Last week, the Central Bank of The Gambia gave a directive to commercial banks to phase out non-Gambian employees by December 31, 2026, and replace them with suitably qualified Gambians. This is more than an employment regulation, but indeed, a statement about national economic priorities, the value of indigenous talent, and the responsibility of foreign-owned businesses to contribute to the development of the countries in which they operate.

The directive affected some Nigeria commercial banks that operate in the Gambia; viz: Access Bank, Guaranty Trust Bank, FirstBank, Ecobank and Zenith Bank. This raises an important question for Nigeria: why should a country that produces some of Africa’s brightest professionals continue to struggle with a corporate culture in which foreign expertise is sometimes treated as inherently superior to indigenous competence?

For clarity, The Gambia’s policy has not imposed an indiscriminate prohibition on foreign workers. Rather, it has demanded compliance with existing labour legislation, proper expatriate employment arrangements, the recruitment of qualified Gambians and the systematic transfer of knowledge and skills. And this is the central lesson Nigeria must examine.

Foreign expertise is not the problem but making importing expertise become a substitute for developing local expertise, and expatriate appointments become permanent privileges as indigenous employees remain perpetually subordinate despite possessing the qualifications, experience and capacity to take responsibility.

Nigeria’s experience, particularly in its sports, oil and gas, construction and manufacturing sectors, makes this matter particularly crucial.

Perhaps, no recent industrial controversy illustrates this contradiction more vividly than the dispute surrounding the Dangote Petroleum Refinery in September 2025.

Dangote refinery, one of Africa’s largest industrial investments, was embroiled in a major labour dispute after the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) accused its management of dismissing more than 800 Nigerian workers following their efforts to join the union. The union also alleged that Indian expatriates were being brought in to replace Nigerian employees and raised questions about disparities between the remuneration of Nigerian and Indian engineers.

Also, in sports, particularly football, Nigeria has continued to hire expatriates as coaches and technical advisers despite having skilled, experienced and exposed professionals.

In the same vein, some Nigerians have made spiteful comments suggesting that Nigerians are inferior to their foreign counterparts.

The MD/CEO of Moniepoint, a digital banking platform, had recently accused Nigerian youths of lacking competence and requisite skills to compete with their peers out there.

Similarly, the former president of Nigeria, Mohammadu Buhari, had described Nigerian youths as lazy.

Essentially, these descriptions are not totally true of the Nigerian Youth. They are not less smart than their Gambian, and other counterparts, but enabling policies, and political Will would present effective buffers.

There is no gainsaying that a company of scale would necessarily require specialised knowledge in engineering, process control, instrumentation, automation, maintenance, safety management, risk management, audit and strategy, petrochemicals and other highly technical and professional disciplines.

Commissioning a complex industrial facility, for instance, can require experienced international engineers and technicians whose knowledge is not immediately available locally.

But the fundamental question is: what happens after the expatriate expert arrives? Who is assigned to understudy that expert? What training programme is established? How many Nigerian engineers and professionals are expected to acquire the relevant competencies? What are the timelines for succession? And what measurable evidence exists that knowledge is actually being transferred?

If a Nigerian engineer, for instance, works for years alongside an expatriate specialist without being given the opportunity to acquire the skills, certification, operational exposure and decision-making authority necessary to replace that specialist, the failure is not necessarily the engineer’s. It is failure of corporate human-resource planning and regulatory supervision.

This is a troubling tendency in most parts of Nigeria’s corporate environment – associating foreign nationality with superior professional competence. An expatriate appointment sometimes carries an aura of authority that an equally qualified Nigerian employee must struggle to earn.

This attitude is more prevalent in the oil and gas, telecommunications, manufacturing, construction, hospitality, banking, and other sectors where Nigerians sometimes find themselves reporting to foreign professionals despite having comparable qualifications and substantial institutional experience.

There are, no doubt, legitimate reasons for recruiting foreign specialists. International businesses need global expertise, multinational banks require consistency in risk management and information technology, and industrial investments sometimes depend on proprietary technologies developed elsewhere.

However, the presence of foreign expertise should produce a stronger Nigerian workforce, not an indefinitely dependent one.

The problem is partly cultural and partly institutional. Some employers appear more comfortable importing an experienced foreign professional than investing in the training of a Nigerian employee who may require time, resources and structured mentorship to attain the same level of specialisation.

Some Nigerian employers also perpetuate this practice themselves. The preference for foreign consultants, imported management personnel and expatriate technical supervisors is not always imposed by foreign investors. Indigenous businesses and public institutions are equally responsible.

The consequences are substantial. Nigeria loses opportunities to deepen its technical workforce, local employees are denied career progression, scarce foreign exchange is spent on expatriate remuneration and associated costs, and the country becomes unnecessarily dependent on external expertise.

Worse still, the failure to train local professionals creates a cycle in which employers subsequently cite the absence of experienced Nigerians as justification for recruiting more expatriates.

The irony is that Nigeria is not without laws and institutions designed to address this problem. What is missing is consistent enforcement, transparent monitoring and the political will to make local capacity development a condition of doing business.

The Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development (NOGICD) Act 2010, and Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) provide some example.

Indeed, the NCDMB’s published monitoring requirements include approved expatriate positions, succession plans, understudy arrangements, Nigerianisation commitments and quarterly expatriate quota returns. Companies are also expected to identify skills frequently supplied by expatriates and develop Nigerian professionals to fill those gaps.

The challenge, therefore, is not simply the absence of legislation. It is the gap between regulatory requirements and actual corporate practice.

Why should a company operating in Nigeria for 15 or 20 years continue to claim that it cannot find Nigerians to occupy positions for which it has had sufficient time to train them?

Why should an expatriate engineer, banker, accountant, project manager or technical supervisor remain in a position indefinitely without a clearly identifiable Nigerian understudy?

Why should Nigerian graduates spend years acquiring professional qualifications only to discover that the most senior technical and managerial opportunities are effectively reserved for imported personnel?

These questions deserve answers from the Ministry of Interior, the Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment, the NCDMB, the relevant sector regulators and corporate boards.

There is also a disturbing weakness in Nigeria’s training culture. Training is sometimes treated as an occasional corporate social responsibility activity rather than a fundamental investment in the future of the organisation and the country.

A company may sponsor short courses, organise workshops and issue certificates without necessarily preparing its employees for higher responsibilities. Real professional development requires practical exposure, supervised assignments, access to technology, professional certification, leadership opportunities and the authority to make decisions.

An employee cannot become an experienced refinery operations manager merely by attending classroom lectures. He or she must be exposed to the control room, equipment, production processes, safety procedures, troubleshooting and the responsibilities of actual operations.

The same applies to banking.
A Nigerian employee cannot become a competent risk-management director or information technology specialist if foreign managers retain all the critical responsibilities and local employees are restricted to routine administrative duties. This is how professional dependence is reproduced.

International labour law does not prohibit countries from regulating expatriate employment, protecting domestic employment opportunities or requiring employers to develop indigenous skills. Equally, it does not give governments unrestricted authority to dismiss migrant workers merely because they are foreigners.

The International Labour Organisation’s Convention 97 on Migration for Employment and Convention 143 on Migrant Workers establish important protections for migrant employees, including equality of treatment in relevant employment conditions and protection of fundamental rights.

Convention 143, in particular, requires countries that have ratified it to promote equality of opportunity and treatment for legally resident migrant workers. Nigeria ratified Convention 143 and Convention 181 on private employment agencies in March 2023.

In the main, the Gambia’s December 31, 2026 deadline should therefore serve as a wake-up call to Nigerian regulators and employers.

Ultimately, a country’s industrial strength is not measured only by the number of factories it builds, the volume of crude oil it refines, the size of its banks or the number of multinational corporations operating within its borders. It is also measured by the competence of its citizens to manage, maintain, improve and eventually own the expertise behind those investments.

Nigeria cannot continue importing the knowledge it ought to be developing at home. It cannot continue producing graduates, engineers, accountants, scientists and other professionals while making them permanent understudies in their own country.

We, at Daily NewsCraft, insist that the expatriate should bring expertise, transfer knowledge and build capacity. Governments and industry leaders must stop confusing the importation of expertise with the development of competence.

Nigeria must learn from The Gambia that employing foreign expertise should be a bridge to developing local capacity, not a permanent arrangement that denies qualified citizens opportunities to rise in their own country. That is not economic nationalism rather responsible human-capital development.