Following the protests by lawyers over poor service delivery by the Corporate Affairs Commission, CAC, the agency has promised to clear the backlog of requests within the week.

In a statement made available to the www.icirnigeria.org by the office of the director of public relations of the CAC, Churchill Williams, the commission said that it is working on “a new software that will accommodate e-payment module to ease operations before the end of the month, (which) portends better services for customers.”

According to the statement, the two weeks backlog, which resulted in the protests, was caused by a system shutdown from the commission’s software handler, despite the handler being paid part of his money.

“It was unfortunate that anyone could do this (shut down the system) to government business for two weeks,” the statement read, adding, “(it) was a deliberate attempt to sabotage the on-going efforts to deploy a new on-line registration system by 1st October, 2014 as announce by the Minister,” the agency said in the statement.

Meanwhile, lawyers continued their boycott of the commission Tuesday from 9.00 am to 12.00pm, with a full-scale protest planned for Thursday.

Speaking to our reporter, Ben Nordi, one of the leaders of the protest, said that the reason for having a half day action was to enable members to prepare for a bigger one on Thursday.

“We are going to drive a motorcade from Maitama to the minister’s office because we want to hear from him. We wrote him a letter some weeks ago complaining about the deterioration in service delivery at the CAC but he failed to respond.” Nordi said.

Reacting to the commission’s promise to clear the backlog this week, Nordi said that that will not be enough to avert Thursday’s planned action, insisting that “what we want is sustenance of improved service delivery.”

The lawyers commenced a protest march on the offices of CAC on Monday complaining of poor quality of service delivery by the agency, a situation that had put them in bad light with their clients.

They alleged that the commission tells its customers that services will be delivered within 24 hours but ends up spending several days putting enormous pressure on lawyers who act on behalf of the public.