Nigerian professionals charged on quality services, competence

PROFESSIONALS in Nigeria have been urged to exhibit competence and be ready to provide quality services to enable their customers and clients get value for their money.

Making the charge at the 37th Annual General Assembly of the Association of Professional Bodies of Nigeria (APBN), held  in Lagos recently,  the event’s Guest Speaker,  Kadri Adebayo Adeola, in his paper titled, ‘Rethinking Professionalism, Leadership and Development’, stated that the call had become imperative since many of the nation’s professionals do not exhibit adequate competence and ethics, thereby making  it difficult for clients to seek redress in the event of dissatisfaction.

The Guest Speaker argued that  besides regulating their members and seeing to their welfare, the essence of professional associations is also to protect the public from incompetent and unethical professionals.

This, he added, can be achieved through strict admission processes and continued education programmes for members.

He stated that rather than focus on service delivery, the nation’s professionals are pre-occupied with complaints about the inadequacies of the government for members.

Adeola, therefore, charged members of the association to jettison the entitlement mentality they presently exhibit, and work hard on providing products and services that will delight their customers, clients and the end-users of such offerings.

He also decried the present situation in the country where most professions do not have viable or visible professional associations to regulate them, especially at the vocational and artisan levels.

“Even among the elite professions where professional associations exist, the focus of the professional associations is generally on the welfare of their members rather than the quality of service delivery to the public. More emphasis is laid on qualification rather than competence.

“If the hypothesis that the daily living experience of the citizenry derives from interaction with professionals is accepted, then the frustration experienced by the citizenry can be significantly improved if the quality of professional performance improves,” he added.

Adeola charged the nation’s professionals to up their ante by taking on the greater challenges of national development.

Expressing the readiness of the nation’s professionals to support governments at the national and sub-national levels, the association’s president lamented the obvious preference of governments at the various levels for foreign professionals over the local ones.

He however charged the 30-member associations on the need to enhance professionalism and ensure their clients get value for their money.