By Steve Opeyemi
The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), has in recent past sent Directors that have spent 8 years in service packing because a government circular had made it a requirement since Yar’adua came to power.
Many organisations have implemented the circular and some have navigated to find a way out by using different nomenclature such as General Managers or even Coordinating Director titles to escape the implementation.
The NCC was on the other hand quick to implement the directive sending young and able directors into early retirement.
However, last week there was a video clip going round on a speech given by one of NCC’s directors who retired recently, at his send-off party, wherein he, the director, claimed that in total he has spent 39 years in service. He managed to spend a whopping 39 years in civil service for two main reasons; first, he did not spend 8 years in the position of Director at the NCC, which was the focus of the NCC, and, second, the NCC ignores years of his service elsewhere in its computation of the mandatory 35 years of service as enshrined in conditions of service.
The NCC in-short took into account, albeit erroneously, only the time he spent working within the NCC to compute the 35 years of service. This has made it possible for those who started working after ONDs or NCEs, or even Secondary schools, to be skipped when counting their years of service.Ignoring the fact that most of them started teaching jobs, or clerical office jobs, on attaining such qualifications in before or in the year 1991.
The NCC seemed to only calculate years of service from the time of youth service (NYSC) or from time of University graduation, or the times of joining the NCC, rather than the time the individuals started working after completion of either a secondary school, or the OND, or the NCE prior to 1991.
The problem seemed endemic in the system. It has been a common knowledge that in the past anyone who completed an OND or NCE must work for 2 years before starting an HND or a B.Tech course.
Any one therefore, who must have completed these qualifications in the 1980s and still working in civil service could be acting in breach. The NCC must therefore get its house in order, otherwise documents signed by those who breached the 35 year rule, and continue working illegally might be challenged. The NCC might find itself to blame for those breaches. The civil service however has a way of recovering payments collected during illegal occupation of office after retirement age of 60 or 35 years of service. In fact, even positions attained during illegal occupation of office must have to be reviewed since the foundation has been faulty. As the saying goes, you cannot build something on nothing and expect it to stand.
The new Head of Service Abel Olumuyiwa or his staff in the head of service need to comprehensively address these issues service-wide to avoid many litigations against the government or government actions.
Opeyemi writes from Abuja