By isqil Najim
There is a story online originally written by Bar Mor Hazut, and titled “I lost a lot of sleep: Fired employee finds out company lied on termination report to keep them from getting unemployment, spends months trying to win the appeal.”
The story is based on an anonymous account by an employee. According to the employee, who opened the piece with a question “If the little guy doesn’t fight the big guy, who will?”
He goes on to say that we have all lived long enough to know that we must choose our battles carefully. In his words, “some struggles are monumental to our development and human learning, while others teach us that it is okay to let things go. At some point, you’re expected to recognise which is which and what battle you should focus on.”
The Story
The man at the centre of this story worked for a large restaurant company for three years. He was not a manager. He was a regular staff member with a background in restaurant operations, the kind of worker who does whatever needs doing, from kitchen work to hood and fryer maintenance to clearing snow off the parking lot.
Early this year, after a busy lunch rush, his kitchen manager approached him and told him she was supposed to give him a performance review, but instead of doing it properly, she simply photocopied someone else’s review and put his name on it.
In that moment, something in him gave way. He had already been feeling unappreciated and overworked. He told her plainly that these reviews did not matter to him anyway, and he walked off. Twenty minutes later, he was called to the dining room.
The General Manager and the kitchen manager were both waiting for him. He was terminated on the spot, over a statement he could not even fully recall making, one that was later twisted into what the company called a “sideways threat.”
When he applied for unemployment benefits, his former employer submitted a termination report full of lies and misinformation designed to block his claim. Rather than accept this quietly, he decided to fight.
He spent the following weeks researching labour law on his own time. When the unemployment appeal hearing finally came, he got the company to admit, on record, to forging documents, applying policy unevenly, and destroying employee records that should have been preserved as evidence. The hearing officer even wrote the manager’s confession directly into the official fact finding decision.
He did not stop there. He wrote to the wage division about unpaid break time and unsigned waivers. He noticed he was suspiciously logged out of the payroll portal right after demanding payment for those violations. He escalated his findings until the labour investigator asked him to stop sending more material, because he had already sent so much.
Eventually he contacted corporate head office directly. He put together a fully formed settlement proposal built entirely on facts the company itself had already admitted to under oath, and gave them a choice. Settle, or he would take everything to the National Labour Relations Board.
As the writer of the piece puts it, “while it would have been easier to give up and let the company get away with it, the fired employee refused to back down. They knew they could prove the company was lying, and they believed they could win. This was one battle they were more than willing to fight.”
Five months later, as at the time this story was published, the fight is still ongoing.
The Lesson For Employees
The first thing this story teaches is that documentation is power. Every date, every conversation, every photograph this man kept became the foundation of his case. Nigerian workers, especially those in informal sectors must cultivate the habit of keeping records.
The second lesson is that silence under pressure can protect you. When asked to write a statement on the day of his termination, he simply wrote, “I have nothing to say.” That single sentence denied his employer the ammunition they were hoping to extract from him in a moment of confusion and distress.
The third lesson is that appeals exist for a reason. Many Nigerian workers accept unfair dismissal decisions or denied entitlements because they assume the system is rigged against them from the start.
The fourth lesson is patience and sequencing. He did not throw every complaint at the company in one angry outburst. He built his case step by step. Unemployment appeal first. Then the wage complaint. Then corporate escalation. Then the threat of federal intervention. Each step built pressure on the one before it.
The Lesson For Employers
For employers, Small dishonesty compounds. A single act of dishonesty became the loose thread that unravelled a much larger pattern once someone pulled on it.
Uneven enforcement of policy is often what truly loses these cases, not the underlying incident itself. If a company cannot show that a rule was applied consistently to everyone, that inconsistency becomes the legal and moral weakness that a determined worker will find.
Why Nigeria Needs Stronger Labour Protection
This story took place outside Nigeria, but the pattern it describes is one Nigerian workers know intimately. Wrongful terminations. Wage entitlements withheld through administrative delay. Retaliation against workers who dare to ask questions. The difference is that in many advanced labour systems, there exists an appeal process, a labour investigator who can be petitioned directly, and a federal labour board that can be escalated to when internal remedies fail.
In Nigeria, too many workers do not have access to this kind of legal recourse. The National Industrial Court exists, but for the average restaurant worker, retail assistant, or factory hand, the distance between filing a complaint and actually seeing justice can feel impossibly far. Legal representation is expensive. Awareness of labour rights is low. And many workers fear that speaking up will simply cost them their livelihood with no real protection in return.
This is exactly why Nigeria needs a stronger, more accessible labour enforcement structure. We need state level labour offices that are genuinely responsive to individual worker complaints, not just structured around large scale industrial disputes between unions and employers. We need clear, publicised channels where a single employee who has been wronged can report wage theft, forged documentation, or retaliatory dismissal, and expect a timely, fair investigation.
We also need stronger whistleblower protection laws that shield workers from retaliation the moment they raise a formal complaint, whether that complaint is about unpaid wages, unsafe conditions, or falsified records. A worker should never have to choose between silence and unemployment.