Nigerians urged to embrace sector

Nigerians have been urged to see insurance as a way of life, as the low insurance awareness in the country is one of the major reasons a large percentage of the public is not insuring.

The Managing Director, Capital Express Assurance, Bola Odukale, gave the advice in Lagos.

According her, Nigerians do not have enough awareness to appreciate the benefits of insurance, stressing that they need to be educated on this as various insurance products are designed to protect life and property.

She added that the cases of road accidents, buildings collapse, and fire outbreaks across the country, where properties worth millions of naira are destroyed, make insurance imperative, stressing that the public should know that insurance is beneficial to them.

She said: “Nigerians have waited too long in recognising and accepting the reality that without insurance, it is like one building a house without a foundation, and in no time, it could come crashing. And when that happens, you will have to start from the scratch again with more funds than you initially expended.

“Insurance gives you the promise of a safe and comfortable future. The earlier we disabuse our minds of the old notion that insurance does not work, the better it will be for all of us.

“Experience has shown that an individual who took out one policy or another in the past that went awry along the line was largely due to his inability to peruse the insurance contract or policy as the case may be.   Such an individual is capable of giving the wrong information or misrepresentation of ideas to would-be customers out there that would have taken one policy or another,” she said.

She stressed the need to influence the public, saying it is key to getting more patronage, and charged practitioners to ensure that the public is sensitised to embrace insurance as an integral part of their lives. “We all are confronted with different kinds of risks as we go about our daily businesses,” she added.

Going forward, she identified human capital development and growing reserves from yearly operational profits as panacea to the challenges faced by insurance operators in recent times.

Odukale, also considered aggressive industry-wide awareness campaign and investment in technology as factors that will reshape insurance business.

She called for proper pricing of insurance products; development of innovative insurance solution and review of reinsurance arrangements amongst others as urgent measures to be taken to enlarge the coast of the industry.