Abuja: Mr Ekpo Nta, the Chairman , National Salaries, Income and Wages Commission ( (NSIWC), on Thursday advised the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) to intensify its effort in rebranding the agency’s operations.
According to Nta, rebranding the agency’s operations will attract more Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) which will boost productivity and enhance staff welfare.
Nta gave the advice when the Managing Director of NAN, Mr Buki Ponle led other management staff on a visit to the chairman of the commission.
“ I know the huge infrastructure you have on ground and these things have not been translated to take home. The good change has to come from NAN.
“So you have to rebrand yourselves using the huge institutional advantages you have to repackage.
“I know how you feel, you graduated with certain people and you see them, children and contemporaries are now earning more than you. Because of this, you will not say you will not work in NAN.
“Coming to plant a seed, you are the one who will water the seed and turn the place to what it is, ‘’ he said.
According to him, ideas rule the world and you need to bring in consultants to look at your strength and how to translate it into welfare packages.
“We have to be very innovative and know how we tend to enhance our resources and what rule the world is communication and you are masters of it, ‘’ he said.
He said the essence of the productivity carried out by the commission was to help NAN look outside the box and see what could be done.
He said there was ongoing harmonisation in the public service and we expect that when the report was released, it would cut across everybody, so “lets work on our inner strength first and rebrand.
According to Nta, when the report is released, we will look at the outcome of the report, and we will follow the act of the commission.
He said that in the places where had worked, he insisted that NAN must come first.
“ We won’t do anything without NAN and that is the same thing I am doing here too , there is no event without NAN representative being present.
“I hold you in high esteem and we know what NAN is today, you can publish anything in this country people won’t believe until they see that of NAN.
“Regrettably you have trained people from the entire sector and they have moved to higher financial rewards, they cannot say they were not trained by NAN.
“This is almost like a tragedy because NAN, NTA and FRCN were in a class and with the trend of denotative engineering, splitter groups and small groups have gotten the headlines
According to Nta, when a journalist is not trained, what you say can be misquoted and create a problem in the country.
“ And most of the problems we have had been created by people who doesn’t have any background in journalism and do not have any name to protect, that is rather unfortunate, ‘’ he said
Earlier, the Managing Director of NAN, Mr Buki Ponle, said his visit to the Commission was to solicit for an enhanced welfare package for staff of the age in order to boost productivity and move the agency forward.
Ponle said that one thing that had been consistent with NAN was to enhance productivity of workers.
“When we started in 1978, we had little or nothing“ But we worked and within months we were known all over the world not just in Nigeria
“At that point, we had about 10 offices outside Nigeria because of paucity of funds, the number has dropped to three but we are planning to reinvigorate those centres outside Nigeria.
“We have offices even in the 36 states of the federation, then it was 19, where we have offices now , we projected that they will be state capitals, we have district offices in those states.
“When I came on board in 2020, I saw that it wasn’t as vibrant as it was before and one thing we identified was because workers were not compensated in terms of welfare , the morale was very down.
“We started with contemporaries, like Central Bank of Nigeria(CBN), Nigeria Port Authority (NPA).
“No matter how, they are human beings when they see their contemporaries in other areas and they know that they are working assiduously without remuneration, they tend to lose that morale.
“We rallied round and try to boost their morale asking them to just go on and I can assure our chairman that now that standard we used to have had come up and we are surpassing that standard.
According to Ponle, when things are not commensurate with what your expectations are, there is no doubt that people want to fall back to the old days.
“Today, we are here to thank you and your able team for injecting into us what will always enhance the productivity and morale, what will always make us to be different from others.
“We did something my predecessor did around 2014, the late Remi Oyo to rally staff together to ensure that they don’t just fall by the way side.
“We are here chairman, to enlist your support in our stride to make things better in NAN.
“We want to increase from where we are now and we still want to go further in terms of productivity and we also want something that will make the workers smile.
“We believe you can do it and you have been doing it directly or indirectly for us but we have come to seek your face to enable our prayers to be answered.
“ And, we will always rely on you because we know that as a father you know where our shoes pinch and we believe our prayers will be answered.” (NAN) (www.nannew.ng
