Amidst apprehension over the delay in conducting elections into the national executive council of the embattled Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA), its immediate past national vice president, Mr Dayo Abdulazeez is canvassing that the next president must be resident in Lagos.
The licensed customs agents told Shipping Position Weekly that the fact that the greatest percentage of shipping business takes place in Lagos and that majority of licensed customs agents are based in Lagos.
According to him, majority of the problems that often come up in Lagos ports and for which licensed customs agents are always on the receiving end could be addressed promptly if the association’s president is on ground in Lagos.
Abdulazeez who lamented the current state of things in the association however expressed optimism that current reconciliatory moves by leaders of the party will lead to elections into the various chapters within the western zone very soon, even as he insisted that for ANLCA to move forward the forth coming elections and the ones that have been held should culminate into the emergence of an acceptable national president who according to him, must be a Lagosian.
“We must get our acts right and let the president be resident in Lagos so that if there is any professional challenge, the president on ground together with his team will just move in, its not right that we are going to wait for one president to come form outside Lagos who will need at least one hour to reach Lagos by flight. We must elect the next ANLCA president from western zone. That is my position”, he stressed.
“I want to say that if ANLCA wants to move forward, the next president of ANLCA should come from western zone. I am speaking confidently that if the association wants to move forward, the next president should be elected from among practitioners who are resident in Lagos, if they want to elect an Igbo or a Yoruba man as president or an Hausa or south-south man as ANLCA president, no problem, but he should be resident in Lagos because 85 per cent of cargoes coming into Nigeria come in through the Lagos zone and 90 per cent of the licensed customs agents are resident in Lagos. They are the ones who are facing the major challenges, they know where the shoe pinches, and we can not have a distant president because ANLCA is different from the other professional associations”, he maintained, even as he decried the emergence of ethnic inclinations within the western zone of the association.
(Please go to pages 6 and 7 for details)
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