The blame game trailing the crisis that engulfed the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding in Nigeria (CRFFN) has been taken a step further with a chieftain of the Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA), Mr. Pius Ujubuonu accusing the Nigerian Shippers’ Council (NSC) of complicity in the whole saga.
Ujubuonu who made this his opinion known in an interview with Primetime Reporters in Lagos said that his position was informed by the fact that NSC which would have been in the vanguard of resolving the crisis appeared to have interest in the crisis as it midwived the creation of CRFFN.
He further blamed the problem on the staff of the Federal Ministry of Transportation as well as that of some agencies under the Federal Ministry of Transportation who he said had interests they were fighting to protect which they had not expressly voiced out.
According to him,” The Nigerian Shippers’ Council which would have been in the best place to define all these things appeared to be an interested party because it midwived CRFFN. So, there is a passion that the Nigerian Shippers’ Council has in CRFFN, it doesn’t want to be seen as tearing down the house it built.
“So, in most cases, you see it not really coming out to define what appeared to be the dispute and the Minister came in, he was almost harassed into believing that this group is a troublesome group and that group is a friendly group. And the Minister, let me not limit it to Amaechi, Idris Umar and the other three Ministers before them have been constantly misinformed by the staff of the Ministry and some of the agencies”.
The ANLCA chieftain also blamed the crisis on the absence of a common interest among the leaders of the associations that were registered by the CRFFN saying that vested and pecuniary interested represented by the Practitioners’ Operating Fee (POF) was paramount on the minds of the leaders of the associations.
“There is no common interest, everybody is interest that this POF be collected, that sharing should be made through the associations so that those who are the leaders of the associations will be able to have a piece of the cake. Naturally, there would have been a way that all the leaders of the associations should strive to fund their associations or there could have been a kind of harmonization that could have been done without the notice of anyone”, he said.
Ujubuonu noted that with all those distractions in place, no appreciable progress could be said to have been made in the past six months as there were orders and counter orders as well as policy thrusts confusion even as he said that there had not been any direction in the industry in his personal opinion.
On the way forward for the freight forwarding subsector, Ujubuonu called on the Federal Ministry of Transportation to take a critical look at the reasons why there had been disharmony in the sector adding that the Minister of Transportation, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi should look dispassionately at the problems even as he said that as long as the Minister continued to listen Ministry’s officials who he said were particularly interested in some certain things which they had not stated, the sector would remain where it was.
He said,” By the time they are able to know that customs agency and freight forwarding may be related but they are not the same, each association that is registered with CRFFN should be recognized according to the services they provide. If you say you are freight forwarder and you still run customs agency, then the number of customs agents amongst you will be determined.
“So, it is the license that is in your association that is recognized so that whenever anything like contribution and the distribution is going on, you will take according to the quantity and amount of contribution that you make. Then, if all the associations appear to be doing the same thing, then it is for him (Amaechi) to tell us what he told the maritime journalists, then we will all come together and form one single association and remain under one umbrella and then pursue one goal”.
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