How DCG Nwafor is Discreetly Denied Customs Comptroller-General Position
DCG B.U. Nwafor, an accomplished and highly respected officer from Anambra State, had been the natural successor to the current Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Customs Service, Bashir Adewale Adeniyi. Her professional record is nothing short of exemplary; a career marked by discipline, integrity, and quiet excellence. She has risen through the ranks with dignity, and by every standard of merit and service, she was next in line.
However, in a deeply disappointing twist, DCG Nwafor has now been denied this long-earned elevation following the recent one-year tenure extension quietly granted to CG Adeniyi. That single administrative decision has effectively blocked her path. With her retirement due in October 2026, the timing of the extension appears less like routine procedure and more like a calculated move to edge her out of contention.
Now, DCG K.I. Adeola is being positioned as the likely successor after Nwafor’s retirement, a succession plan that casts a shadow over the ideals of meritocracy and fairness. It feels less like an honest oversight and more like a deliberate bypass.
This is not how to build a united nation. This is not how to restore trust in our institutions after the divisions and selective appointments of the Buhari era, an era many remember as a time of wounded national spirit, where merit was too often sacrificed on the altar of regional and political interests.
This is not even how to promote ethnic confidence, especially for us from the South West. Respect for one’s own ethnic nationality cannot be built by denying another their rightful place.
As Thomas Paine once warned: “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”
The Nigerian Civil War may have ended nearly sixty years ago, yet its ghost still haunts our institutions. The quiet sidelining of a qualified Igbo woman from ascending to the highest position in Customs leadership sends a deeply troubling signal, one that suggests that competence still plays second fiddle to identity politics.
Even more troubling is the silence from many Igbo leaders within the ruling party, the APC, a silence that borders on complicity. When injustice is disguised as procedure and goes unchallenged, it erodes the moral foundation of governance.
We cannot build a truly inclusive nation when merit is routinely overruled by political convenience. We cannot speak of unity while practising subtle exclusion. True unity demands more than rhetoric, it requires courage, fairness, and the will to act in the national interest, even when it is inconvenient.
Let history record this not as another quiet betrayal, but as a call to conscience. Nigeria must choose whether it will be governed by fairness and merit or by expediency and bias.
By Jimoh Olusegun, Ilesha
