Lawyers protest server failure at CAC

The lawyers, who are accredited users of the CAC, say it now takes between one and three months to process applications while business name availability search, which ought to take 24 hours, now takes between three weeks and one month.Barristers Ben Nnordi and Josephine Ehigie, who spoke to Daily Trust at the premises of the […]

The lawyers, who are accredited users of the CAC, say it now takes between one and three months to process applications while business name availability search, which ought to take 24 hours, now takes between three weeks and one month.
Barristers Ben Nnordi and Josephine Ehigie, who spoke to Daily Trust at the premises of the CAC headquarters in Abuja, said they encounter a lot of difficulties while waiting for their requests to be processed.
“The services have been poor. Clients have been abusing lawyers, yet nobody is telling us what is happening,” said Victoria Ukot, another lawyer who is regular at the CAC.
The lawyers called for urgent action to be taken to rectify the situation because of the place of CAC in doing business in Nigeria. They said  lawyers file about 1,200 requests for ‘Availables’ each day. They said  the figures have dropped drastically with the present level of service.
But reacting to the complaints raised by the lawyers, Churchill Williams, the Director of Public Affairs of CAC, who spoke on behalf of the Registrar General of the commission, Alhaji Mahmud Bello, said the disruption in the CAC network server was a result of attempt to sabotage the efforts of the commission to “deploy a new online registration system” to be powered by the National Communications Communication (NCC).
He said the commission is doing all it can to configure a new registration software for processing of company applications by Monday August 25 to meet the federal government’s policy on 24 hours business registration as obtains in other parts of the world.
The Minister of Trade and Investment, Mr Olusegun Aganga, in 2012 announced the federal government’s plans to reduce bottlenecks around doing business in Nigeria through a 24-hour business registration policy.