The Shippers’ Association of Lagos State (SALS) has called on the Nigeria Customs Service to adopt the electronic manifest as well as a miniature video of all the contents of a consignment coming into the country as a way of accelerating the release of containers in the country.
Speaking in an interview with newsmen in Lagos on Tuesday, the President of the association, Rev. Jonathan Nicol also warned against incessant querying of consignments duly released from the ports contending that it was wrong for junior officers along the road to query the authority of the releasing officer who in most cases is a senior officer of the service.
Nicol further contended that such practice should be done away with as it did not portray the Nigeria Customs in good light.
According to him,” you have fast track system by customs, how fast is the fast track? That one officer will tell you, I cannot come to your warehouse, you have to provide a vehicle for me. Is that the bargain? Is that what is written in CEMA? And when you say, okay, I will provide vehicle for you, he gives you a price. All that things should stop. You don’t want to do the job of a customs officer, why don’t you resign?”
“The moment a consignment is released from the port by the most senior customs officer recognized by the Central Bank of Nigeria, because the entry goes back to the Central Bank of Nigeria if it is a foreign transaction, once that signature is there in that SGD, it is not subject to query by any officer on the highway”.
“Why should we have them on the highway? So, all these should change. We still come back to us behaving in the right way and if we make up our minds to do the right thing, we can do it. These are all human errors”.
He added that the association was looking at a very decent society in 2015 especially in the maritime sector so that at the end of the day, one would give somebody a quotation that would enable him or her clear his or her container from the port and it ended getting out the container at that price as against what obtains currently where one was not quite sure how much it would take to release a consignment from the ports.
