The Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) has introduced Time Release Study (TRS) at Apapa port.
Speaking during the stakeholders parley to announce the new platform at Apapa customs command yesterday, the coordinator of the platform, Comptroller Wale Adeniyi, said that the platform is what customs all over the world will use to measure how effective their trade facilitation is.
He also said that the platform will help to know if there are laws that can be changed to ensure effective facilitation.
"We are here to meet the stakeholders and create awareness about the Time Release Study (TRS) project. The project is what the customs all over the world can use as a tool to measure how effective their trade facilitation measures are. You could automate your procedure, change your laws, put the right people at the right places, but you still need to know how effective these things are in terms of how much of time it takes to process goods from the time of arrival to the time of exit from the ports", he explained.
Explaining further he said that the platform will comprise customs officers and all the stakeholders who are involved in the clearing of cargoes at the ports.
"So this is what TRS is all about and it is being executed by a working group that comprises the customs and all the stakeholders that are involved in the release of goods from the ports. So the stage we are right now is that we gave come up with questionnaire what on what time the goods arrived the ports and how long it took the customs to process it", he added.
He also maintained that the procedures will look at all the bottlenecks in trade facilitation and look for a way forward.
"We harness all that and we analyse and we look at where the bottlenecks are and we have further discussions with the stakeholders; what we can do about all these bottlenecks. Is it about changing the laws or procedures or reducing the number if interventions".
"The measuring itself doesn't take us more than 10days, this is a pilot and because it is a pilot we then put one or two people together. So we need to train them sensitize the stakeholders and this takes time. It might take as much as six months to do that, we started around July and by the first week of November we will be rounding up", he told the gathering.
According to him, the different between the TRS and other platforms like the Ease of Doing Business is that the criteria for TRS are more comprehensive than that of the Ease of Doing Business.
He said: “The different between the TRS and the all these indices that you are talking about like the ease of doing business. The ease of doing business, the logistics index and all these other ones were handled by the World Bank and their agencies. Now we have discovered that the criteria that they used were not comprehensive enough, they don't talk to all the stakeholders enough. Nobody is going to measure things going into consideration just the roads alone to draw certain conclusions which may not be scientific"
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