Amade Abdul is the new Customs Area Controller of the Federal Operations Unit (FOU), Zone A of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) with its headquarters in Lagos. A fortnight ago, he held a maiden press briefing in Lagos where he entertained questions from Journalists on the mandate of the Unit under a new Comptroller-General, the fracas between Customs and other Security agencies at Gbaji among others. Our correspondent wad at the briefing and filed in this report. Excerpts;
How do you cope with the new dispensation?
Like I said in my opening speech, Customs is an organized and having trained set of people. It is like going to school, nobody goes to school to learn how to work in Customs, may be you just have a general knowledge of what you will meet in life. Your training will give you the capacity to adapt to a new way of doing things.
And so, Customs officers, we are already trained on ground and you know at different levels of doing things, we have the strategic, we have the operational and tactical. At this level, as our name connotes, we are at the operational level, we are already adapted to what we are supposed to do. The rules are there for us, there won’t be any new mandate for us. The logistics is on ground. So, it might not matter, all that we are waiting for is just to get a new directive from the strategic level of order.
To me, it does not make much difference, we are waiting, our Comptroller-General has taken over, he has given us an address and by that, our minds have quickly adjusted to all that he is looking for and being Nigerians, we know, the standard requirement for new Nigeria today, due diligence, hard work, transparency, it is only that Nigeria is broke.
So, we don’t have any more tasks adapting to new rule of this country.
What is your mandate in this dispensation?
Like I said, anti-smuggling activities, we don’t need any new mandate. We all know that smuggling is dangerous to the nation and so we are not having a new definition of smuggling neither are we having any doubt about the dangers of smuggling. We work with the existing rules, with existing nomenclature and with existing procedures and we are going to rely on whatever is existing, like I said, with the new zeal to make sure that this thing is minimally reduced.
As at August 31, 2015, how many convicted suspects do you have?
If you listened to my address very well, I want to speak of my new dispensation. I want to believe that by reading through the hand over note, I think there are four convicted or ongoing cases. The Legal Adviser could have thrown more light on this. There are four cases that are ongoing and I am sure we will secure a conviction for them.
And like I told you in my earlier address, I said, between the 26th of August till today (12th August), we have eight suspects that we are documenting for. Some of you know that taking someone to court and securing conviction is not a wash-wash thing, you must document properly, you get your facts right and put your information in proper perspective, if not, the suspect can escape on semantics and documentation problem.
And so, between the 26th (of August) and today (12th August), we have eight suspects. I want to tell you that all of them will be taken to court and attempt will be made to secure conviction for all of them.
What is the update on the sealed warehouses?
The operation of sealing the rice warehouses was an operation that was conducted from the Headquarters. Those of you in the press should know that Wale came down to carry out that operation because the sealing order was not passed to us to do but it was a sealing order that was executed by the Headquarters themselves.
If you look at between the sealing and maybe, last Friday, there was that transition gap between the outgoing and incoming Comptroller-General. I want to believe very strongly that from today, we will be able to hear some good news regarding sealing of such warehouses. So, let us keep our fingers crossed as the new administration takes off and they will be able to address the issues concerning the sealing of those warehouses.
Could you comment on the current rift between the Nigeria Customs Service, other security agencies and the Air force at Gbaji?
I am happy that those of you in the press are followers of events in Nigeria and all over the world. We cannot rule out occasion of frictions between the uniform personnel of different organizations. It is normal and this one, it was not between Customs you know, even the Military at that check-point had fracas with the invading Air Force personnel. Immediately it happened, the DC (Deputy Controller) Enforcement was asked to go and get on the spot assessment.
I have spoken with the Controller at the Seme Border and since it was a weekend issue, the different commanders, just like we have heard from the Controller of Customs, we have spoken together and I think later today, we will be able to out and come back together and see how we can resolve the issue.
We have tried to find out the detail really, it won’t be proper; it won’t be fair of us to say this is what happened with speculative facts. So, this morning, we are looking forward to seeing the other people concerned and get the fact. Then we will be able to know how to tackle it to avoid the future occurrence of such. But I want to tell you that it was not out of place, I look at it as a normal inter-agency friction between the young ones, those junior ones. I believe that it is not going to be a very big uproar. Let us just take it as one of those small frictions and skirmishes between agencies that are working together. We will get to the root of the matter and get all the witnesses, both the Air Force, the Army, the Police, we will come together to look at the whole problem.
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