UN ready to accredit our new correspondent – NAN

The statement said Isabelle Broyer, Chief of Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit of the global body has expressed her readiness to receive the new staff in New York. It added that the  letter from the United Nations office provided detailed steps that the NAN staff should take to accomplish necessary documentation. “We will be happy to […]

The statement said Isabelle Broyer, Chief of Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit of the global body has expressed her readiness to receive the new staff in New York. It added that the  letter from the United Nations office provided detailed steps that the NAN staff should take to accomplish necessary documentation.
 “We will be happy to provide an accreditation to Mr. Rotimi Ijikanmi. Please ensure that he also fills out our online form.  Once in New York, Mr. Ijikanmi should go to the Pass and ID office to get his accreditation and should bring with him his passport,” the statement said.
It would be recalled that NAN last week was enmeshed in a controversy surrounding the closure of the office  that was allocated to it at the UN.
Its Managing Director, Mr Ima Niboro, who was shocked by news of the development, said  “We are not aware of this development. As we speak, Nigeria’s Permanent Representative to the UN is also not aware of this. We have our own NAN property in New York. So this has nothing to do with our operations”
He argued that nobody from the UN Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit (MALU) had communicated to the news agency or Nigeria’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations (UN) in New York on the shutdown of the office space allocated to NAN.  
But it was gathered that the United Nations Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit (MALU) had alleged that under the rules of engagement NAN had erred in its operation of the office space given to it free by the world body.
Head of the UN Media Unit, Ms. Isabelle Broyer, was reported to have said the office had been reassigned to a media organisation from another country.
Unconfirmed report said the agency has problems with financial controls and its staff are being owed salaries. It was also reported that NAN’s financial condition was not that good and it can no longer sustain its offices around the world.
However, the news agency’s Editor-In-Chief, Malam Lawal Ado, in a statement last week  said “NAN has not closed its operations in New York. Indeed, it is in the process of expanding its operations in strategic countries beyond its present locations.”
The statement said that the agency also owned and maintained an official property within New York different from the office space made available to it by the United Nations. “The suggestion in the report that an audit report highlighted ‘problems with financial controls’ may be correct since there is a financial audit report covering 2012 and 2013 operations at NAN, but they refer to the years pre-dating the present management. The report, however, created imaginary staff ‘being owed several months in salaries’.
 “NAN staff, like all other Federal Government personnel, receive their salaries as and when due from the consolidated, service wide salaries vote. We have also embarked on wide ranging stakeholder engagement to ensure that critical funding windows are opened to the agency for the work at hand. There is work to be done at NAN, and its new management has its sleeves rolled up for the challenges ahead,” the statement reads.