The National President, Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA), Prince Olayiwola Shittu has called on the Standards Organization of Nigeria (SON) to create a help desk so as to enable agents and stakeholders to access their services.
Shittu who was speaking at a the public forum organized by SON in Lagos recently stated that the desk would facilitate quick information sharing which would in turn boost the confidence of the agency’s processes.
He opined that with the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in vogue, people don’t need to travel a long distance to access the services of the SON calling on the agency to also create a department that could answer their questions in order to improve on the freight forwarders’/SON relationship.
“There has been a lot of misconception about the operations of the regulatory agencies just because they are closed, they are not open. We should be more open in our operations. I want SON to create a help desk so that online somebody can ask a question and within a space of one or two hours, you will be getting a response”.
“You will have confidence about what the process is all about and you don’t need to travel too much and that is why this ICT is the in-thing now”, he said.
The ANLCA boss further called on SON to embark on pre-shipment inspection of goods before they are imported into the country as was the case in the advanced countries of the world adding that that way, Nigeria would cease from being a dumping ground for sub-standard products.
He said,” our senior colleague here, Lucky Amiwero has said something about foreign inspection, it is the most modern way of checking dumping in any country. That is why we have embassies in the world. If you go to the America Embassy in Lagos, you have the trade group, you will see all sorts of government regulatory agencies’ representatives there to make sure that what is coming to their country is not harmful”.
“I will beseech that we look at that angle and then we need standard level of operation. I think SON, I don’t know if you are going to devise a means for freight forwarders to be standardized too because I am telling you, it is not just me and you on different pedestals, it is not the number of associations that we have that will cater for our interests, it is what individually we are able to do together”.
Responding, the Director-General of SON, Dr. Joseph Odumodu promised that the situation where stakeholders had to travel all the way to Lekki to transact business with SON would soon be a thing of the past.
Odumodu stated that with the e-services platform being put together by the agency as well as the e-payment aspect of the project which would soon come up, stakeholders could comfortably transact business with SON in the comfort of their homes and offices without necessarily coming to the agency’s office at Lekki.
“We all know that within a short time, we would have gotten that. I think within the next one month, all these travelling to Lekki back and forth will not be anything because by the time we will have the e-services and we would want to integrate the e-payment, so that you can stay in your home quietly and handle everything about fund”, Odumodu stated.
