Picking up from where we stopped last week. Today, we will examine the consequences of migration of Bankers, IT Professionals and Big 4 employees on the economy.
Bankers and IT Professionals
The student visa entry route opportunity created by the UK government appears to be a clarion call, most especially for people who work in Nigerian Banks. To buttress this, it is alleged that a particular university in UK have over ninety percent of her student being former employees of Nigerian Banks. The impact of this on service delivery in some of these banks cannot be over emphasized considering the fact that customers’ complaint has gone up significantly coupled with delayed resolution time.
Imagine you go to an ATM to withdraw N40,000 out of the N50,000 in your account, to solve an urgent need but the transaction was unsuccessful, however, your account was debited. It is unlikely that the failed transaction will be resolved within a reasonable time as it stands now and the need for the fund may be greatly affected.
The service failures being experienced in banks have been attributed to the loss of staff due to migration, especially the IT staff. Unfortunately, the economic situation in the Nigeria have accelerated the migration for greener pastures. If this trend (migration of bank employees) continues at this rate, we may face serious banking crisis, as increased poor services will be experienced and a time may come that some branches might be closed due to shortage or absence of staff to attend to customers.
Big 4 and other Audit/Consulting Firm
It is no longer news that many of the employees of Big 4 are being recruited from Nigeria to fill vacant roles in other countries, especially UK, resulting from Brexit. While some others took advantage of the student visa route to relocate to UK. These two issues, in turn, created vacant roles that needs to be filled in Big 4 and other mid-sized Audit/Consulting Firms in Nigeria. It is said in some quarters that some of these Firms are short of mid-level staff, who are critical to audit assignments but their exit will have serious implication for year-end audit for many of their clients.
It is already envisage that delays will be experienced in completing audit assignments for financial year end December 31, 2022, due to the fact that many companies (using same Audit Firm), most especially Financial Institutions have their year-end to be December 31, 2022. Audit Firms will be extremely under pressure at that time to meet set timelines but it is unlikely that this will be so, due to limited availability of human resources to carry out the job.
Conversation with an Audit Manager
Recently, I spoke with an Audit Manager of a mid-sized Firm to know if their Firm was in anyway affected by the effect of migration. However, in his response to me, he lamented how frustrated their Firm is and also narrated a situation in which they concluded trainings for their newly recruited employees in preparation for upcoming audit, but 95% of them were taken by the Big 4, two months after the training.
So the question is, what can be done to stem the impact of migration on the economy? Food for thought.
Lagos and Traffic Congestion