The Day I Learned Why Some People Never Teach You Anything (knowledge hoarding at work)
It was cold in that room. Always cold. The IBM mainframe computers at United Bank for Africa required a carefully controlled environment. It was an atmosphere of chilled air, humidity management, fire suppression systems. As the operators who worked inside it wore the their white lab coats in the cold. I was a young systems software engineer, newly arrived, eager, and full of questions.
But, and this is a big but, I had noticed something that confused me. One of the senior systems programmers was technically gifted, experienced and respected. However, he consistently avoided sharing knowledge with me and some of the other junior staff. Not rudely. Not dramatically. Just quietly, carefully, as though information were a limited resource and giving any of it away would leave him with less.
I asked one of the operations staff about it one day. He looked at me for a moment, then said it simply, “that is his ohun ije.”
That is Yoruba for saying: What he eats. What sustains him. What keeps him alive.
I have never forgotten that phrase. It explained something I would keep encountering across decades of working in technology, institutions, and policy. Knowledge hoarding at work stems from a scarcity mentality. It is driven by a deep-seated instinct to to protect information as if sharing it meant losing it.
I understood the logic, even then. In large hierarchical institutions — and UBA in those days was one of Nigeria’s biggest, most layered, most rigidly structured organizations. Your expertise was often the only leverage you had. Promotions moved slowly. Hierarchy mattered more than ideas. If you were the person who knew how the mainframe behaved when the batch jobs failed at a critical period, that knowledge was genuinely valuable. It gave you a position. It gave you power. It made you necessary. Teaching it to someone younger, someone cheaper, someone more energetic might feel dangerous.
So without a spirit of abundance, people hoarded. Quietly, without announcing it, they kept what they knew to themselves and let junior colleagues figure things out through the long, slow, expensive process of trial and error. It was rational, in their narrow sense. It was also quietly devastating to the institution, to the people around them, and eventually to themselves.
I decided early that I did not want to live that way. I rejected that mentality. Not because I was especially noble, but because I had seen the alternative. I had also watched the colleagues who did share freely, the ones who explained things without being asked, who passed on what they knew, who seemed to understand that knowledge given away somehow multiplied rather than diminished. Those colleagues became the ones people trusted. They became the ones people turned to with real problems. Their value grew: when you’re generous with value, your value grows.
It shaped something in me that I have carried ever since.
Years later, as I engaged in mentoring, I noticed that the memory of that cold room was still active. I even saw the humour in it. Most importantly, it reminded me why I believe we should teach openly, documented carefully, and try to help younger colleagues move faster than I had been allowed to. It was not charity. It was philosophy. I had seen the cost of ohun ije cost. How it stunted institutional growth, in talent that was forced to reinvent wheels that already existed, in the quiet resentment of capable people who were never helped or ignored.
And I had also seen what the abundance mentality produced. At UBA, despite the institutional rigidity, there were systems programmers and application developers who were world-class. They were people who could have worked anywhere on earth, who shared what they knew freely and drove each other to higher levels. The division had genuine human capital. The tragedy was not the people. This “knowledge hoarding at work” mentality was part of the culture around them that constrained what they could become together.
I later learned that the senior colleague who had withheld knowledge eventually gave me a positive reference when I left the bank. That taught me one more thing: early friction does not define the final relationship. Sometimes trust comes with time, after persistence. The person who saw your knowledge as ohun ije may later, when they have watched you long enough, decide you are worth trusting.
But I never wanted to be the person making someone else go through that sort of experience.
Here is what I believe now, after decades of working in technology, building systems, advising institutions, and watching organizations succeed and fail: the people who guard their knowledge most carefully are usually the ones whose knowledge matters least in the long run. The world moves too fast. What you know today will be replaced somewhere tomorrow. The only sustainable advantage is the ability to keep learning, keep connecting, keep adapting and keep helping others do the same.
Ohun ije made sense in a rigid hierarchical bank in an era of scarce information. It makes no sense.
Teach what you know. Knowledge never runs out. It multiplies when shared.
Author: Jide Awe
Science, Technology and Innovation policy advisor.
Nigeria’s Inaugural Tech Mentor of the Year
Find him on LinkedIn:
Jide Awe on LinkedIn
Find him on Threads:
@iamjidaw
Find him on Twitter:
@jidaw