Ugochukwu Nnadi (Chairman, NAGAFF, PTML)
As far as I know, the Council of Managing Directors is a faceless organization, they are existing just in name and if you look around, I don’t know what they stand for apart from Amiwero who have been parading himself around as president and the new person who have told him to step aside because he has been there for too long. If you go to ports, go to terminals you will see other associations showing their influence, contributing to the movement of cargo, but you can never see a member of the association; it’s like the council has outlived its relevance.
It is illegal to operate an unregistered organization and tell them not to parade themselves again, to me is normal, but however you must also remember that there is the freedom of association and that association should be for a purpose and the purposed must affect the life of the people around and not just members of that organization. Apart from those days when the Council of Managing Directors was newly- formed, I can hardly see any member or any contributions they have made in the cargo movement.
Olu Olasore (Gemtrade International Ltd)
First of all, I don’t know if the law that establish the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarders gives it power to register associations, and even if they have the powers, some of the people parading themselves as factional members of the council do not even have offices and so it is wrong for the CRFFN to deal with them or to recognize them, it is not legally correct.
Looking at it on the other hand, the CRFFN is not to be blamed; it is the Council of Managing Directors that should be blamed for failing to put its house in order, if you look at some of these factional people, they do not even have the knowledge of what the industry entails, they are merely using politics because Amiwero seems to have deep knowledge of the system more than majority of them, and maybe they feel he does not have any skeleton in his cupboard so they are bent on working against him, the only way he goofed is that he stayed there for too long.
Adesanya Olagunju (Ajadematanle maritime services)
Excluding the national council from the list is not right at all. I think they just have to come to an agreement and sort it out, it is wrong for an association to be having two national presidents, all these will bring about confusion and what Amiwero should do is to make sure he puts his house in order. For now, those of us that have been registered are still in the dark and we don’t know what is happening yet, we have registered and we await the council to tell us what is going to be our benefits.
Bayo Akomolafe (Maritime journalist)
Looking into the port system, for the past years, there have been multiple associations which is not healthy for the industry, what the CRFFN should have done is to advice all the associations to come together and form one body and that is when we can know who is who, the removal of the council which according to them even met the 100% requirements is not a very good thing to do because the association was established as a credible association, and again most of them are credible agents just like Amiwero now, nobody will say they don’t know him in the industry.
So, what CRFFN ought to have done is to fizzle out all the associations and allow them to go back to their roots which is ANLCA, it’s not that the managing directors of licensed customs agent can not practice without being registered by the CRFFN, but my advice to them is that they should go back to ANLCA; which is their root.
Akosi Mbuba (Freight forwarder)
First of all, I want to ask who the Council of Managing Directors is, they are licensed customs agents and directors of customs licensed companies. So, they are not supposed to be an association, they are supposed to be just directors who will be meeting once in a while to discuss, maybe the CRFFN wants them to go back to where they belong and let us have only ANLCA and NAGAFF which are recognized associations for now.
I am not saying that the Council of Managing Directors should not exist, but they should exist as directors of companies and not as an association because they are the same as ANLCA, so why are we duplicating associations, so its not that they will cease to exist or operate because directors will always remain, but they should not be an association.
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