A frontline maritime lawyer; Emmanuel Nwagbara, has faulted the Act establishing the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding in Nigeria (CRFFN), saying that the Act was inelegantly drafted.
Nwagbara who said this in an interview with Shipping Position Daily recently in Lagos, also said that the Act was drafted in a hurry, adding that there was no provision as to ‘who- is-who’ in the framework of the Act.
He also maintained that the law failed to differentiate who is a freight forwarder from a customs broker, stressing that virtually everybody in the maritime industry is freight forwarder, which should not be so.
“Honesty, I will tell you that of all the legislations that I have gone through in the maritime sector, the CRFFN Act is the most inelegantly drafted legislation. The drafting is so inelegant; I think it was drafted in so much a hurry such that there is no provision as to who is what within the frame work of the CRFFN Act. For instance, who is a freight forwarder, virtually everybody that operated in the maritime industry in one way of the other is a freight forwarder; which should not be”, he argued.
“We need to have a freight forwarder properly defined and we need to know that a freight forwarder is different from a customs broker; and a freight forwarder is different from a transporter within the maritime industry”, he added.
Nwagabara, also accused the Act of confusing a customs broker with a freight forwarder who according to him, is supposed to operate at the international frontier.
“But the CRFFN Act seems to confuse the customs broker that is, the clearing agent with the freight forwarder who is supposed to be operating at the international frontier and even the transporter who moves cargo from one point to the other just as a carrier who picks cargo from one point to the other. All of these people are treated as freight forwarders under the act”, he explained further.
He reiterated that the Act needs a surgical operation and total review; even as he advised that the CRFFN should not be an agency of the government.
He also said that the CRFFN needs to have a means of generating funds to run its affairs without depending on the government.
He stated that: “So the CRFFN Act needs surgical operation, it should be reviewed and it looks to me that even the number of people that constitutes the board is too much. You recall that recently there was an election were about 15 people were elected who are yet to be inaugurated”.
“The other thing is that the Act presents the CRFFN as a parastatal of government and for me it should not be a parastatal of government, we have too many parastatals of government in the maritime industry already”.
According to him, “the CRFFN should be a body that regulates freight forwarders, they need to have the backing of the law and it needs to have a means of generating funds to run its affairs, it needs to have a provision that allows government and individuals to give donations to it. But the way it is structured it is hampered in its operations by the same law that ought to enhance its operations”, he concluded.
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