Over five million post office mail boxes may have been abandoned by their previous users following the advent of the Internet as a means of communication, investigations have revealed.
Also, it has been observed that over 10million letters stuffed in those mail boxes have been left at the mercy of postmasters, who could randomly dispose them because their owners had abandoned them in the past six years.
In most cases, it was gathered that postmasters had to painstakingly make contacts with some owners of the mails in an attempt to clear them. Post offices are directly under the Ministry of Communications. The mail boxes, according to our findings, include Private Mail Bags, and sundry boxes. Lagos alone has over 20 post offices/postal agencies, where all these abandoned letters can be found; thousands of others are known to have been scattered across the country.
A visit to Agege and Ikeja post offices, respectively, revealed that out of over 5000 boxes traced to the two locations, less than 50 of them were upto-date while tons of letters stuffed in them were struggling for space.
Many of the boxes, it was observed, had gathered dust while their iron covers rot away.
At the Ikeja Post Office, a lot of valuables such as Warrant and Dividend Share Certificates as well as magazines and journals from some foreign professional bodies, have been left unclaimed by their owners in most of the letter boxes.
“What we are doing here is just skeletal as the Internet is what is in vogue as a means of communication. People now prefer to communicate using their mobile phones than to come here and buy envelopes and stamps for the purpose of posting letters,” an official said.
Asked what usually became of the ton of mails stuffed in those boxes, the official said that whenever they were directed came from the Marina, Lagos head office, to dispose of them, they usually complied.
A source added that “between N7,000 and N10,000 would be required to get a post office box, after the applicant must have submitted photocopies of his driver’s license, international passport or National Identity Card, as the case may be, for the processing. It takes about a week to process.”
At the Marina General Post Office, our Correspondent was told that Speedpost being maintained by the government remained the most reliable arm of the business, “since there are several privately owned others that have continually made competition so tight.”
The story is not different at the Agbara Post Office in Ogun State, where thousands of boxes had become covered with cobwebs.
An attendant at the post office told our correspondent that, “the Post Office is simply living on its past glory as nobody appears to be interested in what has been going on there. We have both Postal and Money Orders running into several millions of naira, but nobody is interested in them any longer .In this age of technology, people preferred to transfer money, using their mobile phones.”
The Minister for Communications, Alhaji Adebayo Shittu, could not be reached for comments.
