The TinCan Island Command of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) has urged clearing agents operating at the command to rely more on the use of e-clearance for submission of declaration, so as to avoid the issue of physical contact of persons.
The Command’s Public Relations Officer, Mr. Uche Ejesieme, a Superintendent of Customs, who said this in a chat with Shipping Position Daily at Tin-Can Island ports on Wednesday, reiterated the need for agents to make use of the platform instead of clustering at the ports.
He also said that they have issued a public alert on stakeholders on the need for them to be well educated and well informed on the virus.
“We have also issued a public alert on Covid-19 and the alert is trying to advise stakeholders on the need for people to be well-educated and well-informed about this. We issued the notice to all our terminals and bonded terminals, we also advised stakeholders to rely more on e-clearance for submission of declaration so that they can avoid this issue of physical contact of person. We are encouraging them to embark on e-clearance format because we have a platform instead of coming to cluster here”, he said.
Ejesieme said that, as another measure to avoid clustering of people at the command, officers at Customs Processing Center (CPC) have started alternating their work schedules in line with the spirit of social distancing.
“And some of the offices are operating on shift, meaning that they are alternating their work schedules to ensure that the place is not clustered unnecessarily. This is also in line with the spirit of social distancing is obeyed. We started experiencing the alternating of the work schedule from the CPC you know the CPC is the engine house and sometimes it could be very congested because of the nature of the work they do”
“So what we now do is to divide the officers into two- shift A and B, so if you come today you won’t come tomorrow, just to ensure that those clusters are dismantled and this is also in line with the expected standards. So if you are talking about non-compliance for us we have zero tolerance to that, you can’t come here without covering your nose”
Ejisieme nevertheless said that despite the six weeks’ lockdown order by the federal government to curtail the spread of Covid-19, the command has met and even surpassed it when compared to what it had the same time previous year 2019.
Ejisieme said even though the pandemic is something nobody envisaged, it has not started having negative effects on the revenue of the command.
“Well, surprisingly and quite unexpectedly, we have continued to record a sort of boom in our revenue collection from January to this moment as we speak. This global pandemic is something nobody envisaged but as far as we are concerned I don’t think it has started having any effect on our revenue going by the figures we have on ground”
“Now, it may interest you to know that between January to April 2020, the command has been able to generate N117.9billion comparatively speaking, if you now look at the same period last year when there was no pandemic we had N106.6billion.
So you can see very clearly that our revenue had continued to be on the upspring. Talking about Covid-19 and its negative effects, I don’t think it affecting this figure because it has a difference of almost N11billion from the collections of last year. So far so good we can’t say authoritatively that this pandemic has affected our revenue for now. I don’t know of tomorrow, you compare with last year before the period, you will see that we are actually not below expectation” he concluded.
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