by Akodu Oluwaponmile
Business activities at the
headquarters of the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) in Abuja were brought to
a standstill early morning monday as lawyers and other customers protested over
alleged poor service by the organisation.
The lawyers, along with
members of the Institute of Chartered Accounts of Nigeria (ICAN) and Chartered
Institute of Secretaries of Nigeria (CISN), during the protest called on
President Goodluck Jonathan to order the immediate sack of the management of
the corporations for alleged incompetence.
One of the protesting
lawyers, Osakwe, who spoke on behalf of his colleagues, accusing the Registrar
General of CAC, Bello Mahmud, of not doing enough to resolve the crisis that
resulted in loss of valuable data from prospective applicants for business
registration in the past two months.
“For more than two months, normal services in CAC have
been deteriorating,” Mr. Osakwe said, “Contrary to
information in the CAC website that applications for reservation of business
name and business incorporation would be completed within three hours and three
days respectively, its takes a minimum of two months.
“CAC claim is not in tandem with the reality on the
ground. The truth is that nothing is working in CAC. There is total collapse of
their Internet connectivity service. Valuable data are lost, creating confusion
in the system between lawyers and their clients. The claim that CAC was
upgrading its system to a bigger one is false.”
According to him,
applications for name search availability sent in to the CAC system more than
two months ago are still pending approval.
He said that they decided to
embark on the protest march following the enormous pressures they had been
exposed from their clients based on claims by CAC management that the system
was working.
“Often, people are asked to make multiple applications
for filings as a result of loss of data. Nobody is able to say what is really
wrong with the system. Asking people to pay money to re-apply for availability
after their previous applications were lost amounts to extortion. We have
spoken against it.
But, our resolve to protest
today (yesterday) was to demand that the entire management of CAC be removed to
enable the system to be sanitised for efficient services,”
Osakwe said.
However, the Registrar
General of CAC, Bello Mahmud, blamed the difficulties encountered by customers
in the last three weeks on the refusal of the service provider and vendor to
the corporation, who refused to upgrade the registration platform with modern
operational software.
Blaming the crisis on lack of
understanding and activities of those he called mischief makers, the office of
the Registrar General acknowledged the challenges in the CAC system and said it
was as a result of the transition from the old software to a new one.
“CAC is proud to say that it is one of the few public
institutions that give the best service to its customers,”
Mr. Mahmud said.
“We acknowledge there are challenges in the system, but
it is as a result of the transition from the old software.
“For a long time, CAC management has not been
comfortable with the software used by the vendor, which started working since
2004. Since he (the vendor) refused to modify the system, we opted for a total
upgrade to the modern software to enable us serve our customers better.
“Two days after the Federal Government announced CAC
was transiting to a new system by October 1, 2014, the vendor decided to shut
the system down for 14 days contrary to the existing agreement with him. The
shutdown is what created the backlog of applications that the lawyers are
protesting about,” he said.
He said since the software
vendor had refused to upgrade the platform over these years, CAC decided to pay
him off and terminate the contract, while a new software from the government
has since been installed to enable people register their companies from any
part of the world with ease.
Though Mahmud said the new
system did not contain an e-payment module, he assured prospective customers
that his management was making extra efforts to clear the backlog latest by the
end of Tuesday to allow the system to continue to run without hitches.
“CAC has started using the new software received from
government. Full services have been restored. As I am talking to you, the
software can register companies within 24 hours. What is left now is the
software that would enable the Commission implement e-payment, which would be
put in place before the end of the month, latest before October 2, to allow
customers pay and obtain CAC services from anywhere with ease,”
he said.
He denied allegation of loss
of CAC data by the lawyers, saying the only period customers had difficulty
accessing the system was during the two weeks the vendor shut the system down
and people were asked to come with their receipts and re-apply.
However, flaunting several
copies of applications for businesses he filed on behalf of his clients, Bassey
Etukudo of Legal Temple and Templars, said the CAC management was economical
with the truth over the matter.
“I have copies of these applications since July 13,
2014. Having waited for over 60 days, the application expired and I was asked
to re-apply. The system rejected the fresh application. If CAC had a back-up
system, there should not be the issue of the system not recognising the same
applications it earlier approved.
“Since then, I have re-applied for more than three
times with the same response. Yet, we are under pressure from clients for
inability to get the registrations completed,”
Mr. Etukudo said.
Another lawyer, Chidi Dim,
said prior to the crisis, CAC was able to generate registration certificates.
But since the introduction of the new system, the quality of certificates
issued have been sub-standard.
He said this has worsened the
country’s image in the eyes of prospective investors,
particularly from outside the country, whose applications from business
registration have not been approved more than two months since they were filed.
“This is unacceptable to most lawyers, because they
have come under serious pressures from their clients,”
Mr. Dim said. “The only way out of the crisis is for the Registrar
General and his management to resign from office. We call on the
President to intervene and save the country the embarrassment before
foreigners,” he said.
However, a representative of
the software service provider, DTI, Mathew Idoni, blamed the CAC management for
the crisis, accusing it of refusing to pay debts owed the company.
“When a debtor does not want to pay his debt, when the
person being owed wants to leave, what he does is to take what belongs to him
till they decide to pay,” Mr. Idoni said.
“The problem with CAC is that they do not want to pay
their bills, but they are using their power to put another system there. In
that case, we decided to leave, but we did not want to leave with our tail
between our legs. We wanted to leave with our dignity.
“(Segun) Aganga (Minister of Trade and Investment) even
announced that he was going to go live with the new system. If they have
developed the new system and is not working, let them call us back and let
everything return to normal.
“They are owing us money. They know the truth. They owe
us over $78million. Last month, we borrowed money from Diamond Bank to pay
salaries, and we paid $4million as interest for that. I owe my workers a
responsibility to pay their salaries.
He denied that DTI refused to
update the software and the system as CAC claimed. “They
wanted to put up software, but they do not
know that what was put there was not just software, it was a customised
solution, especially for that system". “If they want to solve
the problem, they should call us back and we sit down and everybody treats
everybody with respect and we iron out the issues and everything would be
fixed" He added.
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