The Nigeria Customs Service {NCS}, has explained that it is not changing its uniform but is only introducing another one to be worn by officers who are working in an office or at the airport.
The Public Relations Officer of the Service, DC Joseph Attah stated that the uniform would not be worn by its operatives on patrol, adding that the additional uniform was introduced so that Customs operatives would not have to wear one uniform all through the month. The plan for the NCS to have an additional uniform had been in the view for some time now with different samples considered until the management agreed with that which was recently made public.
Attah started with this question: “Other uniformed organisations, don’t they have two or three different wears that they can use in different situations and on different assignments?” before saying, “We only introduced additional new dress not a change of uniform. It can be worn when you’re working in an office, maybe in an airport or depending on the type of assignment. Of course, you know you can’t wear this one to patrol. If you look at Air force, you look at Navy, you look at the Police, you’ll discover that they have different colours of uniform. If you even look at the Immigration, there are different colours. For some time now, Customs is just one and you keep wearing one thing from the first day of the month to the last day of the month. This thing has been in the pipeline. We have been discussing it. We have seen samples and management had gone through them for a very long time. Finally, they said “it’s okay, we can go public now”. And even while going public, we only used two people to wear it and go public and we released a press statement.
On whether all personnel of the Service would immediately start putting on the uniform, the Customs spokesman said, “The additional uniform will still go round but for now we are saying that only commissioned officers will start wearing it. Patrol officers will not use the new uniform”.
