NIGERIA’S BANKS AND THE CASUALISATION THEY REFUSE TO END

_By Sam Agogo_

At a quarter past six, long after the last customer has drifted out into the evening traffic, a young woman in a bank-branded blazer remains at her desk, the fluorescent light overhead humming against the silence of an emptied banking hall.

Her phone, warm from hours of use, is pressed to her ear as she works through a dwindling list of names, her voice carrying the practised warmth of someone who has learned to sound hopeful even when hope is running thin. On the desk before her lies a printed target sheet, one figure circled in red ink, a number she has chased for weeks without quite closing the distance. She has worn this uniform for close to four years now, ironed each morning with a discipline that borders on ritual, as though neatness alone might hasten the promotion that never quite arrives. Every year, a supervisor tells her, in tones carefully calibrated between encouragement and warning, that confirmation is within reach, that one more strong quarter will finally settle the matter. Every year, instead, the target creeps higher, and the promise recedes a little further into the distance, like a horizon that shifts each time she draws near it. To every customer who walks through the door, she is a banker in the fullest and most convincing sense of the word. Yet in the eyes of the institution whose crest is stitched above her heart, she is not truly an employee at all, but a placement — supplied, monitored and, when it suits the balance sheet, quietly discarded by an outsourcing agency most of her customers have never heard of and would struggle to name.
She is one face among many thousands, an anonymous multitude scattered across the marbled banking halls of Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt and beyond. Over the years, a parallel workforce has quietly taken shape within Nigeria’s financial institutions, one that looks, speaks and dresses exactly like the permanent staff of an earlier, more generous era, yet carries almost none of the protections that once made a banking career the ambition of every bright graduate. It is a workforce sustained less by loyalty than by anxiety, for the contract staff who fill these roles know that falling short of target is rarely just a disappointing month. It can mean the quiet, almost administrative end of a livelihood — a contract simply not renewed, a name simply not called back, an income no less real for having always been provisional.
This was the unflattering portrait Senator Adams Oshiomhole sketched in October 2025, when he appeared on Arise Television and delivered one of the bluntest public rebukes the banking sector has faced in recent memory. He called the practice “immoral” and described it, without hesitation, as “modern-day exploitation.” He backed the charge with a figure that startled even seasoned industry watchers accustomed to grim statistics: that sixty percent or more of bank employees across Nigeria today are contract workers, dressed like bankers, trained like bankers, expected to perform like bankers, yet stripped of gratuity, pension continuity and job security the instant their usefulness runs its course. He went further still, alleging that certain banks had gone to the trouble of establishing their own recruitment agencies, elaborate corporate scaffolding erected for the sole purpose of supplying themselves with cheap, disposable labour while keeping their direct obligations to an absolute minimum. It was, in his estimation, a practice long overdue for reckoning.
A senior figure within the banking industry, reflecting on Oshiomhole’s remarks in a recent exchange with this writer, observed that this was hardly new territory for the senator. It was, in truth, familiar ground he had walked before, decades earlier, at a very different stage of his public life, armed then not with a Senate seat but with a picket line.
Between 1999 and 2007, Adams Oshiomhole presided over the Nigeria Labour Congress, and it was in the early years of that tenure, between 2002 and 2004, that he forged his reputation as organised labour’s most uncompromising voice against what unionists of that era had come to call casualisation. He led the NLC in picketing banks and other major employers across the country, forcing boardrooms to confront a practice they preferred to keep quietly out of view — the hiring of staff on casual or contract terms purely to sidestep the cost, and the responsibility, of full employment. His campaign in that era did not confine itself to contracts alone; it paid particular and pointed attention to the plight of female bank workers, who were routinely handed unrealistic deposit-mobilisation targets under the unspoken threat of losing their positions altogether. Long before he became governor of Edo State, long before he chaired the All Progressives Congress, Oshiomhole had already staked his name on a simple, unfashionable conviction: that an employer who benefits fully from a worker’s labour owes that worker something more substantial than a renewable contract and a borrowed uniform.
More than two decades on, his return to this subject from the floor of the Senate reads less like a fresh discovery than a grim confirmation. The practice he once fought in the streets has not merely survived the intervening years; it has entrenched itself, growing new structures and new justifications, learning to outlast the very pressure that once threatened to dismantle it.
Behind the statistics lies a set of pressures that never quite make it into shareholder reports or glossy annual accounts. Contract staff, and female staff most acutely, describe monthly targets that climb without regard for prevailing economic realities, quotas that treat customer goodwill as though it were an infinite, endlessly renewable resource rather than the finite thing it actually is. Sources within the industry speak, carefully and often reluctantly, of colleagues who, faced with the stark choice between falling short and losing a contract altogether, have felt compelled to accept the attentions of men positioned to help them close their numbers — a pattern seldom discussed in the open, yet widely acknowledged in the hushed conversations that happen after closing hours. Married women are not spared this particular pressure, and accounts suggest that some among them have taken the same route, at a cost that has, in more than a few cases, quietly unsettled or altogether ended their marriages. It is a bitter irony, almost too neat to be believed, that an industry which markets itself so heavily on the language of trust, growth and prosperity has, for a meaningful share of its own workforce, become instead a wellspring of quiet, corrosive desperation.
Even the regulators appear to have taken notice. The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Olayemi Cardoso, has himself acknowledged publicly that casual and contract staff within the banking sector face poor working conditions, an unusually candid admission from an office not typically inclined to wade into the murky waters of labour disputes.
That acknowledgement, paired with the renewed public pressure generated by Oshiomhole’s remarks, appears to have lent fresh momentum to a legislative response long overdue. In December 2025, the House of Representatives gave second reading to a bill sponsored by Rep. Fuad Kayode Laguda of Surulere, seeking to amend the Banks and Other Financial Institutions Act to explicitly prohibit, criminalise and penalise the use of casual or contract staff by banks. Laguda told his colleagues on the floor that such workers now account for as much as sixty-five percent of the entire banking workforce, and argued that banks lean on the arrangement specifically to avoid paying pensions, minimum wages, health insurance, bonuses and the severance entitlements that permanent staff would ordinarily receive as a matter of course. He noted, with evident frustration, that the practice runs directly contrary to existing labour law, which limits casual employment to a maximum of three months, and he described the workers affected as exposed to systemic inequality, emotional strain and, all too often, a slow erosion of mental health. The bill cleared second reading by voice vote and has since moved to committee stage, where it now awaits the scrutiny that will determine whether it becomes binding law, or simply another well-intentioned proposal that quietly stalls somewhere between conviction and consequence.
None of this alters the plain arithmetic confronting the banking sector. It remains among Nigeria’s most profitable industries, comfortably possessed of more than sufficient resources to end a practice it has, in certain documented cases, gone to considerable and deliberate lengths to preserve. That it has not chosen to do so voluntarily says something quietly damning about how far the profession has drifted from the values it once claimed, with genuine pride, to embody.
The country has spent years arguing, loudly and at length, over minimum wage, over fuel subsidy, over the naira’s uncertain fortunes. It may be time that same energy, that same appetite for public reckoning, was turned toward the quieter emergency unfolding inside the country’s banking halls each evening — where a young woman, still at her desk long after closing time, chasing a target that keeps moving just beyond her reach, continues to hope, against mounting evidence, that this will finally be the quarter that changes everything.
For comments, reflections and further conversation, reach out at samuelagogo4one@yahoo.com or +2348055847364. a picket line.
Between 1999 and 2007, Adams Oshiomhole presided over the Nigeria Labour Congress, and it was in the early years of that tenure, between 2002 and 2004, that he forged his reputation as organised labour’s most uncompromising voice against what unionists of that era had come to call casualisation. He led the NLC in picketing banks and other major employers across the country, forcing boardrooms to confront a practice they preferred to keep quietly out of view — the hiring of staff on casual or contract terms purely to sidestep the cost, and the responsibility, of full employment. His campaign in that era did not confine itself to contracts alone; it paid particular and pointed attention to the plight of female bank workers, who were routinely handed unrealistic deposit-mobilisation targets under the unspoken threat of losing their positions altogether. Long before he became governor of Edo State, long before he chaired the All Progressives Congress, Oshiomhole had already staked his name on a simple, unfashionable conviction: that an employer who benefits fully from a worker’s labour owes that worker something more substantial than a renewable contract and a borrowed uniform.
More than two decades on, his return to this subject from the floor of the Senate reads less like a fresh discovery than a grim confirmation. The practice he once fought in the streets has not merely survived the intervening years; it has entrenched itself, growing new structures and new justifications, learning to outlast the very pressure that once threatened to dismantle it.
Behind the statistics lies a set of pressures that never quite make it into shareholder reports or glossy annual accounts. Contract staff, and female staff most acutely, describe monthly targets that climb without regard for prevailing economic realities, quotas that treat customer goodwill as though it were an infinite, endlessly renewable resource rather than the finite thing it actually is. Sources within the industry speak, carefully and often reluctantly, of colleagues who, faced with the stark choice between falling short and losing a contract altogether, have felt compelled to accept the attentions of men positioned to help them close their numbers — a pattern seldom discussed in the open, yet widely acknowledged in the hushed conversations that happen after closing hours. Married women are not spared this particular pressure, and accounts suggest that some among them have taken the same route, at a cost that has, in more than a few cases, quietly unsettled or altogether ended their marriages. It is a bitter irony, almost too neat to be believed, that an industry which markets itself so heavily on the language of trust, growth and prosperity has, for a meaningful share of its own workforce, become instead a wellspring of quiet, corrosive desperation.
Even the regulators appear to have taken notice. The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Olayemi Cardoso, has himself acknowledged publicly that casual and contract staff within the banking sector face poor working conditions, an unusually candid admission from an office not typically inclined to wade into the murky waters of labour disputes.
That acknowledgement, paired with the renewed public pressure generated by Oshiomhole’s remarks, appears to have lent fresh momentum to a legislative response long overdue. In December 2025, the House of Representatives gave second reading to a bill sponsored by Rep. Fuad Kayode Laguda of Surulere, seeking to amend the Banks and Other Financial Institutions Act to explicitly prohibit, criminalise and penalise the use of casual or contract staff by banks. Laguda told his colleagues on the floor that such workers now account for as much as sixty-five percent of the entire banking workforce, and argued that banks lean on the arrangement specifically to avoid paying pensions, minimum wages, health insurance, bonuses and the severance entitlements that permanent staff would ordinarily receive as a matter of course. He noted, with evident frustration, that the practice runs directly contrary to existing labour law, which limits casual employment to a maximum of three months, and he described the workers affected as exposed to systemic inequality, emotional strain and, all too often, a slow erosion of mental health. The bill cleared second reading by voice vote and has since moved to committee stage, where it now awaits the scrutiny that will determine whether it becomes binding law, or simply another well-intentioned proposal that quietly stalls somewhere between conviction and consequence.
None of this alters the plain arithmetic confronting the banking sector. It remains among Nigeria’s most profitable industries, comfortably possessed of more than sufficient resources to end a practice it has, in certain documented cases, gone to considerable and deliberate lengths to preserve. That it has not chosen to do so voluntarily says something quietly damning about how far the profession has drifted from the values it once claimed, with genuine pride, to embody.
The country has spent years arguing, loudly and at length, over minimum wage, over fuel subsidy, over the naira’s uncertain fortunes. It may be time that same energy, that same appetite for public reckoning, was turned toward the quieter emergency unfolding inside the country’s banking halls each evening — where a young woman, still at her desk long after closing time, chasing a target that keeps moving just beyond her reach, continues to hope, against mounting evidence, that this will finally be the quarter that changes everything.

*For comments, reflections and further conversation, reach out at samuelagogo4one@yahoo.com or +2348055847364* .