Some Nigerian banks have finalized arrangements to sack their workers in what an insider described as a wave of sack beginning from this month when workers are expected to resume across the nation.
Banks and other employers of labour have been hard hit by the Covid-19 phenomenon having to shut down offices for about two months.
However, there are strong indications that most banking staff will resume next week to meet their dismissal letters despite some of the banks declaring huge profits in the last financial year. Q2 results for almost all offices are projected to be very poor as the whole of the month of April has gone without productivity.
Access Bank, UBA and Zenith Bank are among the banks linked with the wave of mass lay-offs.
Already, Mr. Herbert Wigwe, the group managing director of Access Bank, had voiced the bank’s planned mass retrenchment of its workforce. He spoke via video conferencing in a town hall meeting with the bank’s staff, stressing that those to be affected by the mass retrenchment are 75% of the bank’s staff, most of whom are outsourced and are offering “non-essential services.”
“We probably don’t need as many security men as required, even to the fact that we are not gonna have all our branches open between now and December. We don’t need all the tea girls. We don’t need all the cleaners. We don’t need all the tellers etcetera, etcetera,” Mr. Wigwe said in a video obtained by The Trent on Thursday, April 30, 2020.
“The second has to do with our professional cost. Now that is one that is very tricky and it is tricky because I do understand and appreciate that it’s gonna, you know, bring its own pain to staff. We basically have to make the adjustments the same way you sounded when we spoke 10 days ago with respect to basically cutting down cost.
“I will be the first to take the hit and I’m gonna take the largest pay cut, which would be as much as 40 percent. The rest we would have to cascade right through the institution. Everybody may have to make some adjustments of some sort.”
Zenith Bank is also strongly hinted to have penned down names of certain categories of staff to be laid off. The bank is said to have also considered a cut in wages across board but some members of the bank’s management were said to favour outright sack of some staff nationwide.
A top staff of United Bank for Africa, UBA, said dismissal of staff was a foregone decision and “it will happen this May.”
According to the staff, the sack is as a consequence of low returns induced by the Covid-19 forced holiday.
