NCS Assures Improved Officers Deployment, Reiterate Commitment to Professionalism and Efficiency
Gregg Itutoh, the Deputy Comptroller General of Customs and the Head of Human Resource Development Department, has reiterated that the Nigeria Customs Service will continue to deploy capable officers to departments where they specialise in.
He made this known during a panel discussion at the Comptroller-General Conference in Abuja on 14th November, 2024.
DCG Itutoh during the discussion spoke on Professionalism in the NCS, redeployment, and how officers are placed in the right position or department they specialise.
He said” Overtime, there have been this issue among officers that you could be forgotten in a duty post but under the CGC guidance we now have a solution, a leadway out of that by bringing the management closer to our officer.The CGC felt that these officers are in remote places and truly for the management to be closer to them, the zonal coordinator that are equally part of the management clearly decided where these officers have been and what they have been doing .It should be involved in their deployment and the zonal coordinator are already doing that as we speak .You might want to ask what are the benefits derivable from this . It does not only motivate officers to move from remote areas to places where they have opportunity of doing something different and that in no small measure motivates and in the process of doing different they get engaged in activities or job descriptions that they have not had the opportunity of getting engaged in.This helps in building capacity, experience and some level of self esteem in such personnel”
As regards training for competent personnels in the service, he also noted that the service can not open a training program for just one person because he’s competent in a particular area and head of departments has been given the directives to nominate officers for such training.
” When openings for training come, the CGC has declared directives on it. Departments that are affected for such training are usually involved in the selection of nominees .The DCG HRD might not know who the proficient officer is when it comes to evaluation and classification but chances are some Area Controller would. They are saddled with the responsibility of letting us have these nominees and after training, an evaluation report is done, and depending on how these officers perform, special requests could be made for them from their specialised department. We always do well to deploy them to these specialised areas of need”
Also speaking during the panel discussion DCG Bello Jibo,Head of Finance Administration and Technical Services (FATS) who was represented by DCG Olaniyi Olajogun on the innovative strategies deployed to optimize spending without compromising the welfare of officers in the service made it known that when there is a deficit in the budget allocated they always work with their sister agencies to maximize what they have.
“When implementing a budget, it’s likely to be a deficit .That is what is budgeted for a particular project and it may not be enough to execute that project so what we do is to partner with other sister agencies.Where we are suppose to pay for consultation fee ,we don’t pay.We use the relationship we have to resolve that consultancy fee.
” Also we have alot of professionals at FATS, the accountants are there, the architects the quantity surveyors who go on training almost on monthly basis or quarterly, instead of us to spend money for them to attend the course physically, we organise a zoom participation for them and through that we can be able to channel that money into a project . When we have a deficit in a project, we try to push it into the budget of the following year so that it can be executed as a fall back to what was not done in the previous year” he added.
