A foremost licensed customs agent; Barrister Ada Akpunonu has called on the management of the Nigeria Customs Service to embark on training of clearing agents in order for them to be at par with the service in terms of emerging trends in international trade.
Akpunonu, who is also a former Vice Chairman of the Tin Can Island Port chapter of Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA) made the plea in a chat with Shipping Position Daily last week in Lagos.
She recalled that the last time customs management organised training programmes for licensed customs agents was during the administration of Abdullahi Inde Dikko as the Comptroller General of Customs.
Akpunonu also said that Customs service cannot achieve compliance from agents nor facilitate trade if it continues to engage in what she called a one-sided training of its officers alone.
"When you say you are training customs, you are equipping customs for a particular programme and so on, Customs and agents are two sides of a coin, if you don't follow suit by training the agents, there is no way you can achieve desired results because most of them would not understand"
"When Dikko (former Customs CG) was there, he was training all stakeholders, it was not peculiar to only ANLCA, I know that when Compt Bashir came to Tin Can, he also followed up, he followed up a system where all the stakeholders were going to Customs office for the training and retraining, I know it has also happened a couple of times during Compt Musa’s time,
“But Dikko was the one that really did it well, he took people outside the shores of this country, international professionals came and exposed us to what is obtainable in their various countries, compared to what is happening here and it was very enriching", she recalled.
Barrister Akpunonu advised the incumbent Comptroller General of Customs, Col Hameed Alli ( rtd ) to make capacity building the core objective of his administration.
According to her, "when you build-up that capacity, people are open to changes, amendments and compliance, they would appreciate what you are talking about and trade would be facilitated"
"All over the world, people are talking about facilitation of trade, but you see our own here, the emphasis is on revenue, if you don't facilitate trade, your revenue would not be met as desired".
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