4000 Customs Officers Faced With Demotion.

Panic has gripped some officers of the Nigerian Customs Service over plans by the management to de-rank about 4000 officers from the ranks of assistant comptroller of Customs to the lowest cadre, over alleged indiscriminate allotment of ranks to themselves.


Customs boss, Col Hamed Ali (rtd) has given all officers and men of the Nigerian Customs Service (NCS) 14 days ultimatum to declare their assets.

According to Vanguard, some of the affected officers have resorted to using their godfathers among other desperate measures to try and frustrate the de-ranking exercise.


Explaining the rationale behind the exercise, chief superintendent of customs, Chris Osunkwo, told Vanguard that the exercise became necessary because some officers have refused to play by rules and regulations guiding customs promotions, transfer and deployment.

Osunkwo who is also the spokesman of the Tin-Can Island Customs Command said most of the affected officers flout the rules on promotions believing that their godfathers can speak for them.

He said: “People ab initio refused to abide by the rules and regulations that guide our appointments, promotions and deployments.

“Officers know that these things have been spelt out; it is just that a lot of them believe that they have godfathers here and there, that is why they sometimes flout some of these directives. If you are not a graduate or Higher National Diploma holder, and you join the Customs, you are not a commissioned officer yet until you do what we call lateral conversion.

“We have three cadre points of entry into the Nigeria Customs Service and they are the Customs Assistant Cadre, the Inspectorate Cadre and Superintendent cadre. If you want to migrate from one cadre to another cadre, there are conditions in the scheme of service which should qualify you to migrate and not for you to ascribe rank to yourself.

‘’If you have any added qualification to entry qualification, come forward and management will verify if you got approval to embark on your educational pursuit. If this is confirmed, you are automatically up graded to the cadre of your wish. But what obtains among some officers is that they get additional qualification most times without approval and before you know it, they are wearing ranks they are not entitled to wear. Whether these additional qualifications are fake or not, nobody cares to find out.”

In the same vein, the public relation officer of the Apapa Area One Command of the Customs Service, Emmanuel Ekpa said the essence of the exercise was for officers to put on their appropriate rank.

Ekpa explained that officers had refused to wear their appropriate rank in the past.

He said: the truth is that what has happened is not new and the Comptroller-General of Customs is not doing anything contrary to the rules and regulations of the service. What he did was that he was given directive on officers that are not putting on their appropriate rank. How do you know the appropriate rank? Bring your letter of promotion; your letter of promotion will determine what your rank is.

“If there is any discrepancy in your last two letters of promotion, the directive will take care of it. If your last two promotions do not read the rank you are putting on, you are asked to put in your appropriate rank. The key word is ‘appropriate.’ Since the new Comptroller General came, he has not done any promotion.

“The former Comptroller General did the last promotion and officers were promoted appropriately but the problem as you have rightly said is the confusion concerning what to put on and what not to put on, depending on the cadre through which an officer entered the Customs.

“I want to let you know that before the last Comptroller General of Customs left, the issue of appropriate ranking was adequately addressed and corrected but officers did not adhere to that directive. It was based on that, that the new Comptroller General now asked officers to put on the appropriate rank.” He explained that in his Command, some officers had carried out the directive, adding that the Customs Area Comptroller, Mr. Willy Egbudin, had vowed that the directive would be implemented to the letter.

Meanwhile, following a 14 day deadline given to customs officers to declare their assets, many officers are now in a hurry to beat the deadline.
Wale Adeniyi, the public relations officer of the NCS said that officers were already declaring their assets as directed by the Comptroller- General of the NCS, Retired Col. Hammed Alli last week.