Protesters Disrupt Services At CAC

A group of lawyers, chartered cecretaries and accountants protested at the Corporate Affairs Commission, CAC, headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria over delays encountered while seeking the services of the commission.

The group lamented that applying for availability which ought to take about three hours going by what the Commission published on its website, takes a minimum of three weeks just to confirm whether the company name which an applicant seeks to incorporate is available or not and months to effect incorporation of a company contrary to the three days advertised on the commission’s web site.

The group, which carried out the protest under the auspices of Representatives of Registered Lawyers and Accountants of CAC, were led in the protest by Barrister Donald Okogbe and Barrister Ben Nordi.

They cordoned off the premises of the commission and obstructed movement of persons in and out of the premises.

The protesters asked for the resignation of the management team of the commission led by the Registrar and Chief Executive Officer, Alhaji Bello Mahmud, whom they accused of skewing the ratio of employment in the commission in favour of the North.

Responding to enquiries over these allegations, Mr. Abubakar Garba, an aide to the Registrar and Mr Churchill Williams, the head of Public Relations at the commission stated thet their attention was drawn to the scheduled picketing of the CAC’s headquarters by some lawyers and that they promptly reached out to the Nigeria Bar Association since the NBA was aware of the software problem which the commission was having and got information that the NBA was not behind the threat to picket the commission.

They claimed that their investigation revealed that a particular lawyer whose conduct was unbecoming of a lawyer was behind the protest which they said had nothing to do with the services of the commission but a carry over of a pending legal matter instituted by the lawyer against the management of the commission.

Both officials of the CAC stated that the lawyer stripped his clothing at the commission in a manner that suggests that all may not be well with him and had been making demands not in any way related to the services of the commission on the management.

The demands, they said, were blatantly refused.

Details of the demands were however not disclosed.

The officials stated that the group’s plan to picket the premises collapsed when executives of the NBA came around and prevailed on the protesters not to execute their threats as the association is not part of the matter.

The group subsequently resorted to harassing customers who wanted to come in and transact their businesses at the commission.

Mr Garba stated that the consultant handling their software had been directed to do an upgrade on the 2004 version they are currently running on which has become inadequate in handling the bulk of transactions handled by the commission.

He further explained that the delay being witnessed currently is due to data clearing exercise which the commission did recently which affected some requests for availability and company name reservations.

He, however, said measures had been put in place in the short time to address the affected requests by Friday.

By Nnamdi Felix / Abuja