The new Chairman of the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding in Nigeria (CRFFN), Alhaji Abubakar Tsanni, has expressed his determination to sanitise the freight forwarding industry, especially in the area of eliminating activities of foreigners in the cargo clearing processes at the country’s ports and other entry points.
Speaking during a courtesy visit to the Maritime Reporters Association of Nigeria (MARAN), in Apapa, Lagos on Friday, Tsanni, who sought support of maritime journalists, said he was determined to do his best in ensuring that freight forwarding is repositioned to create millions of jobs for Nigerians.
He said: “We are here to do our best for the industry; to find ways to sanitise the freight forwarding industry improve the capacity of freight forwarders and strengthen the council’s laws to be able to solve the problems and face the challenges. We believe that by doing this, we will become more effective in our trade and then be able to reduce cargo dwell time in our ports”
“We have met many of the freight forwarding and licensed customs clearing agents associations and we are still visiting other stakeholders to identify with them and ensure that every stakeholder is on the same page to achieve our collective goals.”
Meanwhile, the Vice Chairman of the governing council of the CRFFN; Chief Henry Njoku, has said that the major challenge of the new board is not the collection of the Practitioners Operation Fees (POF) instead; the new board is committed to improving the welfare of the practitioners.
Njoku, who said this in a chat with Shipping Position Daily in Lagos last week, also said that the new governing council is different from the previous one in that the newly0inuagurate board is all-encompassing
"What you have to know is that this particular council is much different from what we had before. Now it is all-encompassing; all the associations are here, unlike before when we had only ANLCA and then people were going to court. This time, we have almost all the presidents of the associations are all members of this council. So it is very easy for us to take their problems look at it and then address it as per law and follow it rigidly"
Chief Njoku said that the new board has the approval of all the freight forwarding associations to go ahead with the collection of the fee.
Explaining further he said that if they succeed in solving the problem of the practitioners they can go ahead and implement government regulations.
"As for the POF, our main assignment now is how to solve the clearing agents’ problems and when we solve it, we will still apply it. The associations we have visited all of them are insisting that we should go ahead and collect the POF. So we don't have any issue with that, but the chairman think that it is necessary for us to first tackle their problems and then go ahead and do what the government regulations says, we are here to implement it.
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