The National Association of Government Approved Freight Forwarders (NAGAFF) has called on the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) to consider collaborating with the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding in Nigeria (CRFFN) as a means of riding the airport terminals and warehouses of touts and hoodlums.
The National President of NAGAFF, Dr. Eugene Nweke who made this known while interacting with newsmen in his office in Lagos last week said unless the service considers the option of working with CRFFN with a view of identifying who is a freight forwarder, they may found out that they were only scrubbing the problem on the surface.
Nweke was reacting to the alleged attack on the Customs officers on duty as well as the Customs Area Controller (CAC) of the Murtala Mohammed International Airport Command of the Service, Comptroller Tajudeen Olanrewaju by those believed to be hoodlums at the terminals last two weeks leading to the shutdown of the terminals and warehouses at the airport.
According to him,” the customs there should approach the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding in Nigeria and ascertain who these people are because if you are not registered with the Council, you are not a freight forwarder”.
“So, whoever must go there must be a certified registered freight forwarder so that we would know if issues come, we can pick your number and remove you from being a freight forwarder. We must apply code of conduct, we must apply standard in modern freight forwarding operations”.
“But if agencies of government chose to ignore that, this kind of thing will keep rearing up every now and then like this because every given cargo warehouse or port terminal environment is a security zone, security zone because goods there are carefully handled”.
He posited that not only is airport terminals and warehouses an interface zone, but that it is a global point where goods coming in and going out of the country are planned thus requiring not the presence of unauthorized persons adding that there must be a system that would identify who is who thus the relevance of CRFFN in this regard.
