Recently, the re-elected President of Association of Nigeria Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA), Prince Olayiwola Shittu spoke with some journalists. In this first part of the engaging interaction, he talked on issues ranging from the election, his agenda for the second term and other sundry issues. Roland Ekama was there for Shipping Position Daily.
What has been your challenge and what do you intend to leave behind in your second term?
Recently, the re-elected President of Association of Nigeria Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA), Prince Olayiwola Shittu spoke with some journalists. In this first part of the engaging interaction, he talked on issues ranging from the election, his agenda for the second term and other sundry issues. Roland Ekama was there for Shipping Position Daily.
What has been your challenge and what do you intend to leave behind in your second term?
That is a question that I have been dodging from those who have been asking, because it has never been in our practice to eulogize ourselves or praise ourselves and we also believe that let those we are leading be the judge and then the result was the very mighty support we had. In the history of ANLCA nobody has served two terms and that shows that something good has come out of what we have done. I will like to tell you that what we met then, in retrospect shows that there have been a lot of improvements. When those people get to office they are looking for how to butter their own bread, they are selfish, so people have a mindset that nothing good will come out of the set up. Our predecessors have tried, they tried in their own way, but the handicap was that the impression they created in the beginning when there was not enough checks and balances in the operations at the ports, where money rolls in as if you are even begging for it to stop and people were wondering what people use that money to do. So there was no way you can convince such people that we are different, is a great challenge because people will say it is the same. We fashioned out a way of ensuring that we hold regular meetings with our people. We make sure that chapters have monthly meetings and there is no week that goes by that we don't have meeting at the national secretariat. In fact also in retrospect, the first week after our election, we got this secretariat; before then for some years ANLCA did not have an identity or a place to be referred to and one of the leaders in ANLCA who ensured that we got the office within one week was Dr Sam Onyemelukwe. He was the one that scouted to ensure that we got this place and you can imagine that things are working out. Along the line again, ANLCA has been known to be bedeviled by fractionalization. You know that other associations grew out of ANLCA and the system has always been when a member or one of the leader is being chastised for not following the rules, he gets annoyed and sets up his own association and that setting has continued to be; even the creation of CRFFN has not abated it, but we have warned that the more fractionalized we become the more in- cohesive and unprofessional we will become. But one unique thing about ANLCA is that ANLCA membership is by corporate body; that is, membership by companies that have been licensed to do the operation. The first license you get come from the customs because it is only when you get customs license that you can become a customs agent. Then subsequently that customs license is what you will use to register in all other organizations that must license you. Now, we discovered that along the line other associations are association of individuals who just find the port industry as an avenue to survive.
What is your perception about the influx of associations operating at the port?
The influx of associations in the industry will continue to increase by the day, and that is why you see a lot of people are just in the port. But as a customs agent, before you are given a license you must have an office and by the requirement of customs you are supposed to operate from your office, that is, whenever you go into the port you are on transit operation whereby you go to the port and get back to your office, but what we see now is that people have turned the port to their offices and that is not what it is supposed to be. So we discovered also that education was lacking because people don't really know what is expected of them, so we do quiet seminars at the secretariat here, where sometimes 50 people can sit. When we hold meetings, we do some training and we don't even stop there, we now extended it to international training and I can tell you that within the last four years, we must have travelled so many times after which we got affiliated with the World Customs Brokers Organization, which is the other side of World Customs Organization and organization called International Federation of Customs Brokers Association worldwide (IFCBA), they are of the board of World Customs Organization and WCO is on their board. In fact the head of the policy and strategic makers of WCO is customs and he is the secretary general IFCBA. So if there is cooperation at that world level, what stops us from co-operating with the Nigeria customs, but yet people believe that customs is our enemy. That has been the practice that if you don't fight customs, if you don't close the port, we must do this etc. I agree that it is the frame work of illegality, but there is no illegality but immorality because before a customs officer says he wants to take money from you, you must have prepared the ground for him to say come and give me, but if you own your own say I don't have to give bribe; you might face some frustration; but if all of us decided that we are not going to give just like the issue of police on the road, your papers are correct on your , they can only delay you at the end of the day they will let you go. But then survival is what matters. In Nigeria today, everybody is struggling to survive.
Have the foreign trainings had any significant impact on members?
Training has been helpful to us, in fact by next weekend we are going to South Korea to attend the World Congress of the Customs brokers and I can tell you that for the first time in the history of International Federation of Customs Brokers (IFCB) which Nigeria was admitted to in 2012, I will be delivering a paper on customs administrations on the impact of Nigeria economy and I believe it is a big one for the association and the country, because Nigeria is not the only black country there, but we have also been given the go ahead to organized the West and Central Africa customs brokers with headquarters in Nigeria. So all we need is support and that support can only come from especially the federal government. It could not have come from Customs because along the line the customs administration has been coming and going. Past administrations of customs never identified with the necessity of working with the customs brokers; they were even responsible for the fractionalization we are talking about, because when they saw one big family, it became a threat to their interest then, so they assisted other associations who want to plot as a counter to the interest of ANLCA, that is what we are seeing. But this administration has found it difficult to even reverse the threat because those organizations that came out of ANLCA are already established and registered with CRFFN. So customs cannot do it and if customs decides to help ANLCA, the other associations will demand for help but the solution is still with CRFFN, because what is done abroad is that customs brokers are professionally a body, but you don't do customs brokerage alone but some ancillary service; you need transporters, you need ship chandlers that will supply vessels with the needful, you need labour. In fact there are so many varieties of the logistics chain and what we expect CRFFN to do is to classify each and every specialty in its own kind and deal with them separately, rather than ask everybody to go and register. In lumping us together they are even helping us to professionalize the practice and that is why everybody claim to be an agent, but how do you become an agent? You will only work in a license customs office. Many people are not working in a licensed company and that is why one of the things we did in the last four years was to do our biometric card because we foresaw the future; now many government organization are doing biometric cards but we did ours some three years ago, it is backed by visa, it’s a payment card, we are even expecting that every agent will stay in his office ,use this card to do the payment of customs duty, shipping companies , terminal operators like it is done abroad. The only time you go to the port is to tell somebody to go with the transporter to go and pick the cargo or if there is need for examination you send somebody to go. So nobody needs to be in the port.
In your last campaign you talked about 10-point agenda, what are you bringing this time around?
In the beginning, we had a 10-point agenda, but within the first two years we had finished our agenda. We only promise to have a functional secretariat and I know that with the standard you see here you know that we have a functional secretariat. So getting a permanent secretariat is just icing on the cake, which is also a motivation for people to say that if we can go to this length nobody knows what they cannot do in future. So in the next four years, we want to work on how we will be able to get government to give us our commission, because we are not looking for 10-point agenda, now we have agreed that we are doing two point agenda because we know that the two point agenda is going to take a lot of time, money, pressure, lobbying etc. And we are happy that ANLCA is one big family so we are going to work hard to also get our association chartered. Chartering of our association does not remove us from being regulated or controlled by CRFFN and Customs, which you know were established under different Acts, Chartering gives us the opportunity to be professionally recognized to chartered institute of customs brokerage and that is what we want the National Assembly to do for us and then we will be affiliated to CRFFN, CRFFN does not train but they only certifies institutes under regulatory agency, so once we get our charter and CRFFN accredits our courses then it means that we already have a means that you have been a customs broker all your life professionally and that is what happens in America. I give you an example; the dream I have is to work like what they do in America. There was a time ever before I became president, I have an affiliation with Pegasus in Houston Texas, they handle all our shipment coming to Nigeria and when we have shipment going to America too under minimal export they also handle it. There was this shipment we did on a 20-foot container and I was here in Nigeria planning to go to America after the vessel has arrived, our partner just sent me the code and in my house on my system I was able to enter the customs platform, use the code because every customs platform has a code with which you can access the platform, we uploaded the information and they told us how much we need to pay, I sent it to Pegasus to pay on our behalf and by the time I was arriving America three days later, the 20 foot container was already at the destination. It was a dream and I felt that if we can replicate that in Nigeria, there will be foreign confidence in our business, because many foreigners want a foreign customs broker, that is why you see that Nigeria is the only place where you see non-indigene practice customs brokerage; it never happens anywhere in the world. In fact you need to be a citizen of America; not even resident for you to be a customs broker, so it takes time for things to change. Just like I told you that the greatest challenge we had was change, for people to live with the usual and challenge to do the usual that is something they are not part of , but gradually it is beginning to sink in . Even in going to this South Korea there are more than 30 people and how do we travel? We self-sponsor ourselves because ANLCA does not have revenue generation mechanism. Our secretariat is maintained by self donation from the chapter executives and when the money is not enough, we task ourselves. But the goodwill we have set up was the reason why we met those individuals of note in this country begging them that we need a national secretariat and many of them said they want to remain anonymous because they believe in what we are doing and that was how we were able to get the national secretariat and I am sure that most of your colleagues will be saying that ANLCA does not have money, but look at what they went to buy and because we are dedicated toward that course, we said we must do something and that is a long way to go.
Is there a Draft Bill already in place?
That is why we still say that you don't get things done in Nigeria by right. Let me go a little backward; it was this charter we had in mind when we approached the National Assembly in the year 2000 asking for the Council for the Regulation of Customs Brokerage in Nigeria, but our leaders then didn't understand what some of us saw. That bill was prepared in the like manner of Advertiser Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON) we share a similarity course where individual companies doing a common course. Because they were not ready, we handed it to the then chairman of marine committee of the House of Representatives; Okey Udeh who took it to Adebayo Sarumi. And because Okey Udeh is a friend to Sarumi, they got talking and Sarumi said Shippers’ Council would have been the one to midwife things like this and that was how they took it to Shippers’ Council, then Shippers Council called Mfon Usoro. Those of us who initiated it were in Port Harcourt, most of our members in Lagos don't even want to bother themselves about such a bill and that was how NAGAFF quietly worked in and changed that ‘licensed customs agent’ to ‘freight forwarder’. Freight forwarding is practiced where the import and export ratio is sometime 20:80 because it is forwarding cargo they don't do customs duty and there is no import that does not require customs regulation and there is no export that does not require customs regulation. If you go to India, they call themselves clearing and forwarding agents, if you go to UK, they are call customs brokers, when you go to USA they are call customs brokers. But even if you say clearing and forwarding it means the same system, but they needed to implore that freight forwarding to cater for everybody not minding whether they are licensed or not and that is one of the hiccups that we are having which CRFFN, but be that as it may it is a law already and customs agents are supposed to be regulated by CRFFN. But in this case of getting a charter, we have the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport and they are supposed to be regulated by CRFFN. Their own is professional training of people in logistics and transportation. So we want professional training where we will certificated on customs brokerage and this we borrow from America. Now If you make it as a private bill from outside it will not see the light of the day, if you make it private members bill which means that we will give it to one member of the national Assembly to start moving it, it will not see the light of the day because passing a bill in Nigeria requires a lot of funds and they will always tell you that there is no money. Even for the committee to sit down and look at the bill is a lot of money, so the only success we can get is for the Nigeria Customs Service to partner with us.
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