Following a widespread protest by customers over the new certificate delivery system being adopted by the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), the agency has made some clarifications about the measures that were introduced to curtail the further spread of the Covid-19 pandemic.
CAC on Thursday explained that company registration certificates will henceforth be sent to customers through courier services or electronically to avoid physical contact with clients.
The Registrar General, Garba Abubakar, gave the indication while reacting to issues that led to a protest by some aggrieved customers at the corporate headquarters of the commission in Abuja.
According to him, since the COVID-19 lockdown was eased off by the Federal Government, the premises of the commission has always been overwhelmed with clients which forced the management to take a drastic decision in compliance with the COVID-19 protocols to stop the spread of the pandemic.
“We are responsible institution. We have to abide by government directives. We cannot continue with this crowd in this place and somethings have to give way.
“What we have done is to insist that mailing not have any physical contact with customers any longer.
“From tomorrow all new certificate will be sent through courier companies and the customers will bear the cost because they are paying for transport or buying fuel to drive themselves to this place, they can as well pay the cost of delivery.
From 10th August every other process will be done by mailing” he said.
The Registrar General who noted that only skeletal service is being carried out said the commission will no longer allow outsiders to have access to sensitive documents as practised in the past but operate based on an accepted global standard practices.
“We have been forced to revisit the existing system of dealing with our customers because since the ease of lockdown we have been allowing customers to come to the commission to do their transactions but the crowd is becoming uncontrollable and it appears to negate the COVID-19 protocol issued by the Federal Government on social distancing and maximum number of persons that should be at a place at a time.
“With this restriction on the number of personnel and the working hours, it is impossible to meet those timelines. So we are forced to suspend those service timelines and we made that known to the customers.
“What we do now is we have to suspend physical contact for some transaction like searches. We made it a policy that all search report will now be issued by the commission, our officers will conduct the searches” he further explained.