The Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA) has decried the constant breach of the indigenization policy and the local content law of the Federal government by a number of foreign companies which engage in the business of customs brokerage in Nigeria calling for a stop in the trend.
The Publicity Secretary of ANLCA, Dr. Kayode Farinto who made this known at a roundtable organized by the Maritime Correspondents’ Organization of Nigeria (MARCON) in Lagos yesterday regretted that the customs brokers in the country had lost their clients to the foreigners who came to do business in the ports thereby making survival difficult for them.
Farinto noted that with indigenization of the customs brokerage in the country, there would be no limit to what customs agents could achieve in the industry which he said was capable of turning individual brokers to multimillionaires.
According to him, “Above all, we are looking at a situation where we have indigenization in customs brokerage. My brother, it takes the grace of god to survive. People like DMT who just came onboard has snatched all our customers, they are not indigenously owned, they are owned by foreigners.
“I went to Cotonou last year, I have a consignment that I wanted to clear and I have to give it out to a Cotonou indigene but in Nigeria, you enter the ports and carry out customs brokerage once you are licensed by the Board of Customs.
“Indigenization of customs brokerage is part of the things we told this government that they must look into. If it is done, we can come to MARCON today and say we are giving you a transformer to power your office or we want you to evacuate from this place because being a customs broker, you are a multimillionaire but it is not done in Nigeria because of the fact that these foreigners have packed all our jobs”.
However, the ANLCA spokesman hinted that a new password for the customs brokers was in the offing as according to him,” We noticed that these people that are parading themselves as freight forwarders are hacking into our password to do illegitimate business”.
He announced that the meeting to that effect had been concluded between the association and the management of the Nigeria Customs Service and would soon be rolled out.
