Valentina Mintah is the Chief Executive Officer of WestBlue Consulting, the company that designed three platforms for the Nigeria Customs Service; the Single Window, PAAR, and the Nigerian Trade Hub. She is currently handling a similar project in Ghana. She hosted some Nigerian maritime journalists recently in Accra, Ghana, where she compared the Single Window project in Nigeria and in Ghana. She also spoke on other sundry issues.
”In two years of PAAR, revenue collection went up by 20 percent, government saved 25million Dollars a month from fees that were hitherto being paid to the Destination Inspection (DI) companies”
What is West Blue Consulting all about?
We are primarily an IT firm that works on automating processes. We are generalist, but we tend to have specialization in Customs and trade facilitation, and that is what we have been known for. Generally, we differentiate ourselves from others because we don’t believe IT is the end result, it’s only an enabler, not the end result itself. So we try to understand everything else before we bring IT into it. In our processes, we always adopt the four P’s; we look at the People first. We ask ourselves, who is going to use the system? How do they think? How do they work at the moment? What are they looking for? What are their current challenges? Now being African, we understand our own people, we understand our challenges, and we understand our strength and weaknesses. That is why we excel in our operations. We try to understand how people work so that we don’t change it completely but benchmark it on international standards. We also look at the operators; who is going to make the system work? How do they currently work? What do they like about what they are doing and what they don’t like? And what other people see as what they (operators) don’t like about the system, and then we look for solutions. We also look at Processes; how are things being done currently? Could they be done in a better way? Could they be done the same way but in a faster way? Or does the system need a radical change from the way it is being done? We do that in consultation with the owners of the processes and the beneficiaries of the processes. We also look at the Platforms, what system are we using to deliver those processes for those people? You cannot go to the United States or Azerbaijan and think their IT system will work in places like Sweden or Ghana or Nigeria. In implementing our systems, we also look at the Policy. We ask ourselves, what is the legal framework? What are the bottlenecks? We don’t want to put up a system that will compromise the very users that we are trying to support.
What is the concept behind PAAR and the Single Window?
The Pre-Arrival regime which is a risk management tool in the trade supply chain and then the National Single Window in general, these two systems capture everything that is needed to be known if somebody wants to import goods or export goods, or even have a transit of cargoes. When you look at this system, you can imagine how many agencies of government that are involved in the cargo clearance or export system. In most countries, it’s about 20 government agencies, in most countries, we have the Customs, to veterinary services, food and drug handling agencies, National Security; everybody has a role to play in the international trade supply chain. But because of the fact that they have a role to play, that does not mean they should hinder the movement of the goods. The essence of the National Single Window is to reduce the time and cost of doing business across borders. If there are about 10 agencies regulating trade at the ports, why should an importer go to all the 10 of them, telling them this is my name, this is my consignee, this is the product etc. All those are already stated in the form, so why should an importer go and fill different forms for different agencies of government? There is really no need for all of that in this digital world that we are living in. The National Single Window is a central platform where an importer/exporter could just access all this agencies of government. That they are all on the same platform does not mean they don’t maintain their mandates. They still maintain their mandates. The platforms just provides avenue to share timely information. This reduces the traffic involved in trade. That is the concept behind the Single Window platform.
Back home in Nigeria, it appears the Single Window is not effective, other government agencies have refused to cue in
It is not a nice thing to see all the efforts we had to put in, even from the stakeholders in the beginning, and not to see the effect fully on ground, but this has to do with the change in management and this also has to do with the buy-in from the top, there is no buy-in (political will) from the government, it is a national agenda and it has to be treated so, when this is done, everybody falls in line.
Are you aware that the Nigeria Customs officers still query PAAR issued by them?
Change management is the key aspect of all these, the customs administration have been more of a control agency as opposed to being a service provider. So you had this Destination Inspection companies who issued this advisory document (RAR) which customs may accept or may not accept. Already, the Nigeria Customs has a mind-set of policing, but now there is an era of change where the document (PAAR) is now being issued by Customs, but the field officers still hold on to their policing stance. When the document comes from the head office where it is issued to the officer on the field, his first instinct is to challenge it, but you cannot challenge it because it is your institution that issued that document. So, for them to stop doing this, it will take time and education, an officer must have a justifiable reason to override PAAR, if on physical evidence, the goods do not tally with the document, then the officer has every right to challenge PAAR. There is need for education of officers on the field.
What are the successes you recorded from Single Window in Nigeria?
We have quite a number of testimonies in Nigeria, but there is one I will tell you, there are some couple of young graduates we started working with, they didn’t know anything about the domain; IT experience, but one of them is now world known WCO-accredited expert in Single Window in less than two years. So we don’t believe in hoarding knowledge, she is the only black African in that group, a one star officer.
What were the challenges?
In Nigeria, the will at the operational level, from Customs and other individuals was excellent. However, we did not have the political will from the top. The lack of political will from the top tend to breed undesirable elements who opposed the Single Window concept. At a point, there was some sabotage. It was either people did not understand the concept or deliberately kicked against it. However, we still recorded a lot of success in Nigeria, the country Nigeria became a blazing light and got World Customs Organisation (WCO) recommendations. The WCO asked other Customs administrations to emulate Nigeria. That was really a high point for us back then. In two years, revenue collection went up by 20 per cent. Government saved 25million Dollars a month from fees that were hitherto being paid to the Destination Inspection (DI) companies who were handling the Risk Assessment Report for Customs. So despite those challenges, these were significant results that trailed the single window project. In Ghana, it was a personal attack, even before the project started; there was a personal attack on WestBlue and its background which has to do with my person. What we found out was that those undesirable elements in Nigeria decided to join the undesirable elements in Ghana to make their lies a bigger story, Nigerians were telling the Ghanaian government to be aware of this company that has been thrown out of Nigeria. For me, being an African, it was such a painful experience. However, we soldiered on because we knew the result will speak for us.
PAAR takes how long to come out in Ghana?
In 2015, Ghana Customs Authority exceeded their revenue target which was not done in 2014, despite all the changes they had to go through and the bashing. Before now, PAAR was taking two weeks, but we are pleased to say that for some compliant traders they get it within two hours.
Where did you leave the Nigeria customs?
We haven’t left, we are still in Nigeria, we have the Nigerian Trade Hub which is a single window for trade information, the portal is experiencing more than 80,000 hots per month from across all countries, it is a very powerful tool that is still underutilized, I say so because it is the first time you will get into the psyche of a would-be trader, because declarations is when the transaction is being done.
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