The Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) has announced plans to conduct recruitment exercises annually as part of efforts to improve workforce planning, while releasing the final list of 3,852 successful candidates for its 2024/2025 recruitment exercise.
The Comptroller-General of Customs, Bashir Adeniyi, announced the development on Tuesday at the service’s headquarters in Abuja during a news conference on the release of the final list. He said the annual recruitment cycle would enable the service to align its manpower planning with anticipated retirements instead of responding to staffing gaps after they occur.
Adeniyi said the NCS would work with relevant agencies, including the Federal Character Commission, while ensuring that future budgets reflected the planned recruitment cycle.
“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.
According to Adeniyi, the annual recruitment process would allow the service to plan its manpower requirements based on known retirements while providing unsuccessful applicants with certainty about when the next recruitment opportunity would be available.
The Customs boss said the 2024/2025 recruitment exercise attracted 573,680 applications for 3,852 available positions, representing a success rate of 0.67 per cent.
He said this meant that approximately one candidate was successful for every 148 applicants.
A breakdown of the final list showed that 1,275 candidates were selected for the Superintendent Cadre, 367 for the Inspectorate Cadre and 2,210 for the Customs Assistant Cadre.
Adeniyi said all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) were represented in the final list.
He said each state received 105 places, comprising 35 positions in the Superintendent Cadre, 10 in the Inspectorate Cadre and 60 in the Customs Assistant Cadre, while the FCT received 72 places.
According to him, the Federal Character principle was fully applied during the recruitment exercise, adding that no position was allocated at the discretion of any officer.
On gender representation, Adeniyi said 839 women were among the successful candidates, accounting for 21.8 per cent of the total intake.
He said women made up 21.2 per cent of all applicants and added that the service would make deliberate efforts to attract more qualified women into enforcement roles in future recruitment exercises.
The Comptroller-General said the median age of successful candidates was 26 years, while nearly three-quarters were below the age of 30.
Adeniyi said the recruitment process took longer than initially planned because of the high volume of applications and the need to subject candidates to multiple stages of screening and verification.
According to him, the process included application screening, a computer-based examination and verification of candidates’ 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 said.
Adeniyi said the successful candidates would proceed to physical and medical assessments before a final review by the Customs Board.
He said candidates would be contacted directly through the contact details provided during their applications and urged them to rely only on the service’s official communication channels.
The Customs boss warned applicants against paying anyone for recruitment, stressing that employment into the NCS was free and based strictly 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.
Adeniyi congratulated the successful candidates and urged them to uphold the standards and traditions of the Nigeria Customs Service.
