Chief Boniface Okoye is a licensed customs agent. He is also a chieftain of the National Council of Managing Directors of Licensed Customs Agents (NCMDLCA). In this interaction with Shipping Position Daily correspondent; Dapo Olawuni, he spoke on the need for Federal Government to appoint a career officer as the Comptroller General of Nigeria Customs Service. He also shared his professional views on how to resolve the Apapa gridlock as well as what the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) needs to consider in reviewing the port concession agreement.
“The Customs should acknowledge the help of Nigeria licensed customs agents and the Nigerian importers who helped them in generating this revenue”
“We pay N215,000 to the Customs to renew our license, then if suddenly they are asking us to pay to the CRFFN again in tune of N100,000, this is where the fight would start”
NPA planning to review port concession agreement, what aspect do you think they should focus on?
From inception, we have always known that the agreement will fail one day, and this is what is evident now, because if you go abroad, you will see the true meaning of concessioning, it means, build, develop and encourage importers to come patronize you, then the NPA can now become a supervisor. What we have here is an already built port handed over to terminal operators who only moved in and erected their gates to separate their potion of land, there are existing gates into the port, they all went ahead and created another sets of gates, they have occupied spaces meant for trailer parks and taken over all government warehouses inside the port. Automatically, there is no government presence at our ports again apart from Customs wearing uniforms, you only see NPA by buildings and their signboards, what have they done? Nothing. The port concession agreement that NPA signed is tying Nigerians to a stake, what they should have done is to tell a concessionaire to go to a place like Badagry, develop their own port, build Customs house and equip it with necessary tools for cargo examination and NPA security should be there. The Apapa roads are contested because there is no holding bay and this is why shipping companies are always on Christmas because of container demurrage they are collecting, they no longer give refunds, they now rather write you for more money, the problem of the port is from the shipping companies.
Thirdly, Nigeria Customs are not doing what they are supposed to do, if they act according to CEMA, these containers lying on the roads are supposed to be at the expense of NPA. There are so many empty lands along Badagry expressway and Ikorodu which they can convert into a holding bay.
What scientific approach can be followed to bring solution to Apapa traffic?
The permanent solution to Apapa traffic is to revoke the concessioning policy and give the concessionaires a condition, if they want to be given a certificate, they must go and build an empty container holding bay, NPA will go and inspect it and certify it okay, after this when we load cargo from a particular shipping company, we would know where to drop the empty container, otherwise, every street in Lagos would be filled-up with empty containers.
The fact remains that 99.9% of the shipping companies in Nigeria do not have holding bay, they only came into our port to practice roll-on, roll-off system, a container comes to the port, discharges containers and leaves, but in actual sense of it, if the Nigerian Customs and other regulatory agencies were doing their job, a ship that drops 300 containers must also go back with 300 containers, but as it is, Nigeria has become a dumping ground.
What is your take on the recent ban on third party by the CG of Customs?
You see, whoever wants to be the President of this country should try and call professionals Customs officers who know the job, agents do not produce PAAR, it is the Customs that provides it from their system and ask you to go and pay, how then would they now arrest the container, what happens is that companies sometimes have different addresses on a particular product, the problem is that the CG of Customs himself doesn't know what to do, there are professional customs officers who know what to do, how can you go and arrest an agent who didn't generate the PAAR? Sometimes you see customs placing five alerts on a single consignment, and no importer would like to abandon his consignment at the port because of bribe. We want to see a situation where customs start arresting and displaying officers who released cargoes alongside the agent.
Last year customs collected N1.2 trillion, what is your advice to them this year?
Everybody worked towards that revenue, but does the customs know the importer or clearing agent who is bringing that money? At whose expense did they generate that N1.2trillion? The Customs should acknowledge the help of Nigeria licensed customs agents and the Nigerian importers who helped them in generating this revenue and give soft landing.
Do you support that Customs should be taken away from Finance Ministry and placed under Transport Ministry?
I do not support this call because, what the ministry or transportation is chewing is more than the width of its mouth, there are certain things we should be looking at, and this is to ensure that they fulfill the mandate given to them and know the limit of their powers, if both ministry do not understand the limit of their powers, they would continue to clash all the time.
Government has expressed plans to review the auto policy soon, what is your advice to them?
This is the third time they have planned to review the policy, if the policy was good, nobody would be kicking against it, this simply means that the policy cannot achieve anything meaningful for this country. There are no jobs in Nigeria and yet the little one we are managing, they want to close it down, Innoson Vehicle Company at Nnewi, we saw how they end up dealing with him through the banks, assuming he is a small man, they would have finished him completely, but because he knows what he is doing, he followed them up and won the court case. What the government is supposed to do is to give soft landing to manufacturers, they would start coming by themselves to invest in Nigeria. Big companies like Peugeot and Volkswagen, Leventis and so on were in Nigeria doing CKD (Completely Knocked Down) but today what happens to these companies? These companies are no longer in Nigeria, they have gone to Ghana where they are doing very fine.
As a chieftain of National Council of Managing Directors, is it true the association has died a natural death?
The National Council of Managing Directors of Licensed Customs Agents (NCMDLCA) is not dead, we have Mr John Morris as the president of the Council, very soon you will start seeing us in a different way, right now we are at the end of the court problem, we are only waiting for the court to pronounce judgement, it is Lucky Amiwero that is behind all the problems.
In the build up to the CRFFN elections, there were agitations among your members that Chief Austen Kelly should not represent them in the CRFFN Governing Council, what is the situation?
This is a claim of hatred against Kelly, but today he is already in the board, going into the board is about policies that would help people outside, this is why we supported Austen Kelly to go to the Council, he is the type that will look at your face and tell you the truth.
The Council is preparing to begin its compliance and monitoring exercise, how prepared are the stakeholders?
They must let us know their plans, whatever they plan to do would not be more than the Customs who issues us license, they must liaise with the management of Nigeria Customs so that when CRFFN monitoring team comes, it would be a soft landing for everyone. Every year, we pay N215,000 to the customs to renew our license, then if suddenly they are asking us to pay to the CRFFN again in tune of N100,000, this is where the fight would start, the NPA collects N15,000 from us for license even while they are not giving us any services at all, this is why the CRFFN needs to call every freight forwarder to a town hall meeting to discuss before they introduce anything.
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