Comptroller General of Customs; Col Hameed Ali (rtd) has admitted that there were problems with the scanners at the nation’s seaports and borders.
Ali stated this on the heels of the recent seizure of 661 units of pump action riffles ain Lagos by officers of the Customs Federal Operations Unit in Ikeja, Lagos.
Acknowledging that absence of working scanners aided the exit of the weapons from the port, the Customs boss maintained that if the container in which the guns were loaded had passed through proper physical examination, the officers would have discovered the 661 pump action rifles that were seized.
He said the physical inspection of goods at the ports and borders before clearance would go a long way toward preventing security breach in the country.
He admitted that most of the scanners were faulty, adding that the agency was working towards resolving the problem.
He said: “Yes, we have problem of scanners, most of them are not working but we are working diligently to replace them.
“By God’s grace, by the end of this first quarter, we would have scanners fully installed in our ports.
“We are working on that. We know that the ones that we have had gone bad.
“Some of them, we have done a lot of scooping on them; few of them can be repaired and replaced and put back but we need to replace most of them with new ones and you know what it is.
“The paucity of funds has been part of our problem.
“We are working diligently to ensure that we get scanners into our own ports and the borders.”
It will be recalled that the Federal Operations Unit of the customs said on Monday that it intercepted a Mack truck along the Mile 2 Apapa Road carrying 49 boxes of pump-action rifles.
Apparently not scanned or properly subjected to 100 per cent examination, the importers and the clearing agent succeeded in taking delivery of the dangerous cargo.
The manifest that followed the truck indicated that it carried steel doors, before the customs officials discovered otherwise.
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