The President, Association of Registered Freight Forwarders of Nigeria (AREFFN), Dr. Frank Ukor has explained his position on the recent feud between the Standards Organization of Nigeria and some freight forwarding associations in the maritime sector.
It will be recalled that Ukor who championed the campaign against the incessant arrest of containers on the City Highways of Lagos was recently seen in a press conference organized by the Maritime Advocacy and Action Group (MAAG) in support of the act he vehemently opposed.
Speaking to Primetime Reporters on his action, Dr. Ukor disclosed that his decision to recant his earlier position was as a result of superior argument put forward by members of MAAG of which his association was a member.
Ukor observed that he cannot continue to remain in the past adding that since he now had better information regarding the situation on the ground, he had to toe the line of the majority.
“We had a meeting where this issue came up and in the meeting, if majority is seen carrying the day, as a member, you have to comply. If you single yourself out, you become an enemy. So, it was a consensus of the group, let me not say it was a consensus but majority opinion of members that this is the situation and I don’t have option. We were mandated to go and talk and we did”.
“But then, at the meeting, there were arguments that were proffered and when you look at the argument, we will not have to depend on the past, we have to move forward. If between the times we talked about these things and now, we have better information about the real situation of things and not the manipulated, we toed the line of the majority. I don’t have any option than to go along with them”, Ukor said.
On what the new information that made him change his position was, he informed that he gathered that SON was grossly underfunded as well as grossly understaffed thus the reasons for the challenges it was facing in the cause of carrying out its duties.
He said, “they have been asked out of the ports and if they have been asked out of the ports, how will they fulfill their mandate apart from regulating the Nigerian Industries but the goods that are coming in. If you check, you find out that all the goods that are manufactured in Nigeria are of international standard even better than the ones that were imported”.
“But the problem that we have is that all these goods that are imported, that are where all these problems are. So, that is why we said, having found this out, what do we do about this situation?”
“So, SON needs to be given an enabling environment to operate. Well, they have been stopped from operating from the ports; they cannot enter the ports to do their work, so where will they do the work? The Customs are not inviting them when they want to do examination and even when they indicate that certain goods should not be released; some of these importers manipulate their ways through and get their goods”.
“The only area I tended to disagree was the issue of arresting containers on the highway but then they had a superior argument that if they don’t arrest containers on the roads, they can’t do that at the warehouses either because if the goods go to the warehouses, somebody can break through the warehouses and remove the goods at night and seal of the place and pretend that nothing happened. So, what do we do?”.
