The over 3,000 staff of Mainstret Bank Limited (formerly Afribank Nigeria Plc), have been gripped by extreme anxiety in the last one week as the deadline given to them by the new management to shape in or ship out is fast approaching. There is increased tension in all the branches of the bank as the workers appears caught in the cross fire of resignation and termination of their appointments.
A survey across the various branches of the bank in Lagos and key stakeholders of the bank indicate that the staff are worried that the content of their new letter of appointment from the Assets Management Corporation (Amcon)-owned Mainstreet Bank whose probationary period ends in December is frightening.
The bank had, after issuing letters of re-employment to the workers, given them deposit targets ranging from N50 million to N300 million per month as condition for their confirmation. Almost six months after this development, none of the staff has met his target and there indications that the management may carry out its threat as it has embarked on systematic employment of new hands who are now placed on better conditions of service.
Miffed by this development which has the potencial of returning the workers to the path of disobedience, an integrated meeting between the management of the bank  and the workers has been called by the Federal Ministry of Labour to bring the two parties to a common ground. The meeting scheduled for last weekend in Abuja is seen by most of the bank’s workers as a major factor which will determine their fate in the frosty relationship between them and their new employers.
In the last two weeks, a wave of punitive transfers had been visited on the bank’s workers, most of whom are still not ready to resume at their new places because of the belief that such transfers are not in line with labour laws in the country. Although some of them resumed some days after, they are still of the opinion that such trends could be unfavourable to the realization of the bank’s turn-around as their new postings did not consider issues of disadvantage in deposit mobilisation.
Inside the banking halls of the Mainstreet Bank activities are at their lowest ebb as workers may have lost confidence in the institution and themselves. Some of the workers spoken to are eager to leave the bank the next day if the bank can explain the issues relating to their terminal benefits which have remained in wraps since the take-over. Some of the workers who have put in well over 20 years in the bank are not being told what they will get if they decide to go.
BusinessWorld can reveal that there is a plot to send the workers home without terminal benefit as the new owners are insistent that Afribank is dead and what they have with the workers now is an entirely new employment. Even though the management has not officially made this position known, there are signals that the bank is capitalizing on the weak staff in the bank unlike what obtains in Union Bank of Nigeria Plc. In Union Bank, the strong pension workforce made up of even retired chief executives and their collective investments in the bank were part of their strength. Afribank has no pension scheme and no collective investment in the bank. The angry workers may puncture the arguments being made by the bank’s management because the bank cannot afford to send them away empty handed after it had paid some unbelievable amounts to some few executives employed by the apex bank who worked for only two years without achieving any result. Coupled with the fact that the workers are losing huge deductions on forced loans incurred in their failed subscription during consolidation, the workers believe that nothing has changed in the status of Afribank other than name.
Sources close to the bank indicated that the Abuja meeting would determine the reactions of the workers in the weeks ahead.