On the Donation
I am very happy that we are witnessing today, first as a Nigerian for what we started in Cotecna by way of our corporate social responsibility. This is about the second major event, I remember earlier on we were in Kano, Kano State where we where talking about solar powered water project. After that we started discussing with Alhaji Aminu Mohammed who is in charge of our client relations, we normally go to Kings College on Fridays (when I am around) to say our prayers and when we started looking at it that our corporate social responsibility is about water, health and also about education, and we said, we really don’t need to go too far because Kings College is the closest federal institution to us. So, we sent him down to come and look at what we can do, I think initially when we started, the school was looking like how much are we going to put into it, so when he came back with some projects; I said no because I don’t think they are big enough for what we want to do for the school, so I said go back again and let’s look at something that will make them to really feel our presence; that we have a company that is socially responsible close by. It is my joy that the library project has come to pass and I can assure you that we will not just donate it and disappear, we are part of the same community and we know there will always be areas where we can collaborate. As for business, as we continue to do better in Nigeria, we will also continue to partner with the country by sowing seeds that will germinate into a better Nigeria for all of us.
Cotecna, Social Responsibility and Continuity
We are concerned about Nigeria and its future; we want to be part of shaping the future and this is the core of it, we will continue to identify projects that are strategic and we will contribute to the kind of future that we also foresee and partner with the community in which we are operating so that people will no longer say that businesses are just around to collect money and move away. This is the same society that shaped us, like I was discussing with somebody that in Cotecna Nigeria, we are 353 staff and there are only six expatriates, and he told me that before they started looking at our reports, whenever they hear about Cotecna, they just feel it is a foreign company manned by foreigners and so on.
When we talk about education in Nigeria, Kings College is one of the best schools, we would identify other projects in other parts of the country like this and we will try to sow because we believe in sowing. Like somebody asked that: ‘what is in it for us’, it is not a show, it is about the fact that we feel touched by this. I remember when we where in Tsanyawa (Kano state) after the geophysical survey and the people organized a rally and what they where saying after gathering their quranic scholars together was that whoever provides water has touched the lives of a lot of people and they started praying for the company. We have always been in touch with the place, they made a commitment that they are going to preserve it very well, we have been in touch there and it is still in very good and perfect condition and like we said, we will always be prepared to go back there to make sure that it functions at the level we want it to function; just like we discussed with the principal at Kings College that we will be in regular touch to ensure that the standards do not go below what we have today and also look into other areas that we can sow.
Capacity building, succession and the Nigeria Customs
I must say something; we had a meeting about three Thursdays ago at the federal ministry of finance and I put it to the permanent secretary that the new administration that we have in Customs (with the enthusiasm and embrace of modernization) have done well. What we were not able to do in the past (maybe it’s not the fault of the management because of the frequent changes, what we were not able to do in months back) we were able to cover the gap within the last two months. We just concluded a joint training programme which was like a whistle stop thing, it is a programme organized by the three service providers; we started in Lagos with Global Scan anchoring it, from there we moved on to Port Harcourt and also to Kano where we anchored it. When we started off, we were complaining because officers were not reporting on time, but by the time we ended up in Kano, all the officers that were supposed to attend it were in attendance. I was with the Comptroller in charge of human resource management and valuation who represented the Comptroller General and they were quiet impressed and say that they are ready, but that is on a joint level.
Cotecna has what is branded as the revised training plan which we submitted to the client in 2009, we gave it to the customs management and the new thing was that with the new Comptroller General coming in, we now have a Deputy Comptroller General in charge of human resource management so we have a direct interface in terms of that, because managers in charge of training deal directly with this department. So, what we have is our own internal training programme, we were not holding ourselves to the contract, we said if Cotecna were to hand over the lots, talking about the seaport, air ports and land borders under us, (Banki, Jibya, Kano, Abuja, Apapa and Tin can), if we are to hand over to Customs how many people do we need? So we came up with certain figures and we said that on our own; apart from the joint training, we are going to train these numbers of officers so that they will have the capacity to take over from us when we leave and so we started the programme.
Some Fridays ago, I was at Abuja where we graduated the first sets of officers on what we branded as the valuation and classification centre incubator programme. Valuation and classification is the core of what we call destination inspection, scanner is also a part of the process, you start from looking at the documents, correctly classifying them and the correct value, we opened a valuation and classification centre in Abuja which is world class with all the tools and we got some customs officers who have been with us, we requested for them last year and they reported in October. We started by first sending them to Nigerian Institute Information Technology on computer proficiency because when they came in we took them through the skill test and we told them ‘for you to be here, you must be able to use the computer and be very good’, so they went for one month and when they came back, we took them through our processes and took them to Abuja to start this programme which is a world class training programme and they graduated on Friday. In fact, we were thinking that because they are public sector people, they should go on vacation, but coincidentally they called me on Monday that when they reported to the CG, he decided to redeploy them immediately, so that they can use these skills. It gives us a kind of motivation and that’s why I said that apart from the fact that we are saying we want to do this, are they ready to take it? So we are working together now, these officers are waiting to be redeployed and we are starting off again, we are taking another sets of officers and we are going to have three runs of this valuation and classification centre training. As I speak now, there is a training that is going on in Apapa because we looked at various areas; like I said which valuation is and classification then we moved on to scanning, how many people do you need. We have been running now for the past five weeks at the leaning centre in Apapa at our site, we were running scanner operations training, on Monday we started with technical maintenance training which is going to run for two weeks, from there, we are moving on to Abuja to run image analysis training for the people. What we are actually doing now in partnership with the Customs is that instead of bringing officers to Lagos all the time, we will move closer to where they are so that more people can attend and we can train more people. I can tell you that in the last six to eight weeks we have been running training back to back and like I said, it is commendable that we have an administration in Customs that is prepared to go along with us, give us all the support and we are also ready. We are committed to this programme because one thing that we have seen is that in terms of capacity building, if we do not build enough, we would not be able to sustain Destination Inspection because it rest on capacity and on all the stakeholders. For example, few days ago in this room we had a meeting with the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding in Nigeria (CRFFN); we are partnering with them, we donated a bus to their secretariat for them to be able to set up very well because that is another segment or area in terms of the Destination Inspection; if the customs brokers don’t have the kind of capacity that we are talking about, there is going to be a lacuna there, the good thing is that we have been working with the Council, we sent five of their members for training in the UK earlier and we told them that we are ready and committed to give them all the help required and to also build capacity in that industry.
When you talk about capacity building we are ready to move on and there are still more to be done.
How many customs officers have benefited from this program so far?
Cotecna alone has trained 392 customs officers within the period of 2006 till now on different kinds of training, and if you look at the increase its over 200 trained in 2009 alone. What happened is that in the last three months, the figure increased because we had Customs that was willing to send people, the trend is moving and before the end of the year, it’s still going to improve because we still have some training programmes that are planned and people are coming on it. For the three service providers, we have trained 450 jointly. Like we said, capacity building is not in terms of numbers, it’s in terms of building the right competence. So in terms of the image analysis which have seen a huge training programme, what we projected was that year on year, up till 2011, we will be training 250 image analysts from Cotecna alone. What we are doing now is that we are gradually introducing Customs officers as trainers along with our people so by 2011, they will have gained the competence and the confidence. In 2012 Cotecna is just going to sit behind, provide the funds and allow Customs to do the training so that it will be something they will be able to continue to replicate, in that year alone we should be able to train not less that 400, purely using Customs people as trainers. And the joint training programme that we are talking about, the valuation programme that we are using currently we are using Customs officers who have been trained which means that they can replicate this over and over, what they need is just to provide the funding and the logistics.
Prospect of good succession at end of contract
What has happened is that from being competitors, we (the three service providers) have also come together, the term now is cooperation, we are competitors but we also need to cooperate. So, a lot of time we talked together with the other service providers, what I can tell you is that this scheme is moving in the right direction, part of the positive signals that I have seen apart from the new management in Customs is that we had a meeting at the ministry of finance, we had a meeting session with the new permanent secretary and he told all the service providers though we have started working on the transition plan in partnership with the university of Cambria in Australia to ensure that we are not just saying that we have to build capacity, we have a formal plan of transition that is being looked at, not waiting until 2012, but phasing in and phasing out so that when you talk about people taking over, we will have a trial period and look at it that how many people are supposed to be trained in this area?
So the Permanent Secretary has told all of us that we will be having quarterly reviews of this scheme and all service providers will have a transition plan that they will be monitoring. Part of it also is that a team has been sent out and they will be moving from site to site.
The fixed scanner promise
I am also happy to tell you that the fixed scanner in Apapa is on course, December, 2009 is the deadline and by April, 2010, we will be delivering the one in Ashaye (Tin Can port), in fact if you go there now you may not know the difference in terms of the physical construction but the issue is that Apapa is now around 75 per cent to 80 per cent in completion, Tin Can is around 65 per cent to 70 per cent completed. We promised that we are going to deliver Apapa first and so we are focusing on that, we have already scheduled training for all the people who are going to work on it, it is not different from the skills you need to acquire when you are running a mobile scanner, but the only thing that we will need is that we will officially inform the government and they will now tell us when they want to be there, but I can tell you that by January 2010, we will start running the fixed scanners in Apapa, and like I said it is something positive for Nigeria because in sub-Saharan Africa, this is the first time we are having something like this and in one year Nigeria is going to have two at a go, its 9MEV and it’s the highest level of penetration that is allowed, it has a dual vision which means that you can look at containers from the top and from the sides, it is the best in technology and the only other place I think we have it in Africa is Algeria, but this is the latest model, it has material discrimination and if there are atomic materials in the container it will flash it and you will know about it.
Impact of global economic meltdown and 2010 prospects
We had a slight decrease in revenue in 2009 because of the economic situation but we are sure that in 2010, we are looking forward to a positive improvement and the revenue will be up again to last year’s level, the profit of the company is stable at a percentage, so the company is well managed. As we all know, import was down compared to last year, but the projection is that there are lots of positives, the peace in the Niger Delta has allowed the country to be able to pump more oil unlike in the past when the country budgeted to pump 2.2 barrels per day and we were doing 900,000 barrels per day, now government has said that we are doing 1.6million barrels and with the peace in the Niger Delta, we expect that the government will be able to pump more, so the projection is that government will be able to do that, the price of oil in the international market is also rising, growth is expected next year. We see next year as positive, although growth may not be led by the world leaders but it will be dragged, also the direction of trade will be moving towards the Far East, so these are some of the things that we see. Every company has to adjust, but what we had to do was that in terms of staffing, we made sure that we hold on tight and it has been a big issue, if you look in terms of fuelling, we virtually run on generators these days and we had to start looking at that and then try to manage the cost because it can’t increase your revenue, you must try to manage your cost, so in the midst of this we still ensure that we have the right kind of environment for our staff and the people are happy. If you are operating in an environment, your people must be happy, we are tax collectors and that’s why I always say when people react negatively, if you make a mistake in a document people will react beyond the errors they have made because it’s a natural thing that nobody loves paying tax. As much as possible, we have continued to invest, it has not affected the kind of things we are putting on ground, construction has been going at the rate it should go and even more because we must deliver on schedule, we have said it earlier in the year that we are going to do these projects and we have not allowed all that to hinder us as we have continued to deliver.
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