The Nigerian Customs Service (NCS) is set to lay off about 200 newly recruited officers who were enlisted into the Service not up to a year ago and have already been posted to various commands. This is even as findings further revealed that the affected officers have been pencilled for sack due to irregularities uncovered in their employment processes.
According to investigations, some of the newly recruited officers were found to have submitted fake university certificates, while others did not attend the mandatory customs training college.
The third affected group were discovered to have been enlisted while they were still passing through the mandatory one year National Youth Service Scheme (NYSC).
According to a senior customs officer, who declined not to have his name in print has he is not authorised to speak on the issue, “this officers were recruited under the administration of the former Customs CG, Dikko Inde Abdullahi.
“These officers are children and relatives of highly placed Nigerians who used their parents and family friends influence to gain entrance into the Service back then. However, with the change mantra of the current dispensation, the Customs CG, Hammed Alli has vowed to ensure due processes in their employement procedure, meaning most of them will get sacked. I think they should be around 500 in numbers.”
When contacted, the image maker of the Nigerian Customs Service (NCS), Wale Adeniyi, confirmed the development and admitted to uncertainty over the future of the affected officers.
He, however, could not verify the numbers of the affected Customs officers as at the time of filing in this report.
“The problem is with the recruits, not with the system. Customs did not ask them to submit fake results or fake NYSC certificates when they were being recruited. The problem is with their documentation. It was when we decided to do proper documentation for them that we discovered all this anomalies and we have asked them to come forward with their original certificates, that is for those that have issues with either NYSC or university certificates.
“I don’t have their exact numbers here because the process is still ongoing. I cannot give exact figures of affected officer’s until we finish the process.
“For certificates issue, we have been writing their universities and various institutions for which they submitted their certificates that they attended. We need to confirm the authenticity of the certificates. For due diligence, we have to find out where they trained, if they trained and whether they were properly trained.
“For those who are not properly trained, the Service has agreed to properly train them, but we cannot train them if we don’t sort out all the issues of eligibility in terms of certificates etc,” Adeniyi said.
When asked how come the officers beat the Customs recruitment system to get enlisted into the Service almost a year ago, the Customs Spokesman explained that, “when you are being recruited, you come in with a certificate. Anybody can submit any certificate. What we are now trying to do is to validate those certificates. This exercise was done about a year ago
“If you have an employment, and your employment letter pre-dates your NYSC certificate, then there is a flaw. If an officer did not attend training and is not properly trained, then there is a flaw. These are some of the things that we discovered and we felt we have an opportunity to correct them.”
Source: Tribune
