The National Association of Government Approved Freight Forwarders (NAGAFF) has frowned at the recent engagement of the German Development firm, Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH (GIZ) by the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) to assist it in implementing the Common External Tariff (CET) of the Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS).
Recall that at the beginning of a two-day seminar tagged,”Common External Tariff: Implementation, Challenges and Prospects”, organized by NCS for journalists in Abuja, GIZ’s Advisor on Trade Facilitation and Private Sector Development, Frieder Mecklenburg said his firm is in Nigeria to train officers and men of the NCS the CET implementation.
Speaking in an interview with Primetime Reporters in Lagos, the founder of NAGAFF, Dr. Boniface Aniebonam faulted the move by NCS arguing that there were lots of Customs officers who were learned as far as CET implementation was involved who the Service should have assembled to get this job done.
According to him,” if there is somebody we should try to respect in this country, it is the former Comptroller-General of Customs, Hamman Bello. I think he was the brain behind this CET, he was part of the people that prepared this document”.
“What is German firm? German firm on what? People like Hamman Bello has the capacity, I spoke with him this (Monday) morning on this matter and I know what he told me. Even the so-called German firm you are talking about, what do they know?”
“We are not taking advantage of somebody who is one of us. Even in the customs itself, there are a lot of guys there who are very brainy that we should have assembled to get this job done. People like Julius Nwagwu, these are gurus in the matters of tariff nomenclature and things like that. So, we don’t need to be wasting all these time”.
“Honestly, I am telling you, I spoke with Hamman Bello this morning, he wasn’t very happy that some of these things are being given out to a foreign firm. Let us try to use our indigenous brains; customs has done very well as far as am concerned but in this regard”.
Recall that former President Goodluck Jonathan last April approved the implementation of the CET in Nigeria 2015-2019 and 2015 Fiscal Policy Measures.
The implementation of the ECOWAS CET (2015-2019) together with its Supplementary Protection Measures (SPM) and 2015 Fiscal Policy Measures concurrently took effect from 11th April 2015 after the expiration of the 30 days notice required under the provisions of the ECOWAS CET.
