By ROSEMARY ONUOHA

The Chartered Insurance Institute of Nigeria, CIIN, is set to edge up the level of professionalism in the insurance sector. To this end, the College of Insurance will soon come on stream. President of CIIN, Mr. Wole Adetimehin recently spoke on this issue and others.

Restructuring of the Institute

The whole essence of putting in place a restructuring programme in the institute is to evolve a better structure that will enable us drive the institute to attain all the laudable responsibilities under our charter and to also put us on a better platform to be able to deliver to the expectation of all our members in the industry. We all know that our responsibility under the charter is majorly to train and educate would be practitioners in the industry and you are well conversant with our latest strides in the pursuit of that goal and responsibility.

The progress we are making so far from observers can be a little slow but this has been dependent on our IT platform. Again that will be ready for commissioning any time from now. We have had to embark on an outright development of an IT platform that will be robust to drive the entire process of the institute activities from membership to examination to subscription, etc.

When that is put in place the second stage of our restructuring programme will come into place. The intention is not to render people redundant or make people poor but we want to be seen as fully utilising the human capital resources at our disposal, whereby those that are not relevant are given another set of schedule of work to do.

More than one year ago, we recruited the Deputy Director-General and it has always been provided for in our charter. It is not a new development but it featured realistically into the new restructuring programme. On the hierarchal restructuring, we have directorates and the new structure is meant to collapse some of them so that people can be more effective and they can be better utilised. These are some of the main features of this restructuring programme.

College of insurance

The whole essence of building a college with a view to running it is to provide the right platform that will enable us be efficient in meeting our responsibilities under Charter which is to train and educate.  Our college will focus mainly on the development of professionals.

So the college will be open to graduates from varied disciplines that will want to make insurance as a career or a profession. The curriculum studies have been patterned towards the professional line and the whole essence is that it will be that of academic or theoretical packed up with field work.

Anybody coming out of the college will end up having maybe two or three papers to become Chartered and that is the way it is being done all over the world.  I can tell you emphatically that the progress we have made in Nigeria in particular, in terms of academic programmes in insurance is way ahead of what obtains in Europe.

Recently I know a number of university dons that traveled to Europe in search of external examiners and they came back with nothing. I told them that they should come to the Institute because we have external examiners in our industry and stop wasting time. And they were told that most of the professors in insurance abroad did not obtain PHD in insurance, they had higher degrees in varied disciplines but had to major or found themselves in the insurance field.

So the challenge to our institute is to be able to develop thoroughbred professionals that can service or fit in to all these institutions around us. We commend the Federal Ministry of Education and the federal government for giving us recognition by making insurance a subject from Senior Secondary School one to three.

It’s been a policy guideline but we need to move round all the state ministry of education to assure them that we will provide facilitators at various levels. We need to let them know we will write textbooks for their use at those levels and this are challenges to us as well as good opportunities.

So when we start turning out more professionals, we can be sure we will not be experiencing a high rate of unemployment in our fields. This is a challenge and I believe in the long run, we will surmount all this challenges. So the curriculum studies have been specially fashioned out to suit industry needs and apart from the full time programmes, there will be short term programmes in the college specially packaged to suit industry needs.

A number of us will know our difficult areas so programmes can be specially packaged to suit them. For example, when you look at the array of marketers out there, a number of them became marketers because they couldn’t find jobs and had to pick on anything that is available.

If you look at their insurance knowledge, it is nil and very shallow because all they needed do is to open door, put up good smiles and grab the business. What they had to do on the field could be a lot easier and they could achieve a lot more if they develop their insurance knowledge.

So there will programmes packaged towards that. Another example is that technically some insurance companies out there could not operate robust training budgets. When they do budget and they provide for training, those that benefit under such budgets are top management staff.  But the essential needs in the technical areas are they being addressed?   Our areas of challenge, be it marketing, finance, technical, IT, are not been addressed.