There is a saying that ‘health is wealth’ and ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’. It was on this premise that banks and other financial institutions are tailoring their programmes to focus on provision and maintenance of a safe, clean and healthy work environment.
Many of the Nigerian banks have in the past engaged in such activities as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR).
This is also observed in other jurisdiction, specifically, European Central Bank (ECB) ensures good environmental management and minimises the risks to the health and safety of the general public and the workers involved in the production of euro banknotes.
The Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) was not left out in this move as it dedicated last week for community safety and healthy walk as of the activities marking its Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) week.
Staff of NIBSS came out in mass including senior executives to observe this years’ HSE week with the theme “A Clean Environment, A Healthy Workforce At Its Peak”.
Niyi Ajao, NIBSS executive director in charge of business development told BusinessDay that the HSE week was in partnership with Lagos Waste Management Authority (LAWMA) and a deliberate effort to support cleaner Lagos initiative.
“The whole idea is to keep health and safety in the minds of all the staff. “As we go out we want to spread this information to the public that we need to take our health serious and we need to take safety serious and we want to really show support to the cleaner Lagos initiative. Yesterday we had a free medical check-up for all staff so we have many partners that are working with us incidentally. We are not paying them we just called on them and they all willingly decided to partner with us on this”, Ajao said.
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Chinasa Jonathan is the head of human capital at NIBSS, who has been in the organization for 24 to 25 years. She said the health of the staff and the environment is very important to the payment institution.
“We also believe in work life balance and because of that we have created different activities/ programs to ensure that it is not all about work, life has to be balanced”, she said.
“Part from the fact that we believe in work life balance which we try to demonstrate through different activities, the management of NIBSS also buys the idea or the concept that a healthy mind is a more relaxed mind to create and innovate things that can make an organization have a cutting edge”.
“Some time ago, we came up with the HSE week, which simply means health, safety and the environment the human capital management introduced this to the executives, they gave us their whole heartened buy in, because everybody understands that a healthy mind is a fertile ground for a lot of things to grow. The aim of every business is to make profit, and in this E payment terrain, we have other competitors and we must be at the top of our mental alertness to be able to come up with innovative ideas to be able to reach out to our end users, that is why you can see how excited we are to take up the walk which is part of the activities of our HSE week this year”, she added.
Some of the staff who also spoke with BusinessDay said, “as we went out to clean the environment we realized that the most affected area, were areas inhabited by people who were just hanging on without a rented accommodation. They were people living in uncompleted buildings around were we walked, we realized that they were absolutely irresponsible to ensuring that their environment were healthy. You could see that they defecated in trash here and there; the gutters were not cared for.
“One would advise that the government should either find a way to take either census or find a way to get the people living in such places to be more responsible or made to leave such environment; because whatever effort made towards cleaning and they are not committed to it will be an effort in futility.
“My advice is that government should actually do something to crop this kind of people, you find out that they are located here and there in the Lagos metropolis and that is not very good for a mega city like Lagos, because what that means is that whatever the effort put into the cleaner Lagos project it might not actually achieve its purpose when there are a set of people who just hang around and they are not committed in keeping the environment clean, all they want to do is to hang on, eat and drop their trash wherever they want and are just absolutely insensitive to the cleaner Lagos project”.
