Ahead of the proposed official visits by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to countries under the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), an advance team of Nigeria Customs Service to be led by the Comptroller General of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS); Adewale Adeniyi will be meeting with the leadership of Customs of Benin Republic today (Monday) to strengthen and harmonise bilateral agreements between both countries.
Recall that Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was elected as Chairman of ECOWAS on 9 July 2023. He took over from President Umaro Sissoco Embaló of Guinea Bissau.
However, speaking over the weekend during a working visit to the Seme-Krake border between Nigeria and the Benin Republic, the Customs CG informed that President will be paying his first official state visit to ECOWAS member states at the end of the month and has chosen the Republic of Benin to be visited first.
Adeniyi noted that the Presidency has however directed that he leads a delegation ahead of the visit to begin engagements and discussions with the government and Customs colleagues in the Republic of Benin to boost bilateral trade and good diplomatic relationships between the two borders nations.
The Customs boss said preferential trade agreements with ECOWAS member states will lead the discussions on how Nigeria will provide economic security and prosperity for its people.
According to the CGC, this means that people within the geopolitical bloc and geographical entities will trade with themselves under the framework of a number of preferential trade agreements.
Speaking further, Adeniyi noted that these discussions and engagements will strengthen the full implementation of the ECOWAS Trade Liberalization Scheme (ETLS) and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) driven by technology, which will, in turn, have lots of economic benefits for Nigeria within the ECOWAS socio-economic bloc.\
He disclosed that: “At the end of this month, the President will be paying his first official state visit and he is choosing a country in Africa, and that country is Republic of Benin. Because of the strategic importance that has been attached to our relationship with Benin, the authorities in Benin swung into action and they got in touch with the President in Abuja and they called me to say after a careful reflection, they felt that it would have value if I go ahead and have my visits and begin to engage in discussions with my colleagues in the Republic of Benin”.
“We are already familiar with the ECOWAS trade liberalization scheme, which has started over 30 years ago. While we are grappling with this, other parts of the world, they have made significant progress and we discover that in these places, the biggest trade partners are those who are within a preferential trade area. If you look at Europe, for example, the biggest trade partners are Germany and France and they are the leading promoters of the EU. If you look at a place like Southeast Asia, Korea and Japan, they are the biggest trading partners. They trade with other parts of the world, but they trade with themselves more.
“There is also the issue of informal trade around this place, and I know that when we talk about informal trade, it’s not just going to be a customs issue. It’s also going to involve all the agencies that are operating here. We have gone to a number of other big borders around Africa, and we see that the deployment of some technological tools, they have started to capture informal trade.
“There is so much that is going on by our SMEs around these places, and yet the fact that their activities are not captured in our trade statistics, they represent a distorted version of what is going on between our various countries. We need to work with ourselves to see how we can capture this huge volume of informal trade that is happening between us” Adeniyi said.
