Officers of the Nigeria Customs Service at the rechristened Tin Can Island '2' Command (formerly Lillypond command) located at Ijora, Lagos have cried out that despite the rebranding of the command few months ago, officers are not yet properly engaged and that they only sit idle every day, doing nothing.
The officers who pleaded anonymity, told Shipping Position Daily that compared to when the command was handling about 500 containers per month under the former Customs Area Controller; Comptroller Isa Tallatu, currently, the number of containers has reduced drastically to three containers per week.
"If the rebranding exercise had been successful, we are not supposed to be sitting idle like this, and we should have been receiving 100 containers weekly"
"Presently, we are doing three containers weekly, in a month, that is 12 containers, you cannot compare this to when we were receiving 500 containers per month" he said.
The downturn notwithstanding, the command said it collected a total of N4,879,907,418.14 as revenue between January to August 2016.
This is even as it has lamented that the recent rebranding of the command has not yielded the expected fruit as expected, especially in terms of more cargoes being stemmed to the terminal.
Speaking with Shipping Position Daily at the command on Monday, it's Public Relations Officer, Mr. Godwin Andishu said that in the month of September which has not ended, the command have also realised more than N300million.
"We are not yet getting the kind of progress we desired yet, but at least there is some sort of progress, for now we do an average of 30 containers per week which is still very low"
"Although it is better than when we were just sitting idle, but the terminal has promised to bring in more cargoes".
He recounted that the command under Comptroller Isa Tallatu was able to get more cargoes because of the expansion work going on at Apapa Port which made APMT sent much of its cargoes to Lillypond.
He however lamented that since the APMT finished the expansion of its terminal, it has refused to stem containers to Lillypond terminal as usual.
"After the repairs, they were demanding even more containers, so if you ask them, they would tell you that they don't even have enough for their own terminal, so during Comptroller Tallatu's era, it was like a game of chance"
He however expressed hope of a light at the end of the tunnel, saying that there is very little improvement since the rebranding of the command
"We thought that the improvements after the change of name would have been faster than this" he lamented.
He said that the command does not have any berth, but it is strictly an inland container depot which has to depend solely on Apapa port, Tin Can Island and other ports.
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