The Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) at the weekend explained that its new policy on the delivery of company registration certificates through courier services or electronically was borne out of the need to protect its workers and the customers against the ravaging COVID-19 pandemic.

It would be recalled that customers and lawyers on Thursday had embarked on a protest in front of the CAC headquarters building at Tigris Crescent, Abuja over what they described as the dictatorial style of administration of the Registrar General of CAC, Alhaji Garba Abubakar.

The protesting lawyers accused the leadership of CAC of frustrating President Muhammadu Buhari’s Ease of Doing Business reforms through the introduction of courier services, which they argued that the cost would be borne by their clients.

In a swift reaction to these allegations by the aggrieved customers, Abubakar maintained that the company registration certificates would henceforth be sent to customers through courier services or electronically to avoid physical contact with clients.

He said since the lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic 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.

According to him, “We are responsible institution. We have to abide by government directives. We cannot continue with this crowd in this place and some things 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 August 10, 2020 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 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 protocols issued by the Federal Government on physical distancing and maximum number of persons that should be at a place at a time.

“It was because of these concerns and the fact that based on the safety protocols, we are not supposed to work with the full complement of our staff.

“The government guidelines say only officers on level 14 and above should be coming to the office and they work from 8am to 2pm.

“For organisation like ours that registers companies, maintains record of companies and also issue information to members of the public, it has been quite challenging because in the past, we have service timeline where most of these services are delivered within 24 hours.

“With this restriction on the number of personnel and the working hours, it is impossible to meet those time lines.

“So we are forced to suspend those service timelines and we made that known to the customers.

“It is normal the expectation is high. Some of us pretend as if we are not in a pandemic, we are expected to deliver as if the situation is normal.

“We try to impress on the customers to understand that these are unusual times and in as much as we want efficient services, it is not possible under the present circumstance.

“What we do now is we have to suspend physical contact for some transactions 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 said.

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