The director-general, National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), AVM Muhammadu Muhammed (retd.), has disclosed that he, upon assumption of office during the Covid-19 period, inherited a poorly motivated staff who were mutually suspicious of one another in addition to “poor working environment, lack of serviceable equipment” among others.
The NEMA boss made the disclosure Wednesday in Abuja while presenting highlights of the agency’s road map to the staff at a special interactive session.
According to him, to compound the problems, there was “poor perception of the image of the agency by the public, poor relations with our supervising ministry, the National Assembly committees and lack of intra and inter-agency coordination and collaboration.”
He said, “Emergency response was poor, Emergency response was poor; the call centre for emergency calls was inactive and the two air ambulances were grounded. In confronting these challenges, the management team spent many hours, sometimes into the nights, to develop strategies to improve on service delivery. Our efforts in the last few months have helped us to improve in some areas. For others, it is still work in progress.
Our modest achievements include the following: We have established the desired relationship with our ministry; we have engaged the National Assembly as partners in the conduct of our affairs; we are working on intra and inter departmental collaboration; we settled all verifiable Staff claims that have been pending for couple of years.”
Continuing, he said: “We are also resolving contract liabilities that have been lingering since 2017; we reactivated many operational equipment as well as making progress in procuring operational vehicles.
Effort is now being made to bring home the fixed wing air ambulance from maintenance, while we are working on sending the helicopter for maintenance. We have also set the following targets for ourselves; awareness campaign to target 100% of Nigerians on reducing the risk of flooding and other disasters,” among other initiatives “aimed at restoring the public confidence in the agency.”
