Let me paint you a picture that occurs everyday in every Nigerian Bank.
Imagine you are a female marketer in anyone of the three new AMCON-nized banks, let’s say Mainstream bank. You wake up on a Monday morning remembering you have a budget of N1 billion to deliver in a space of 12 months. Where in Lamido Sanusi’s magical financial textbooks do you get that kind of money from? Today is the 9th of November 2012, and you have been only able to retain NGN250million on your balance sheet. (It is important to note that a banker’s balance sheet is never stable, it is always going up and down, one very rich person brought N50 million on Monday into his account, you the banker, celebrates. 20 people withdraw N130 million between Tuesday and Friday and you the banker, wails. Your balance sheet position is now a negative – N80million from the previous week)
In actual fact you are a magician to have met a quarter of your budget especially as your bank has no track record of financial performance or financial integrity, your bank just inherited the ignominy of the name of a failed bank and everyone you sell your bank’s products to thinks you are trying to steal their money. If and when you get someone to actually put money in his/her account with your bank, you have performed the 13th wonder of the world on an extraordinary day, but on the very many average days, you are an incompetent banker in the eyes of your bosses and the job-loss axe is hanging over your head, that your fancy bank job is always on the line.
By 5 am on Friday morning, you awake from horrid dreams, where you have lost your job and the creditors you bought the fancy suits you are wearing are chasing you for their money. You have a banging headache trying to figure out what to say to your manager at your deposit drive meeting at 7am. What lie will I lie? (Haaa! Did I tell you that lawyers are no longer the best liars now, bankers are?) You drive to work with your hands sweaty, your butt squeaky, you are blinking rapidly like an owl, your throat is as patched as the back of a tortoise and your knees feel like spaghetti. The Regional Branch Manager will be around for this morning’s meeting. You would have cried a river if the river will be deep enough to hide you from your RBM’s wrath…One hour from now, you are in the toilet in the office crying like it’s going out of fashion. He just finished tongue lashing you in spectacular invectives … idiot, slow mule, you are just fine for nothing. I don’t know why you’re just useless like this. where is the money, You will never get any bonus at the end of the year, talk less of promotion…I give you 3 weeks, if your figures don’t bring in 500million, I’m putting you on probation, by December kuku just go and look for another job. This is just another beautiful day in the life of an average bloody Nigerian banker. GT bank, First bank, Enterprise bank or any other bank in Nigeria.
The Nigerian Banker is a modern day highway robber…We attack you on your way to the office. We embrace you over-enthusiastically at social events. We blind your eyes with our fictitious smiles and call you all sorts of wondrous endearments. Oh! my dear uncle, my
sweet aunty! We invade your homes for your children’s birthday parties, we can send you 90 greeting text messages in one month, call to greet you in the morning as you awake, updating you on our brand new products you can invest in and call to advise you of your account balance before you sleep. We will grab your briefcase as you alight from your car, prostrating for you in well ironed suits. We will embarrass you with adulations of love on your birthday, delivering gifts to your doorstep before your spouse ever could. If you’re a man with a wandering eye, we can provide customer servicing staff comforts and private ecstasies that meet the lust in any eye. If you are really pressed for time, we can deliver you your cheque book in traffic faster than a hawker selling gala, chasing after you at supersonic speed. (Do you remember that advert some years back that had relationship managers sitting on the back of customers’ moving cars smiling sheepishly…) “Walahi just gimme me your money and I will sing ” I feel like I’m flying over the moon and I can dance all over you…and I can dance all over you and make you kolo eee…” But you already know what I want now, it is the money in your pocket …and the more you give me the more I will dance azonto for you. Meanwhile, the day your money disappears, you know I will disappear in a puff of genie smoke.
Please don’t get me wrong, I make no mockery of my brotherhood. I was once a banker and will always remain one at heart. I can speak freely today as an entrepreneur, but I must cast a moment’s glance back in remembrance of the futility of that servile state in which I once found myself, knowing that even though I have had the fortunate opportunity to have – without losing my job – fled that industry of deceit, lies and organized oppression, I left many brothers and sisters behind languishing. I speak with bitterness in my heart at the wickedness and lawlessness and remember with pain the suffering of many who continue to work for a living in an industry that once used to be known for its civility and honour. An industry where our parents used to pray their children would grow up and hold careers. A place that should be the fortress for Truth and Trust, is now a den of greedy masters in a slavery ring. The Nigerian banker is no longer a respected professional and the treatment that we endure in the hands of customers, who we must go cap in hand begging everyday, is simply embarrassing. CIBN take note, stop wasting saliva teaching what cannot be practiced.
The Nigerian banker in most cases is your first, real and only true contact with the prestigious bank you are dealing with. So as is appropriate, you should and most times measure your bank by the appearance, behavior and service provided by your relationship
officer. The correct image of a good banker is one who maintains his professional conduct, provides timely and accurate financial advice and gives you appropriate customer service every time. So know that if you have ever received a hug from your banker, your relationship which should never go beyond a handshake is fast becoming an inappropriate relationship. It sounds extreme to say this in our environment that a hug is inappropriate for a banker – common, that is correct Nigerian customer relationship management now, but I am sorry that is the truth, because that is the beginning of the elbow handshake that went too far. It will shock you what Nigerian banks do to get bank deposits.Or can you actually imagine a banker in London helping his customer go shopping? It will never happen. Yet it happens in Nigeria, all in the name of marketing!!! Doubters will ask, what does shopping have to do with bank deposit drive. My Answer is: Everything.
A Nigerian banker is told to deliver an insane amount of deposit to the bank, (mine, back in the day was 900million in 8months and if I had 10million I would have resigned earlier), the same banker who just collected your hefty deposit must ensure that the deposit he takes from you must be issued out as loans to business men who know next to nothing about what they want to use your money for, as long as they can provide collateral. It is the difference in the rate of taking your money and the interest charged on the money we gave to the false big man who borrows the money that is our profit and in Nigeria the margins are insanely wide. We collect your deposit at 11%- 14% and give out at 25% -30%. All efforts to reduce this rate have failed woefully. I wonder what Sanusi’s textbooks say about this.
A banker is a parasite and at the same time a slave to his customer, once he identifies you as having any significant amount of money in your pocket, he will quickly become your best friend and your closest financial adviser, if perchance you already have a closer relationship officer in another bank, he starts to look for vulnerabilities in the structure of the relationship the old officer has with you in order to take advantage and take over. So he/she is ready to do anything to get into the position of best relationship officer, so even if you ask us to go to the market for you before you give them that cheque, at least many of us will consider it. It gets worse when relationship officers in the SAME BANK start competing against themselves to win your account!!! Guys let’s not lie about this predicament. It is time to come out of the closet and speak up. I do not mock the situation. I’m just speaking up. Maybe someone will hear.
I daresay it is a shame on our bow-tie wearing CBN Governor, and every other CBN Governor in the last 15 years – since the advent of the New Generation Banks, who have turned their supervisory eye away from the human slavery going on in this industry, an industry where junior bankers are subjected to such abject ridicule in the name of deposit drive. Even though the current CBN Governor is considered in every regard, a patriot in his juggernaut-style fight against corruption in the banking sector, but on the issue of banking prostitution, I consider him a traitor. Until very recently, he was a senior First Bank banker and he is fully aware of what is going on (anyway he was part of the select 20% who you can safely refer to as big boy banker) as he has failed to work on building any personal honour and integrity in the bankers who represent the industry. Those of us who work/worked in the industry know that his fight against corruption is akin to a baboon shaking a tree violently by bouncing around on its branches and when asked what he is trying to do, says; ‘I am trying to uproot the tree’. All you will ever get rid of is a couple of leaves, but as soon as they can, new ones will grow back to replace them. As long as he sits back and never addresses the issue of insane deposit targets and the Al Capone-style approach to which it is desperately raised, in a few years we will still have to mop up a few banks and replace them with another set of clone banks. So all this talk of fighting corruption in banking by liquidating some banks to have them renamed and its leadership replaced, is simply like pasting wallpaper over cracking walls. The cookies will eventually crumble.
What makes it worse is the psychological harassment bankers go through from senior officers of the bank who pass down target aggression cascaded down from management. All you ever hear is budget, target, balance sheet and more budget, target, balance sheet forever and ever. I once heard that an AGM at a bank was making a presentation to senior management and the MD of the bank (he is still a current serving MD of the bank) removed his shoe and threw it at the senior banker raining abuses at him. What ignominy? A married man with children! The idiot who considers himself worthy to be called a Managing Director of a modern Nigerian bank removes his shoe and throws it at another man like a village tyrant king (not the man in the picture). The absolute lack of dignity in the industry is appalling. If a banker will treat his own colleague in that manner what should the customer who is supposedly king, do. In Sierra Leone recently a Nigerian Banker got detained by the police for using abusive language on a subordinate staff who could not understand why such derogatory language would be used on his person because of work targets. Outside Nigeria especially in developed countries, you don’t speak in derogatory language to your workers, you can go to jail.
You should see Managers freely manipulating their subordinate female colleagues into demeaning sexual romps to keep their jobs. During official bank meetings, bosses insinuate that the ladies should go and use their bodies to bring in money for the bank and some ladies are willing to give more than their bodies for money, even married women are not left out. Yes, there are a few good women in the banking sector today that will not use their bodies for sex but I must honestly say that if banking was the last job on the earth my wife will NEVER work in a bank. You should see the level of insults, women suffer from lurid passes and comments made by colleagues and customers in the bank today, it is absolutely ridiculous. I am sorry for husbands whose wives work in a bank. As far as I am concerned, apart from the fact that she does not have a life and she is constantly being harassed, especially as a junior staff, if you are a man you should do your absolute best to get her out of there, because I honestly do not see how she is to maintain her dignity or sanity in that environment. As if this is not bad enough, bankers work long hours, hold worthless and endless meetings. I have heard of staff being held up in meetings at, for example Access bank, till 2 am in the morning. Imagine your wife being held up at work till 2am in the morning because her Oga thinks his target is more important than her life. What happens to your children? Female bankers are seen running around as fast as their male counterparts from pillar to post like headless chickens trying to meet targets that make no sense. Recently, I heard that two Access bank workers died in the office. Sorry? How do you die from too much work? I thought the adage says that work does not kill…
Sadly bankers have no Labour unions. They cannot speak up for themselves. Unfortunately the goons that constitute themselves as Labour leaders in Nigeria would rather fight the government who they know will quickly hand them bags of money after every successful riot, but will never ask us to strike in the face of intolerable working conditions. I hear some banks are scrapping staff buses due to high cost of maintenance meanwhile all the money banks declare as yearly profit is not enough to maintain buses for the bank slaves that produce the money. One of the most respected banks in Nigeria and my personal favourite, GT bank, today is a shadow of itself. This is the same Guarantee Trust bank that had in its first branch a piano being played in its banking hall and a fountain at its door step. Their motto was exceptional customer service. Today, I am not sure which queue is worse, BRT bus queue or GT bank queue. SMH! Thank God for ATM or else people would just have to return to carrying mats to the banking halls. GT has so many more customers today, it is a shame that rather than employ more staff they will work-flog their bank staff to death. A bank where staff used to smile at you when you walked in, is now so short staffed, they permanently look, exceptionally depressed. Uncle Segun you are doing a wonderful job of making GT bank staffers lives a living hell. Let’s not mention the horrors going on in other banks. Eg: UBA, Zenith Bank, Stanbic. May be this article needs a part 2.
What I also find simply sickening, is the response you get from non-bankers when they say “shebi dat is why they are collecting all that big big salary!” Which ‘dirty’ big big salary are you referring to? It is absolute balderdash!! I recently read authoritatively that the banking sector employs only a paltry 60,000 permanent staff. As such you can safely assume that the rest, may be another 100,000, are temporary or contract staff. The average temporary staff in a bank earns between N50,000 -N80,000. Their working conditions are exceptionally poor; they never get worthwhile raises, never get promotions, never get the hefty allowances, or sizable bonuses. Workers in other industries currently earn better than most bankers. So please lets remove that scam view abeg! They only endure your calling them ‘big boys’ without correcting the false impression to console themselves. Most of them have no savings, no future plans, no retirement benefits and they are not better than where they were when they got employed. In Standard Chartered bank, where you would believe they are paid in dollars, I know several contract staff who have been earning approximately N50,000 in over 6 years. That is the average rich banker you think you see on the street. Meanwhile of the 60,000 bankers who are permanent staff, we can safely and correctly so, assume that only 20% are senior staff earning fat salaries. The remain 80% are the middle level managers and officers that susceptible to sudden sack as soon as any financial malfeasance perpetuated by the upper 20% is discovered. Meanwhile most of the same 20% who committed the fraud, soon after the false wind of bank changes occur, get recycled back into the banking system as bank directors and senior executives of the newly recapitalized banks. It is all a huge scam.
The banking sector – through this system of vicious and almost criminal hustle among competing banks for more deposits – help to ensure that the economy cannot raise long-term funding to finance capital projects. Most bank investments are kept in highly liquid or near-cash positions, as high liquidity is supposed to be a sign of a healthy bank in Nigeria, where in actual fact, returns from good long term investments are the true indices for a bank’s longevity. In my opinion, the banking sector is presently a leech on the Nigerian economy rather than a progressive vehicle for national growth. That is exactly why, when you go to a bank to borrow money, and although you know they are awash with cash, they are never willing to invest in your business or dreams, even when their adverts promise heavenly product benefits. We are still waiting for Bank PHB’s cars that will run on water o!
So please can someone kindly inform the robe-totting Emir of CBN, his royal highness Sanusi Lamido Sanusi that his official emirate is severely gangrene and needs internal surgical repair. Please do add that we are tired of all the window dressing in the media and tell him that if he is really intent on solving the issue of corrupt practices in the banking sector, he needs to know what is really the root cause of the rot – It is the psychologically frustrated, broke, busted, overworked,verbally and sexually abused, green-eyed, deposit hunting pirate trying to save a job that he/she is always losing everyday.
We are referred to as - The Nigerian Banker.
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