Lillypond Container Terminal, a subsidiary of the Danish shipping company; Maesk Line, recently announced that it is pulling out of the concession agreement it had entered into with the Federal Government in 2006. Shortly after the pronouncement, Shipping Position Daily Dapo Olawuni caught up with President of the National Association of Government Approved Freight Forwarders (NAGAFF) Chief Eugene Nweke. In this interaction, he spoke on the issue, the alleged expiration of the tenure of the Comptroller General of Custom, Abdullahi Inde Dikko and other sundry matters.
Who should be blamed for the pulling out of Lillypond Container Terminal from port the concession agreement?
From my vantage and informed position, when I heard that they have commenced stemming of containers to Lillypond terminal I knew it was a temporal measure. The truth of the whole thing has to do with the concession agreement, in an ideal concession agreement, APMT is supposed to have been concessioned with Lillypond terminal as its off-dock terminal, in a modern port arrangement, every seaport deserve to have an off-dock terminal, the whole idea is to make the port a transit area, if you are creating a space inside the port, it should be for transit cargo. The Nigerian government through the Nigerian Port Authority and the BPE are to be blamed because they never carried out extensively the cost analysis, evaluation of cost as well as the feasibility study of the port, they just concessioned it because it was under NPA and because they needed money; proper evaluation was not carried out, they should have known that the terminal should have served and be better used as an off-dock terminal for APMT, but here we are that the BPE gave the sister company an off-dock terminal to manage and the other company the main port to manage. Port concessioning is not to serve the interest of those in power; it is supposed to serve the interest of concessionaires, the port authority and Nigerians as the beneficiaries.
What is the implication of the closure of Lillypond terminal?
It will create room for wider public sector monopoly and you know what that means, there will be high handedness and high cost of doing business, some people will tell you that Nigerian port is the cheapest all over the world, but if you investigate it you will find out that it is neither here nor there. Pulling out from Ijora terminal means that we will go back to status quo, government will not be generating prompt revenue as expected, secondly there will be constant prediction of cargo congestion, it will rear its ugly head because the space you are supposed to use have been piled up with cargo while expansion project is ongoing, till this moment you cannot track your cargo in APMT, you cannot trace your cargo from the comfort of your office even if you have your bill of laden.
In view of these, would you say port concession has been successful?
Port concession is on course, the pace of investment is slow compared to the level of profit maximization. I was thinking that in the actual sense because it is a long term project, there should be a long time to invest in order to recoup, I still want to see a situation whereby terminal operators invest massively, apart from the bulk cargo terminals that are really working. I commend Sifax Group who sometimes last year acquired 10 rubber gantry cranes, if you look at it from this angle, you will realize that it is true that we have migrated from the old order, we have achieved turnaround time of vessels, we have also seen to some extent that cargoes are secured and safe, no more pilfering, but the truth and where we are now having problem is on quality assurance, it has to do with you defining the service you have rendered for me to pay you, there is no point in duplicating just because you want to extort money.
The ICPC recently said that to clear goods from the port you need 76 signatures, is this correct?
Eugene Nweke will disagree with that figure, in my article titled ‘once upon a time’, I took out time and gave a background of the number of tables observe in the Nigerian Ports Authority era till cargo goes out of the port and they were 56 tables, each table requires a signature and an endorsement. But now under port concession we need to understand that when you talk about signature for cargo to be released, it should be as at the point you have made declaration for customs and start processing your cargo, it is not when you are still making trade enquiry, filling form M, dealing with the service providers or the bank, these are not what we are talking about, the signatures starts as at the moment you have made your declaration and then we look at how many signatures you require before your cargo leaves the port. There is nowhere in Nigerian port where you need to get 76 signatures, within customs it is less than 10 signatures. I was told that the consultant of the ICPC was displaying the signatures on the screen during the presentation, but I disagree with it totally, it should be arguable because if we leave it at that, it will become the case of Transparency International that has always put Nigerian index as number three in the world. I am in love with this port, so people should not just come from nowhere and start telling us that they have analyzed Nigerian ports, while people like us are here, I disagree.
In your own opinion, how many signatures does an importer need to get his cargo released?
As far as I am concerned, the 28 signatures we know that is genuine before your cargo leaves the port is sacrosanct, this is from the customs to the shipping line and to the terminal operators, if this is in the neighborhood of what they are saying, then it is correct.
Is there no way to harmonize these processes?
This is the driving force behind what the Nigerian Shippers’ Council is pushing for, the council has been calling for a replicate of what has been happening in Cotonou in terms of consolidated charges. Every service is supposed to be paid for at a spot, the agencies all have an agreement and know how much their money is, so when you pay the money, they know how to disburse the money to everybody under Single Administration Document. If this is anything to go by, once you pay custom duty, every other duty is suppose to have been effected at the same time, if there is an organization between the agencies of government with interest on cargoes, then everybody should hook into the Single Goods Declaration Form so that once an agent has effected duty, the banks will know how to distribute the money to appropriate agencies, perhaps this is one of the things that the Single Window project will address as soon as it comes onboard.
There has been an ongoing debate about the retirement of the present Comptroller General of Customs; Alhaji Inde Dikko, where do you stand?
I don’t know whether the trading public are the ones to retire the CGC, the Minister of Finance has said that with the provisions of the Customs and Excise Management Act (CEMA) a CGC is first , a customs officer before becoming a CGC, therefore his service statute is there. The appointment of who becomes a CGC is purely the prerogative of Mr. President, and if you are a CG and you have not served for 35 years and you are not up to 60 years of age you cannot be retired, the only person that can do this is Mr. President either for security reasons or otherwise. Another question you will ask is: has the incumbent CG performed well and I say yes he has performed, so why must we be shuttling for his removal? The indicator here is performance, Abdullahi Inde Dikko has performed and we don’t need to hide our face in saying it. We see custom reform in 2010, we can see a custom that is focused and as a training organization under his administration, but if you sample the opinion of the trading public they will tell you that the cost of doing business under the customs is high but then I ask, is customs bureau de change? Pay your reasonable duty and carry your cargo, why are you going for negotiation? You have not complied and you don’t want them to seize the cargo, so you are going for negotiation and corrupting the officers through your agents, why is it that the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) have not complained against customs, these are people that import cargoes in quantities and volumes, but you will see traders making noise that customs have collected all their money. In customs parlance, illegality begets illegality, there is nobody that will occupy the position that will not be blackmailed and receive criticisms.
Will you say that auctioning of cargoes has been carried out fairly by Dikko’s administration?
First and foremost, I don’t need to benefit from auction to tell you that it is a legitimate thing known in law; we have National Auction Committee that has submitted their position to the customs and collaborating with them, auction is not a crime, it is a position under the law that when cargoes have stayed long in the port and they have given the owners opportunity to come and evacuate it and he refused, then it will be auctioned, those ones that have been damaged will be destroyed, those that are still manageable will be auctioned. If you want to equate the level of auction under the custom CGC I will tell you that the administration of Buba Gyang at one instance auctioned over 10,000 containers, but in three years now the current CGC in all his efforts, looking at the total throughput of cargo that has come into the country and what we are having to auction is about 2,000 cargoes that the owners could not come and clear, does this in reality and truly speaking represent injustice? What made you not come for your cargo if you know you are being truthful to yourself, why must you import cargo and abandon it at the port? Is the port a warehouse? These are germane truth that needs to be bared, even if you penalize the owners you will still not see them coming forward to take their cargoes, because most of the cargoes came into the country by way of money laundering and drug trafficking, they use importation to bring in the money back, we have seen many things as far as cargo importation is concerned.
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