FEBRUARY 6, 2018 – No fewer than 32,359 staff in the banking sector are currently employed on contract basis, accounting for 35.8 per cent of total bank staff, which stood at 90,453 at as December 31, 2017, latest data from the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed on Monday.
Banks are increasingly employing contract staff and cutting back on expenses by reducing the number of their executive and senior staff in the last quarter of 2017.
This is despite warnings by regulators who have attributed the rising rate of fraud and forgery cases in the banking sector to the increasing number of contract staff employed by banks.
According to the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) 64 per cent of fraud and forgery cases were traced to contract staff of banks
NBS in its Selected Banking Sector Data for the fourth quarter of 2017 revealed that the number of contract staff in banks had consistently grown to 32,359 in the last quarter of the year. Banks had gradually increased the number of contract staff from 20,237 in the first quarter to 21,837 in the second quarter and 27,032 before increasing it by 19.71 per cent in the fourth quarter.
Also, the number of executive staff of banks dropped from 197 in the third quarter to 188 by the end of last year, while the number of senior executives had dropped by 3,852 from 20,420 to 16,568 as at December 2017.
In the last three months of 2017, the number of executive and senior staff of banks declined by 4.57 per cent and 18.86 per cent respectively.
The number of junior staff which had dropped from 36,202 in the first quarter of 2017 to 33,783 in the second had grown to 35,191 by the third quarter before rising by 17.47 to 41,338 in the fourth quarter. Total bank staff had grown to 90,453 from 77,096 which it was in the first quarter.
Junior staff constituted the largest percentage of bank workers in the country accounting for 45.7 per cent while contract staff accounted for 35.8 per cent. Senior staff accounted for 18.3 per cent while executive staff were 0.2 per cent of bankers in the country. As at the end of the fourth quarter, 2017, the total number of banks staffs increased by 9.19 per cent from 82,840 in Q3 2017 to 90,453.
Meanwhile, the NBS said a total volume of 461.980 million transactions valued at N29.44 trillion were recorded in the fourth quarter of 2017. Its data on the Electronic Payment Channels in the Nigeria Banking Sector revealed that Automated Teller Machine (ATM) transactions dominated the volume of transactions recorded.
The NBS said 239.692 volume of ATM transactions valued at N1.833 trillion were recorded in fourth quarter of 2017. In terms of credit to private sector, it said a total of N15.74 trillion worth of credit was allocated by the banks in Q4 2017. Oil & Gas and Manufacturing sectors got credit allocation of N3.58 trillion and N2.17 trillion to record the highest credit allocation in the period under review.
