“If Port Reform Is Not Disturbed, It Will Yield Good Results”…Zebulon Ikokide (IFFN President)
Dr Zebulon Ikokide is perhaps the last to appear on this page, that is, among those who played prominent roles in the process that kick-started and which eventually led to the birth of the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding in Nigeria (CRFFN). For whatever reasons, I have not been able to pin him down for his rich insight into the birth of CRFFN, until recently when we finally got down to it. As the national president of IFFN, he sure has a lot bottled- up in him, and he divulged as much as is needful to set the records straight in the self-imposed battle for glory which a cross- section of freight forwarders have engaged in since the birth of the Council. He spoke on CRFFN, his recent appointment into its governing council, the port reforms and other sundry industry issues.
How has been with IFFN, we have not been hearing so much about it?
The institute is an educational institute and we are to train people, so the planning of the training does not actually need noise and that is exactly what we are doing, students are coming in, they prepare for exams, sit for the exams and go out quietly, we are also planning collaboration with higher institutions so that the certificate that is coming out of the institute will be useful in furthering their education. These are the things that we are doing and we can not be making noise about it because it is the outcome of these things that people will be seeing; students coming out of here will become big men outside and become the ones that will be now be making the noise outside that ‘yes I was trained by this institute’; these are the things that will gladden our own heart.
Even with the presence of IFFN , we still have a preponderance of illiterate freight forwarders, what have
you done to eradicate illiteracy among them?
We are trying to do that and this is why you see that after the CRFFN retreat in Uyo (Akwa Ibom state) we agreed that a Registrar should be appointed so that they can flag off this training in order to eliminate illiteracy, because if we are doing it on our own with no assistance from the government and individuals, it won’t be an easy task. You can remember that when we started this we started by asking government to assist us in terms of finance so that we can quickly elaborate this training to encompass all freight forwarders, but since government is not forthcoming, we went to the National Assembly for an Act to establish an institute that will assist us to get government attention in the training of freight forwarders, it is this move that we made that cumulated into what is called the CRFFN today.
You mean you actually wanted to have a chartered institute of freight forwarders, why?
Not that we intended, this was the arrangement at that time when we came out to bring up the Institute of Freight Professionals which is actually from the UK. We said to ourselves that the institute that we are bringing to Nigeria must be firmly established here in Nigeria so that the freight forwarding business can also be a profession just like we have in law and other disciplines. So when we brought this idea we found out that we needed an enabling law to do it and that was why we said we had to go to the National Assembly to get it chartered, and once this is done just like other institutes that are being chartered, then we can be able to have the power to actually train people and that was why we went to National Assembly. Before we went to there, we approached the Nigerian Shippers’ Council to assist us, and the council then under Chief Adebayo Sarumi was very passionate about the move, Late Waheed Kareem was there, Mr. Milton and the former executive director in Panalpina; Chief Mrs Ajibode was also among us, he (Kareem) was the first president of the institute. Chief Sarumi now appointed Mrs Mfon Usoro as consultant to draft the law that can enable us go to the National Assembly, this law was what we used, Shippers Council was supposed to pay 80% of Usoro’s fees while the Institute was to pay 20%, we paid our own part while Shippers Council also paid. When it got to National Assembly, they now called for public hearing and it was at this hearing that the freight forwarding practitioners now know that the bill was pioneered by the IFFN and they disagreed that the institute can not be their leader and most of the people in the industry refused and that was when the problem came up.
Does IFFN have a relationship with other training institutions in the industry?
Yes, at the moment other training institutions actually take a cue from what IFFN is doing, the institute is moderate in the sense that we guide our rules and whatever comes from us, we don’t boast and that is why our certificates are so recognized every where even up to the Universities because we don’t flaunt it everywhere, it is a certificate that when you get it you know that you are really worth it, it is not something they just buy everywhere. Anyone who bags our certificate knows that it is worth it and that is why our certificates are being guided. So we have a relationship with them in the sense that they come and inform us that their people will be training from us, for instance the merchant navy students come to us for training, we train them and send them back to their school and of course, before they pass out they must come to us for training and these are the things that we do.
What does your recent appointment into the governing council of CRFFN mean to you?
It is an appointment that is supposed to have come earlier than this, but it is better late than never. When we went for a retreat at Uyo, Mrs Usoro; being the consultant that started the whole thing advised them that before they go ahead, they should bring the people who are the originators of this ideas so that they will be parts and parcel of the decision- making organ of the council and that this is the only way the council can go ahead, everybody agreed at that retreat and when the minister of transport called us to come for the retreat we had that passion to make sure that the freight forwarding industry grows and this is why we accepted to go for the retreat, when we got there, we gave them our advice, when we came back the former minister approved only one of the recommendations that we made which was that of appointment of a registrar and chief executive, the rest were not done and of course it was very difficult for the registrar to start because the other ones were not taken; you can not start in a vacum, you need these members who are with the associations and the institutes. The CRFFN was just approved and the National Assembly enacted the law but it has nothing, but when these people are brought together, this is when the council can start functioning. When the registrar came into the industry, we now found out that it was necessary, and the noise people are making outside shows that this is exactly what we should be doing, the man made a recommendation in accordance with a section of the Act that established the council and we were appointed. So, I feel that the job of the council is just about to start, as soon as we are inaugurated we will go full swing and start rolling out some of the rules and regulations on how things should be done in the industry and I think the industry will be happy about it.
This suggests to me that you also agree that the council has been very slow in the past two years?
It may have been slow, because they need to learn and know what to do; especially they need to read the law, but some of us that are outside who participated in the drafting of the original law that was sent to the National Assembly we know the intent, at a glance we can easily say that this is what we wanted to do when we put these rules here, we can only ask the lawyer to bring out how to interpret the technicalities of it, but we can reason them out in our head because we participated in drafting the original words that were sent to the National Assembly. Somebody whom you just appointed to come and handle the thing will need to study the document, it will not be like the person who wrote it, there are lots of stages you go when you study something , you have to first understand it before you now interpret it and a lot of things might go amiss during the process, but when we are there, we will be able to say No, and that this is what the law meant, in interpreting a law there should be the original intention of the writing, that’s why when the National Assembly make laws, the judge want to refer back to the intention of the lawmakers when they were drafting this law. We are the owner of this intention and that is why I am saying that now that we are in, we want to make the council to work.
I know that it is not IFFN alone that did it, so who are the ‘We’?
I want to talk about NAGAFF and some other people and organizations that have fizzled out now, like the export academy and so on, some of them have fizzled out already, but these are the people that came together like Dr. Kareem who was the first president of the IFFN, then I was the national secretary and as such I carry a lot of the documentations of the institute, and when we came on board we changed the face of freight forwarding, they were formerly called clearing and forwarding agents, but we told them that unless it is in Nigeria, nobody understands the term ‘clearing and forwarding agent’, if you go outside the country now and you are talking about clearing and forwarding, nobody will understand unless He is a Nigerian. So we now told them that it is called ‘freight forwarding’ which is a profession, and to be a freight forwarder you must have to study for it, we brought out the course they have to study for them, and this was one of the reasons why the industry was against us that we should not be the leader because we are going to put a lot of educational focus and that if we focus on education alone, they will not be able to meet up because most of them do not even have school certificates. But they are all there now, this was the reason why they did not want us, but by the grace of God, now everything is coming back to the original plan for the industry.
It does appear to me that the minister may be ‘settling’ the opposition with these new appointments?
No, it is not a matter of shutting up opposition; it is a matter of doing the right thing so that the industry can grow, because without this the industry can not grow, who are the people that the council will be leading if these people are not brought in? So this is the question and once you can answer that question it means they should be in. We met the minister and he agreed with us and when he now saw the reports and recommendations from the registrar, the registrar knew when he got the job and knew that this is the only thing that will make the job go ahead. Those days when you applied to FIATA, they will first of all call Shippers’ Council to verify, we approached chief Sarumi with the idea and he said he would support us, now that we have one voice you can see that we were admitted into FIATA, if there was another application, they would not have admitted the council.
What does Nigeria’s admission into FIATA mean to practitioners?
I don’t want to preempt the committee that was just set up by the registrar; the committee has just been set up to look into the gains of Nigerians by being a member of FIATA. FIATA encompasses all logistics, freight forwarding, because international trade revolves round freight forwarding, and because of that FIATA looks at international trade and how it is being practiced in our country, if it is not being practiced according to international tenets, then it is wrong and that is why they are interested in knowing how you are training your people, your training programme must come from them and they must approve it. We have joined the international community in terms of trading, people will not be afraid again when they want to trade with this country because your men will be everywhere and they know who to talk to, if anybody do anything wrong in the process of trading with another country, they will call the CRFFN and we will have to investigate it and report back to them that this is what actually happened. Because of this, the council needs to get an internal mechanism which will ensure that trading is done in accordance with international standards, so once you are a member, your trading pattern is assured, people will not be afraid of you or any individual in the country again, in so far as they know that all the freight forwarders are members of FIATA, this is the major achievement.
What is your assessment of the port reforms since it was carried out?
It has done a lot in terms of accessibility to the job itself, the simplicity of how you can come to the port to work and go back, we have also seen that the port can be a serene place to work in, the port is now clean in the sense that people are no longer moving up and down, you don’t see people who are not personnel or users of a terminal doing nothing in that terminal, the port is now more orderly in the sense that if you are for a certain terminal, then you are for that terminal. There are still lots of things to be done though; what we are still telling the Nigerian Port Authority to do that once this thing is ‘terminalised’, they should give them colored code so that somebody from another terminal must not be found in another terminal without identification, port users should be given electronic identification card that will ensure that if you are not for a terminal, you can’t enter. The biometric identification that NIMASA is doing is being carried out without carrying the terminal operators along, whereas the terminal operators are the ones that will identify those that are working with them, and we are supposed to have a machine that we will use in testing whether you are a staff or not. I told them when it was launched that the terminal operators who are also stakeholders should be involved in the implementation of the biometric identification scheme. The card is for dockworkers and they work in terminals, and since they work in terminals, they must also be involved in those terminals so that the terminal operators can identify them, but the machines are still in the offices of
NIMASA so how are they going to be used?
In terms of safety of cargo and persons, how successful is port reforms?
For safety of cargoes the port reform is working well, they have been very successful because once your cargo goes to a terminal, depending on how that terminal arranges its security, you will be rest assured. Recently a big vessel came to our terminal and they said they cannot work in the night because they don’t know what will happen, but we told them that one of the reasons why we must take you to a terminal is that you are going to work in the night, if you can not work in the night we won’t take you, they quickly agreed because they don’t want to go to another terminal and queue up, at the end they came to confess that working nights in Apapa Bulk Terminal is like working in the day because everywhere is lighted and there is no pilferage, nothing happened to their cargo, they wanted to come back but we said we didn’t have space, in fact the space we gave them was the space for a wheat vessel and a wheat vessel has an on-loader that can only be used. If you go to PTML, their security standard and the CCTV is very wonderful, I told my MD here that we need to go and check it out. The port will be a very good place tomorrow if the regulators assist us, and of course the freight forwarders will enjoy working in this country, it will get to a time that freight forwarders will not need to come inside the port any longer, you will wait for your vehicle outside and take your cargo, you will not even see anybody to talk to, this is how it’s practiced outside and we expect that we will get to that level with the development that is going on in terms of port reform, once the port reform is not disturbed it will yield good results. One other thing is that they should allow the various terminals increase their rate a little because for the past four years nothing has been done, they are still paying the graduated rate to the Nigerian Port Authority, the rate they are paying is still being graduated with the dues they are collecting. Government should see to this so that the development will not be stalled by lack of fund.
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