The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), has in recent past sent directors that have spent eight 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.
