Chidi Anthony Opara (Freight Forwarder)
The “Practitioners Operating Fees is an extant law whose conceptualization is advertently predicated on illegality for selfish reasons. “Practitioners Operating Fees (POF)”, by nomenclature and by conceptualization has nothing to do with “goods” exiting Nigerian ports. It is a fee to be paid by practitioners from the earnings from their practice.
The above happens to be the method in all the known professions in Nigeria. No known professional regulatory body in Nigeria charges members on jobs done.
There is nowhere in the “POF” extant law and approval where it is stated that “POF” would be charged on “goods” exiting Nigeria ports. I hereby challenge you to make such provision and approval public.
Olumide Fakanlu (Freight Forwarder)
Collection of POF is a fraud to me, I have never heard of such in any other country except Nigeria, because what we pay as annual subscription both individually and by our companies that should be enough for them, have never heard engineers paying operational fee on every single work they do to COREN, they are not revenue agencies, they are regulatory, no accountant pay such money to ICAN. So CRFFN should not use the issue of regulation to extort people, it’s not justifiable, it’s a fraud. In addition to it, I don’t know how they arrive at the percentage which is another issue for another day, since they were created I don’t think they’ve done any training more than once or twice and I regret being part of it as a clearing agent.
Rev Jonathan Nicole (President SAL)
If you call it Practitioner Operating Fee (POF), every organization pays practitioner fee, CRFFN POF is different, maybe the nomenclature they used is wrong, COREN has practitioner fee, NMA has practitioner fee, NCS have practitioner fee. So why should CRFFN own be different, every year people pay their practitioner fee, without you renewing your license you cannot operate, that’s POF. So you cannot say you are collecting practitioner fee per consignment because they are laying a bad precedent and you will just find out tomorrow that NMA will say practitioner fee is per person that visits your hospital, because that’s exactly what it is.
Festus Ukwu (Secretary General NLCMDMA)
There is no controversy as regards the collection, it is justifiable, government approved the collection of POF, and the Minister also gave his consent, so collection of the POF is justifiable, I see no reason it should be controversial.
Chief Osita Chukwu (Freight Forwarder)
Yes, there is no justification for the collection, first it’s that the tenure of the current board is over; they don’t have any right to say or demand for any collection in the first place. Collection of the POF is abnormal, government should be the one to pay us percentage based on what we generate for them and not the other way round. Just as it is done in other clime, collection of POF should be annual and not be based per consignment, it is not done anywhere.
Frank Ogunojemite (APFLON President)
I have said it before that the collection is not justifiable, and we have gone to court for redress, although the POF was not a bad concept, the matter was still before the National Assembly and yet to be ratified.
If eventually POF needs to be collected, they must call for the election of board members. In fact, it is so sad that after the tenure of the immediate past governing council members, there is a gap. There must be an interim board to oversee this collection.
Agbassi Chibuzor
There is nowhere that it is practiced, how can you say we should be paying POF on every single cargo, is that justifiable? If they are looking for money by all means, let them call it another name and not POF, who pay POF on every job he or she does.
