By MARTHA AGAS

The Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) has announced an annual recruitment cycle and released the final list of 3,852 successful candidates for its 2024/2025 recruitment exercise.

The Comptroller-General(C-G) of the NCS, Bashir Adeniyi, stated this on Tuesday at the service’s headquarters in Abuja during a news conference on the release of the final list of successful candidates.

Adeniyi said the annual recruitment cycle would help the service align its manpower planning with anticipated retirements, rather than responding to staffing gaps as they arise.

He said the service would work with relevant agencies, including the Federal Character Commission, and ensure budgets reflected the plan to forestall administrative impediments that could compromise its implementation.

“Recruitment will no longer be an occasional event undertaken every several years. It will be a standing, predictable, yearly process.

“The 2026 Recruitment Exercise will open later this year and it is my firm intention that it will be completed within a single calendar year from advertisement to final list.

“The systems, the screening architecture and the verification processes built during this exercise now exist and they will not have to be built again,” he said.

He said the annual cycle would enable the service to plan manpower needs based on known retirements, while giving unsuccessful applicants certainty about when the next recruitment opportunity would arise.

According to him, the 2024/2025 exercise received 573,680 applications for 3,852 positions, representing an overall success rate of 0.67 per cent, or about one successful candidate for every 148 applicants.

He said 1,275 candidates were selected for the Superintendent Cadre, 367 for the Inspectorate Cadre and 2,210 for the Customs Assistant Cadre.

On geographical distribution, the C-G said all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory were represented in the final list.

He said each state received 105 places, comprising 35 in the Superintendent Cadre, 10 in the Inspectorate Cadre and 60 in the Customs Assistant Cadre, while the FCT received 72 places.

He said the Federal Character principle was applied in full, adding that no place was allocated at the discretion of any officer.

On gender, the NCS boss said women accounted for 839 of the successful candidates, representing 21.8 per cent of the intake.

He said women had constituted 21.2 per cent of total applications, adding that the service would work deliberately to attract more qualified women into enforcement roles in future recruitment exercises.

He said the median age of successful candidates was 26 years, with close to three-quarters of the candidates below 30.

The C-G said the exercise took longer than planned because of the volume of applications and the need to subject candidates to several stages of scrutiny.

He said the process included application screening, computer-based examination and verification of credentials against the national identity database.

“Several factors extended the timeline. The volume alone was extraordinary: the service received 573,680 applications for 3,852 places.

“Every one of those applications had to be received, verified and assessed.

“The service also carried over this same period, an unusually high rate of retirement and turnover among its senior and management cadre, which placed real strain on the administrative machinery that runs an exercise of this size,” he explained.

The successful candidates, he said, would proceed to physical and medical assessments, as well as a final review at Board level, he said.

He said the candidates would be contacted directly through the contact details provided in their applications and urged them to rely only on the official channels of the service.

Adeniyi also warned applicants against paying anyone for recruitment, stressing that recruitment into the NCS was free and based on merit.

“Anyone who solicits payment on our behalf is a criminal and should be reported to the service and to the security agencies,” he said.

He congratulated the successful candidates, saying they were expected to uphold the proud tradition and high standards of the NCS. (NAN)

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