Prince Yinka Bakare is the National President of the National Association of Air Freight Forwarders and Consolidators (NAFFAC). In this interview with Oluyinka Onigbinde he speaks on factors inhibiting ease of doing business in the country, assessment of the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding (CRFFN) in the country and other sundry issues.
“A barge can go as far as Baro port and Onitsha port as long as there is security”
How will you describe the ease of doing business at the airport?
Ease of doing business in Nigeria is not favourable in the country entirely, not to talk of the airport alone, we need to look at the ease of doing business in the country holistically, ease of doing business at the airport is work-in-progress and I believe that we will get there.
There is a lot of things we actually clamored for that could help the ease of doing business at the airport you could see of recent that the Nigeria customs were insisting that we must have PAAR at the airport; that all cargoes coming to the airport must have PAAR and it takes almost 48 to 72 hours to get the process of PAAR done, and we had an argument with them and they realized that the process needs to be improved on. We want a situation where we will be able to compete anywhere in the world when it comes to this profession, but when the environment is not favorable, it will be difficult to compete. We need to work on some things for us to get to that level.
Why are we not getting it right when it comes to ease of doing business in the country?
Multiple agencies, multiple checkpoints, physical examination and all that. Imagine that we have to do 100% examination on all cargoes that come into the port, how many containers will an officer examine, and for you to go for an examination the whole agencies need to be complete, you need to have the Standard Organisation of Nigeria (SON), NAFDAC, NDLEA, SSS, Customs, NESRA if need be. Which means that, as an agent you need to have all these agencies, and imagine when you are calling customs; you are calling the customs you are calling the enforcement officer, you are calling the CIU, the resident officer and just in customs alone, you are calling about four to five units to come and do examination and by the time they are through, they pack it back and you go back to the releasing and you pass through another set of tables again for that and the officers on these tables also have the complaint they will give whether wrong or right, so it’s a long process
As a member of the governing council of CRFFN what’s your assessment of the current leadership of the council?
Without being biased, I am a member of the governing council and there is no way I want to look at it without giving myself a pass mark because when you look at the leadership of the council; I am part of the leadership, so it will take somebody from outside to give us a pass mark or a knock.
But, I think what we have been able to do in the past two years; if the former leadership did as much, the council would have achieved a lot, we should also remember that for good seven years, the council did not have a governing board probably because there was no policy direction for the council, so we came in to meet virtually nothing and I think in the last two years we have been able to achieve a lot and we need to get this clear, the governing council it’s not the management of CRFFN, the governing council only meets two or three times in a year, it’s the duty of the management to tell us what they have done and what we think they should do and we bring up the policy for them to go and implement and I can tell since the outbreak of the COVID-19, we have not met. So you will understand the impact of that on the council.
Do you think it’s fair for the CRFFN to deny new associations of accreditation?
To be honest, I am one of those people that advocated for us to have one single association, like some people have argued that CRFFN should not be the one that should represent Nigeria at FIATA, but because there is no single somebody of freight forwarders, FIATA had to recognize CRFFN as the body, whereas CRFFN is an agency of government, it’s just like saying National Sport Commission should represent Nigeria Football Association at FIFA.
What’s your reaction to the recent compliance task team that was set up by freight forwarding associations, don’t you think this is as a result of failure on the part of the council?
The truth is, in as much as I don’t want to get personal about this, we have in that same council NAGAFF representatives; including the President of NAGAFF, we have in that same council ANLCA’s representatives, including the vice president of ANLCA. So if they said the council has failed, which I believe they will not say, then automatically they have failed because they are members of that same council, of course there is need for taskforce as an association to checkmate your members about what they are doing, so I don’t see anything wrong in that.
IS NAFFAC also considering setting up a task force?
No, we are not, I don’t think so.
As a barge operator, what are the challenges of barge operation in Nigeria?
Barge operation is a thing that is probably new, coming into barge operation, people see it as big business, but I think the government can as well come in, thank God, majority of the agencies are coming together to harmonise their charges so that they don’t duplicate charges; this is a good one for us and also the security of our people on the waterways is very important. I can tell you now that a barge can go as far as Baro port and Onitsha port as long as there is security.
Why do we have all manners of barges on our waterways, is it that the business is not regulated?
How many barges do we have? I don’t think we have up to 500 barges on our waterways, I don’t agree that we have barges that are not fit, somebody certifies these barges, the barges are just in different capacities and different sizes just like we have in trucks, there are trucks that carries 20ft containers, there are some that carries 40ft containers. Barge operation is regulated by NPA, NIMASA gives certification and NIWA also, so I don’t believe we have all manners of barges on our waters.
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