Nigerian Association of Air Freight Forwarders and Consolidators (NAFFAC) is one of the five associations that were registered by the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding of Nigeria (CRFFN). In this interview, the President General, Mr C.A. Thomas Agubamah told Shipping Position Daily‘s correspondent, Roland Ekama, about what stakeholders need to know about the airport-based outfit, its peculiarities and other relevant sundry issues
Can you please give us an insight into the activities NAFFAC ?
Nigerian Association of Air Freight Forwarders and Consolidators (NAFFAC) is one of the five associations that were registered by the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding of Nigeria (CRFFN). In this interview, the President General, Mr C.A. Thomas Agubamah told Shipping Position Daily‘s correspondent, Roland Ekama, about what stakeholders need to know about the airport-based outfit, its peculiarities and other relevant sundry issues
Can you please give us an insight into the activities NAFFAC ?
NAFFAC is not a trading group, but an association of licensed companies and recently we acquired our new national secretariat, precisely in October 2013, last year. As part of some of the activities for 2014, since we moved in, we are still trying to give the place a perfect touch and as you can see for yourself we are still doing some fitting repair work in the secretariat. We have a conference hall for meetings whenever it is necessary, we also have offices for the Lagos Chapter chairman of the association right inside the secretariat, likewise the President General’s office. Though because of financial constraints we could not afford separate offices for national and chapter secretariat. It is what we have at our disposal that we can make use of. At least after a hard day at work, they can come over to network and relax before the end of the day's job. Again, as we speak, there is no public power supply here, but we have our standby generating set. Now in the area of performance, as an association we care for our members and whenever our members are faced with challenges we come to proffer solution to the problem. As regards the nature of our job, it is common for our members to encounter problems, thus we caution them on the dos and don’ts of our operations, thus they are expected to comply to regulations. However what we can do for ourselves is based on our income, we are not as big as ANLCA or NAGAFF because by population they are more than us, by scope they are also more than us and they cover both air , land border and sea freights while we are just within the airport alone. Above all the first half of the year is very fair to us and it can only get better.
Talking about scope and size, what is the strength of NAFFAC?
As an association of companies, you must have a corporate identity and with that as one of our criteria we have a total of 90 companies which you can say are our members though we were about 111, but we lost some of our members through death. Lagos has the largest number of members followed by Calabar, where we have 20 of them doing their jobs diligently. As we speak our Enugu chapter is almost complete, it’s coming up soon.
You seem to have a strong base in the Southern parts of the country, what about in the Northern part which is also strategic to freight forwarding practice?
Yes, we made a strong move to set up a chapter in Kano in 2007 and I can tell you categorically that we must concede that we failed because we got to Kano state late. When we got to Kano state, we found out that almost the people that we had spoken to for them to join us had been absorbed by ANLCA. Prior to some weeks of the flag-off of CRFFN, we went to Kano state, Abuja and even Kaduna to let agents know about the coming of the council vis a vis why they should join us, but in Kano state for instance ,what we found was that most of the people we earlier preached to have been converted by ANLCA, thus they could not join us again and in fact we spent a lot of money in that process; not only in Kano, but in some key states where freight forwarding business is notable. Presently we are not in Kano, but our Abuja chapter is intact.
The CRFFN Act stipulates that for an association to be registered you must have chapters all over the federation where freight forwarding business is practiced. Don't you think your association is not qualified to be accredited?
Let me state clearly that incidentally I was a member of the governing council of CRFFN for four years and if you know about membership of the governing council of CRFFN , you will understand that every freight forwarder in the governing council between 2008 and 2010 are members of ANLCA and I was the only one who represented NAFFAC and later Chief Eugene Nweke from NAGAFF, Dr. Zebulon Ikokhide and I were the only non-members of ANLCA in 2010 to 2012, thus I was the only non-member of ANLCA in the governing council of CRFFN between 2008 and 2010. You will also agree with me that it is only ANLCA that is benefiting from CRFFN in all the freight forwarding associations registered under the council and NAFFAC as a freight forwarding body is only present in all the international airports in the country, because you don't expect our presence to be at the local wing of the airports when you know full well that we are talking about imports and you cannot clear anything from the local airports in the country. But again, the name air freight does not restrict our members to operate in other fields for example the seaports; that is why we do not accept their argument in having chapters all over. For example a country like Benin Republic does not have embassies all over the world, yet they are a member of the United Nations but countries like USA, France, Russia and Germany have their embassies all over the world, yet they are also in the United Nations with the smaller countries like Mozambique and Benin Republic. It is not possible for associations to be of equal strength and size, but they can still come together under one practice to achieve a common goal.
Tell us some of the challenges faced at the airports as regards you operations?
Generally speaking, we don’t have any problem with the agencies of government at the airports, same goes to SAHCOL and NAHCO that is why we always preach to our members about compliance and if there is any issue normally we find solution to it and that is why NAFFAC is not lousy and it’s not a noisy association. Nigeria has the noisiest freight forwarding associations in the world and we don’t want to be part of that noise unnecessary.
There is no Governing Council in place at the moment in CRFFN, what is your take on that?
The problem has to do with ego tripping by some people because people want to live but do not want others to live which has become a problem, again when people want to build empires around themselves due to their strength and size is another problem to those who are not strong or big in that regard. If you remove all these ego trips then there will be no more problem. I was a governing council member for four year because I was elected by freight forwarders in Abuja to represent the aviation and land border zones and I remember that I scored 43 votes against my opponent who scored just one vote; then it has nothing to do with sentiment but after that things changed, everybody was trying to protect their empire and problem started. The issue of how to share money through percentage became a problem. But above all if we can all allow the minister of transport to decide what he wants about the council then others also make their inputs, it will go a long way in solving the problem we have at present in CRFFN. I think we should stop putting unnecessary pressure on the minister to redirect the council's act because CRFFN has done well in discharging its function. However, I think the minister is confused on what to do with the council because overtime we heard election is coming up, the next thing we gathered was that the council was broke etc and you don't expect sister agencies in the industry to fund the council for it to conduct an election. But in my opinion I will say the minister should come up in full strength, and then lift the suspension of transaction fee because the cash strap council needs fund to conduct elections. Apart from that, NAFFAC is not arguing to take the same share with ANLCA and NAGAFF because they are bigger than us, but I know that collection of the fee will yield revenue for the council to put in place a governing body through a substantive election. Truly speaking, I know NAFFAC will not win any sit in the next election of the governing council because when NAFFAC won a slot then, we are in support of the council set goals and achievements. We won the slot because many of the NAGAFF and ANLCA members weren’t really serious about what the council tends to look like, but today everybody understand what the council stands for. Since we don't have the numerical strength, we may end up not being in the next governing council. NAFFAC operates an open hand policy, but above all it is left for the minister to give a clear directive for the management of CRFFN to go ahead and collect the transaction fee and to also notify all the agencies involved like SAHCOL and NAHCO to cooperate with the appointees of the council.
But recently the Nigeria Shippers’ Council stopped the collection of that fee?
That is not the point because the CRFFNis responsible for that role and not the Nigeria Shippers’ Council. The Nigeria Shippers’ Council is not getting it right, it is the minister of transport that has the mandate to instruct the CRFFN to collect or not to collect the transaction fee, the Nigeria Shippers Council as far as I am concerned is hindering the success of CRFFN . With the collection of the fee, by now an election would have been conducted because there will be funds made available for the council to be functional. If CRFFN commences the collection of that fee today, I can tell you that all association will key into the system.
What is position of NAFFAC about the move by the CRFFFN to de-register some associations?
We are not aware of that, but if the council says they want to de register the three smaller associations, then it is not fair on their part because we expect them to encourage us or tell us to buckle up and do things right .It’s a like a student who is not doing well in school, its left for the teacher to encourage that student to read more or ask the student what is the problem with him; then such a student will give reasons for not performing well academically than expel that student immediately. The CRFFN is supposed to give fair hearing to the smaller associations before embarking on such actions. But like I said, we are not aware and there is no letter from the council yet to that effect.
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