The shortage of junior officers may cripple the activities of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) as most of its formations across the country operate with middle class and senior officers.
It was gathered that this was as a result of the failure of the management to recruit for the past 17 years.
An insider said the last recruitment was carried out in 2002, adding that since then, no officer had been employed.
As a result of this discovering, the House of Representatives said it would summon the Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Customs Service, Col. Hameed Ibrahim Ali (rtd) to explain the non-recruitment of officers.
The decision followed a resolution passed by the Technical Committee of the House Committee on Customs and Excise after its oversight visit to most Customs formations across the country where they discovered that most of the jobs were being done by senior officers.
Chairman of the Technical Committee, Hon. Leke Abejide, who spoke at the NCS’ FCT Command headquarters blamed the management of the service for the lack of junior officers, adding that when the management called for interview about two years, “we expected the recruitment to take place”.
Hon. Abejide said as a result of the delay in recruiting young Nigerians, there had been rumours that the management were carrying secret recruitment and advised the management to speed up to recruit junior officers.
Abejide said the House would work with the Senate to ensure that eligible young Nigerians were given the opportunity to serve, saying: “We are even told that the plan is to recruit one officer per local government and that will give you only 774 officer when some areas we went to were asking for 1000 officers to perform maximally.
“We are not supporting the Customs management on this, but supports Nigerians who are ready to work. In the real sense of it, recruitment should be a yearly affair. How can you put one person to do the job of ten people? We learnt that they are only planning to recruit support staff and not even core Customs officers”.
In an interview after the tour, Abejide said “we have gone round all the zones and we are ending it with FCT Area Command and the one thing that has continued to resonate is the issue of shortage of junior officers.
“In some areas, they don’t even have them and we are disturbed about this development because we understand that there is a seventeen year gap in recruitment. The question is, why is the Nigeria Customs Service not doing mass recruitment? We have given them all the assistance they need.
“They are using 60 per cent of CISS to augment their salary and seven per cent of collected duties is also for them. We are not happy with this. The instrumentality of the National Assembly is budget. We will use the instrument of the budget to change this narrative and ensure that recruitment is massive.
“We are going to invite the Controller General of Customs to come to the committee to provide answers to these questions because we are disturbed. Before we pass the budget, we will make sure the recruitment is done.
“By not recruiting officers into the service, we are only giving changes to smugglers because when the officers are not on ground, anybody can do anything. We are not happy. We have passed a resolution as a committee that we are not doing anything on the budget until this issue of recruitment is settled”.
Abejide also said the Committee discovered that senior officers who are supposed to supervise examination of containers and cargoes are the ones physically carrying out such examination as a result of lack of junior officers to perform the function.
Efforts by the Controller of the FCT Command, Patience Burromvyat to explain that it was not a deliberate act and that the Customs management was already doing something about the shortage of junior staff did not placate the members.
A member of the Committee, Hon. Mukthar Ahmed said the Committee should tie the passage of the 2021 budget of the Customs to the recruitment of young Nigerians who are willing to serve the nation and ease the burden currently placed on the senior officers.
Hon. Ahmed said “we understand there is a 17 year skill gap already in the service. Many are retiring, promotions are being done and some have even died. The delay is dangerous for both the service and for Nigeria.
“So, the recruitment of new officers should be done speedily otherwise, we should with-hold the 2021 budget so that even the senior officers will not collect salaries. Many of the senior officers will soon leave the service. When you recruit after that they have left, there will be no one to train them and what that means is that we will then be having an inexperienced Customs service.”
Earlier, the FCT Controller of Customs, had told the Committee that out of the 186 staff present in the command, 126 of them were senior officers while 60 were junior officer, adding that majority of the junior officers were drafted to border post.
She also disclosed that the Command lost about N1.727 billion in revenue to Import Duty Exemption Certificates and Covid-19 consignments in 2020 alone, while failing to meet its revenue target.
