The Director General of Nigerian Insurers Association, (NIA) Mrs. Bola Odukale has stated the need for continuous insurance awareness creation across the country to eliminate the prevailing negative perception about insurance.
Odukale made the assertion when the executive members of the Nigerian Association of Insurance and Pension Editors (NAIPE) paid a courtesy visit to NIA head office in Lagos.
According to her, insurance practitioners must always put themselves in the face of the people through collaboration with the media. She said: “Image making is part of the business of insurance especially for an industry like ours that everybody claims much of the time that they don’t know much about. We keep hearing things like ‘we don’t know anything about insurance’ and the feedback is always like everybody seems to lack knowledge of insurance in its entirety.
“Everybody seems to be in the dark about insurance or what insurance is all about and this has been a recurrent decimal as far as the trajectory of the industry is concerned. So, what that says to me is that there must be continuous engagement, we must continuously put ourselves in the face of the people. Nobody will say he does’t know what the banks do. Many people don’t claim the kind of ignorance about the banking sector like they claim about the insurance sector.”
According to Odukale, the fact remains that the media is part of the industry and the image maker of the industry. She said collectively as an industry, the media remained the image maker of insurance industry.
“You are a vital part of us as far as this industry is concerned, hence matters with you cannot be taken with levity and I want to assure you that we are going to be working together,” she assured.
