Nigerian Developers Accuse WeJapa CEO, Favour Ori of Extortion and Underpayment for Jobs
The founder and CEO of Wejapa, Favour Ori has come under fire on Twitter after several Nigerian Developers accused him of extortion and underpayment for jobs and services they offered.
WeJapa is a tech job outsourcing startup that helps developers gain access to tech jobs across Africa, Europe and North America.
According to Silas Adedoyin, a Nigerian software engineer who won WeJapa web app hackathon, the tech CEO never fulfilled his promise to get him an international Job placement as the winner of the competition.
Missing International Job
Although, Favour inferred in a tweet that he has provided Silas with an international job, recent evidence by the developer shows that he hasn’t gotten any yet.
Narrating his experience while working with Favour, Silas revealed that even after announcing him as the winner of the Hackathon, the tech boss kept asking him to make adjustments to his submission without any pay or remuneration.
He further highlighted several instances where Favour leveraged on his position to underpay him on services he rendered. He pointed out the tech boss was always reluctant to pay and left little or no room for negotiations.
“He wanted me to build some other CSS components for Wejapa, because I don’t really use frameworks for my frontend designs. When I asked about how much his budget was, he said there was no budget and he was only going to pay me a $150 stipend. I tried negotiating with him to at least increase it to $200. But he blatantly refused and told me to take it or leave it,” Silas said
He added that “I delivered on Sunday morning, even doing more than we agreed, now its time to review and pay, he was giving stories. After all the drama he paid later in the week. When it was time to pay, I expected he’ll use the current market rate or something close, but he decided that he was going to pay me the naira value with CBN’s exchange rate, like who does that? “
Silas particularly highlighted a situation where he requested for a Job and Favour told him the prize is not negotiable if he wanted it. Silas bitterly narrated that the job which Favour claimed was an e-commerce store ended up being a job with payment gateways for Stripe, PayPal, Bitcoin, Etherium, Tatcoin, and a whole bunch of other requirements.
Silas expressed that he had to turn down the Job after Favour offered him a ridiculous amount.
“When it was time to talk about payments, he told me the project was budgeted at $650 and that Wejapa was going to take 18% off that, meaning I’ll be left with just about #207k. I was like what?? But then I felt, okay, I’ll just slap a few templates together and I’ll be good.”
Silas explained that he refused to negotiate after he found out the requirement was more that he initially said “I went back to him to tell him, I couldn’t do all those for just 200k. He told me to take it or leave it. haha. So, I turned that project down.”
Silas is not alone. Oladiran Segun after hearing Silas story revealed that he built about 4 different products for Favour and all he paid was just 130,000. Narrating his own experience, Segun accused Favour of being a cheat. He explained that he had to take down all his servers before he got paid.
“That guy knows next to nothing about coding and he’s a cheat. I wrote and handled the DevOps of all the initial versions of his products I still have his SSH access how dumb can that be this dude refused to pay me till I took down all his servers and if you’re reading this, he threatened me.”
Another developer, Nwanze Franklin claimed he wasn’t even paid at all after writing about 70% of a project Favour sold for about 23 Million.
“Lmao, you even got paid. Took that guy like a brother and he stabbed me deeply. The college situation he sold for 23m as he said, I wrote 70% of the backend. Got paid nothing, I decided to let it slide but I knew this day would come. Even had the audacity to ask me for DevOps help.”
Similarly, a twitter user, Leksyib accused Favour of not paying for 32 mobile screens a friend built for him. He added that the tech boss threatened to file a lawsuit after his friend made the repo public.
Wejapa CEO to be investigated
Following the backlash from the revelations of the alleged extortion by WeJapa CEO, the co-founder of the company, Hauwa Aguillard has announced that the company has began investigations on the matters.
The company said it will reach out to all concerned persons adding that their records show what has been paid to all contractors who have done work for Wejapa.
Favour Oni has not responded to the accusations himself but if the revelations are anything to go by, his extortions went far back, even before he founded WeJapa.
Extortion and abuse of power in Nigerian tech space
The accusations against WeJapa CEO has ignited feedback of similar trends of extortion and abuse of power in the Nigerian tech space.
Ikechukwu, a software engineer shared messages of how Shakim Harris, founder of Amen tech whimsically fired an employee for a simple comment regarding him.
He also shared information about how the Amen Tech boss used his position to deprive the sacked personnel of his compensations.
The cases of the WeJapa CEO and Amen Founder sheds light on the silent mistreatment that has perhaps gone unnoticed for too long in the tech space.
While all the accusations are unconfirmed the evidence in messages and tweets shared look quite strong.
