Adewale Adeniyi, the CG, Customs.
Story by Dili Utomi.
The Joint Border Patrol Team is a special Unit created and ran by the office of the national security adviser until recently. It is one of the interventionist Units created to forestall smuggling especially the smuggling in of drugs, ammunition and dangerous materials into the country and it is divided into 4 sectors covering a large swathe of the country. The Unit was comprised of officers from the Nigeria Customs Service, the Nigerian Immigration Service, the Directorate of State Security, the Military, and the Police with the Customs as the lead agency or arrow head.
The Unit has recently been reorganised and streamlined to comprise only of the officers from the Customs and the Immigration Services with the Customs still leading the Unit. The history behind this very critical, but effective Unit is not the immediate concern of this article as much as a small, but very important matter of the payment or lack thereof of certain emoluments acruable to some of the retired officers of the Unit.
There has been a few silent grumblings about the non-payment of the allowances of officers who retired over 22 months ago. Our investigation revealed that some of the officers who have served under the Unit were paid in two different tranches over a period of about 15 months of their initial involvement with the Unit and afterwards, they have not been paid again almost two years after their disengagement from the Unit.
A source disclosed that part of the snag on the payment is the attitude of a Deputy Comptroller General, Enforcement at the Customs Headquarters who had elected to slow the documentation process of making the payment of the allowance arrears possible.
We reached out to the Customs National Public Relations Officer, Chief Supretendent of Customs, Abdullahi Maiwada who took out time to explain the part of the Service in the matter.
CSC Maiwada admitted that the officers are owed the allowances, but that the complexities of the payment stems from the history of the Unit. As stated above, the initial composition of the members of the Unit cuts across various military and paramilitary forces of which the Customs is just a part of. The issue of who served, from which arm of the security and at which time are some of the little matters that have militated against the smooth documentation, processing and payment of these allowances according to the PRO. He concluded that the Customs on their part are working on offsetting the arrears.
At this juncture, it is completely necessary that all the heads of the various security agencies who were initially involved in the operations within the JBPT put their biases and prejudices aside, create the time to look into this matter and find a solution to it before it becomes another kind of embarrassment to the country.
The current Comptroller General of Customs, Adewale Adeniyi is an astute public relations person who grew along the ranks through the headship of several PR units and at various Commands and up to the national level before becoming the CGC that he is now. He understands fully what it means to improve the morale of officers serving and retired as has also shown in the performances being reeled out by the various Commands under his watch.
The holy book says that “The labourer deserves his wages” and so it is fittingly right that the allowances of these retired officers and those of other retired Nigerian workers be paid with the immediate attention that it all deserves.
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