise instantly and a management style that runs on the same basic principle as the one they left — age and seniority outrank everything — delivered in a noticeably lower register.

Do's & Don'ts

🇳🇬 Nigeria

🇨🇲 Cameroon

Nigeria

Nigerian corporate hierarchy is, by local and outside accounts alike, "massively hierarchical." World Business Culture's guide to doing business in the country notes that native Nigerian companies run on visible deference — bosses expect and receive respect from everyone below them, and age is treated as a direct proxy for wisdom, which is why managers tend to be older even when a younger hire is more technically capable. Decisions are made at the top, and middle managers routinely look more powerful than they actually are; a foreign professional who spends weeks courting a department head, only to discover the real approval sits two levels up, has made a very common mistake.

The hierarchy shows up in small daily rituals as much as in org charts. A widely read account of Nigerian office norms describes junior staff greeting senior colleagues individually every morning, on pain of a formal query if they skip it, and seniors served first at office parties almost as a matter of protocol. Even support staff carry real informal authority: an office cleaner who expects to be addressed as "aunty" or "Ma" and asked, not told, for a favour is not an oddity, it is the norm. Contributions toward colleagues' weddings, births, and bereavements are treated as close to mandatory, and declining one is reliably noticed and discussed.

Relationship-building cuts both ways through the hierarchy. Nigeria is, by every account, a relationship-oriented culture, and junior staff who are liked and trusted can meaningfully shape what a senior decision-maker eventually hears — which makes office politics less a distraction from the work and more a genuine part of how the work gets done.

A well-known breakdown of Nigerian office archetypes names the recurring cast that makes up this ecosystem: the Oppressor, a demanding superior whose unrealistic expectations keep an entire floor tense; the Kiss-ass, who flatters the boss and undermines peers to look indispensable; and the By-product of Nepotism, hired or promoted through family or religious ties rather than ability, who is correspondingly difficult to challenge. None of these are unique to Nigeria, but a hierarchy this visible gives each archetype an unusually clear stage to perform on.

Cameroon

Cameroon's management style has been studied as paternalistic rather than strictly autocratic — a 2016 university thesis on management practices in the country found that leaders combine authority with a degree of personal care that a purely top-down style doesn't capture, while still keeping real decisions firmly at the senior level. The same research found that Cameroonian employees respond more to extrinsic motivators, like pay and working conditions, than to intrinsic ones such as praise or recognition, and that performance improves most under managers who emphasise cooperation and clear, measurable targets rather than inspirational language.

Access runs through relationships more than through an org chart. The same research found that approaching a manager through a known staff member worked far better than a cold approach, and that candour about leadership could make employees visibly uneasy — reflecting a workplace where speaking frankly about who's in charge is not treated as neutral small talk. Cameroon's bilingual, bicolonial split between French and English carries into business too: Douala and Yaoundé both function as genuine commercial hubs with their own rhythm, unlike many regional peers where a single capital absorbs nearly everything, and which language actually dominates a given office depends heavily on which city, and sometimes which building, you're standing in. Hofstede's data scores Cameroon at 64 on masculinity, notably higher than the broad 46 recorded for the West African cluster it is sometimes grouped with, a gap consistent with the thesis's own finding that pay and working conditions carry more weight there than praise or recognition do.

The Reckoning

Strip away the language difference and the two hierarchies look like siblings: age and seniority outrank credentials, real decision-making stays concentrated at the top regardless of what the org chart claims, and getting anything done quickly depends more on who likes you than on what's written in your job description. Neither country's management style rewards a newcomer who tries to shortcut the hierarchy by appealing directly to merit or logic.

Where they diverge is volume and visibility. Nigerian office hierarchy performs itself loudly and constantly — the morning greeting rounds, the seniority-based party etiquette, the mandatory contributions everyone tracks — so an outsider can learn the rules reasonably fast simply by watching for a few weeks. Cameroonian hierarchy is quieter and more relational, enforced through who introduces you to whom rather than through visible ritual, which makes it genuinely harder to read from the outside even though the underlying power structure is, if anything, more sensitive to being discussed openly.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Zikoko.com — A telecommunications employee named Oma described her boss skipping two months of her salary entirely; when she confronted him and recorded the conversation, he insulted her and said he would pay no one, so she sent him the recording and received her full pay shortly after, then quit.

Zikoko.com — A 26-year-old advertising employee named Kafaya described two years of a boss who criticized her work daily, including asking "What school did you even go to?" — treatment he later claimed, after she left, was meant to make her a better person.

BellaNaija.com — A 2017 opinion piece on Nigerian office norms noted that a junior staffer who challenges a senior colleague's weak idea in a brainstorm should expect a hostile reaction regardless of how sound the counterpoint is.

Pendati (2016) thesis on Cameroonian management practices — The researcher found that approaching a manager cold rarely worked, while going through a staff member the manager already trusted reliably opened the door, and that some respondents grew visibly cautious discussing leadership, reportedly wary that questions might be relayed to anti-corruption authorities.

Conclusion

The practical takeaway for a Lagos-to-Douala move isn't to abandon what you already know about respecting a Nigerian hierarchy; it's to translate the volume down without losing the substance. Skipping the morning greeting round in Lagos gets you a query. Skipping the warm introduction in Douala gets you nothing at all — no query, no feedback, just a manager's door that quietly never opens. Both systems are asking for the same deference. One just makes you perform it out loud, and the other makes you earn it through a friend of a friend.

The other shared lesson is more sobering than either country's Do's and Don'ts list lets on: in both places, a boss who withholds pay, berates staff daily, or demands loyalty tests that have nothing to do with the job is a recognised type, not a freak exception, and the paths available to an employee who gets a bad one — recording a conversation, finding a trusted intermediary, simply leaving — are informal precisely because the formal channels so rarely move.

Either way, the org chart on the wall was always more decorative than descriptive. Find out who the real decision-maker is early, in both cities, and be nice to the person who answers their phone.