By Evelyn Okakwu.
The appointment of Mr. Peter Nwakpa Nwafia as Secretary, Public Complaints Commission (PCC), has set the Association of Senior Civil Servants of Nigeria (ASSCN) and the federal government on a collision course.
The ASSCN has threatened a strike if the appointment is not reversed. According to it, Mr. Nwafia’s selection was “illegal and offensive”.
A statement by the union’s secretary, Comrade Alade Bashir Lawal, has alleged that the officer was “compulsorily retired” by his former employer, the Ebonyi state government, but then he was “smuggled” into the federal civil service as a director, over and above his superiors who were still assistant directors and deputy directors.
Even as director in the Federal Ministry of labour, Mr. Nwafia spent “just few months” in that position and was appointed as secretary to the PCC, which already had “17 substantive directors” who were the officer’s seniors”, said Lawal.
According to Lawal, the ASCN took up the matter with the Chairman of PCC but nothing was done afterwards to “redress the anomaly”.
After a 21-day ultimatum, warning of an industrial action by ASCN if Mr. Nwafia was removed, the Federal Ministry of Labour and Productivity eventually came into the matter but three meetings of stakeholders failed to resolve the matter one way or the other, Lawal said.
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