The crisis rocking the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding in Nigeria (CRFFN) may be far from being over as the National Association of Government Approved Freight Forwarders (NAGAFF) has said that unless a declarant is properly defined in inline with the Act establishing CRFFN, it will not support the collection of the Practitioners’ Operating Fee (POF) as proposed by CRFFN.
It will be recalled that the Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA) had last year when the POF was initially conceived opposed its collection on the ground that associations cannot be partakers in the sharing formula proposed by the CRFFN rather the proceeds from the POF should be shared between the council and the licensed company through which declaration was made to the customs.
Afraid that its members maybe coerced into paying the POF, ANLCA approached a Federal High Court in Lagos to stop the Ministry of Transportation, the Inspector-General of Police and/or its cronies from coercing its members to pay the fee.
That action alone stalled the collection of the fee until the coming onboard of the current Minister of Transportation who put every machinery in motion to resolve all the pending issues surrounding the collection of the fee.
Part of the resolutions reached by the Minister of Transportation, his officials, the Registrar of CRFFN and the representatives of the five registered freight forwarding associations in a meeting held at the Ministry at Abuja was that the old sharing formula which proposed that th Federal Government would get 60%, the registered associations 30% while 10% will go to the declarant from the proceeds of POF be changed to 65% to the Federal Government and 35% to the declarant thereby shutting the door against the associations.
Also, in determining who a declarant is, the stakeholders at the meeting had difficulties in arriving at who a declarant is as some including ANLCA members were of the opinion that a declarant is the customs licensed company whose license was used in releasing cargo from customs area while some including NAGAFF members maintained that a declarant is that individual who sourced for the job as a company is not a living being and cannot carry out any job. When it was very difficult to agree on who a declarant is, they went into voting where four persons voted in favour of a licensed company as the declarant as against one person that voted in favor of the individual that sourced for the job as a declarant and that nailed it.
But in an interview with our correspondent in Lagos, Dr. Aniebonam stated that the Standard Operating Procedures put together by CRFFN was clear on who a declarant was adding that it was an individual practitioner that was known in the CRFFN Act.
According to him,”So, the declarant is the individual who goes to pick up job and not the company through which the job was done. Licensed Customs agents, don’t forget that you have licensed customs agent and freight forwarding agent and corporate bodies and so, those bodies have to be manned by an individual skilled, trained and qualified to carry out such functions”.
When asked what NAGAFF would do if the Minister of Transportation goes ahead to insist that a licensed company should be seen as a declarant, the NAGAFF boss retorted, “It cannot be a licensed company, if he goes on to say that a declarant is the company, what company? Freight forwarding company or a licensed customs company? It is not going to work, it is in breach of the law. There is a standard operating procedure which is already gazetted.
“He cannot do that because he is a Minister of the Federal Republic and he holds the constitution of the country except he wants us to end up in endless litigations but you see we are trying to move away from litigations. If he does that, it still means that he has not been consulting experts, that is what I am telling you and I don’t think he will do that and I can tell you that if you call the Registrar, Mike Jukwe, he does not subscribe to that.
“You know they went as far as voting, how can you vote over a legislative issue? So, you stay there now to make law. You cannot vote over a legislative instrument. The CRFFN Act recognized three categories of members; individual, company and associations. So, the first mistake they made is to conduct the maiden election excluding individuals and that should not be repeated again.
“Until the issue of who a declarant is, is determined, there won’t be any need to start the collection of POF. You cannot do something that is in breach of the law, you will be held responsible”.
Reacting to NAGAFF’s claim, the National President of ANLCA, Prince Olayiwola Shittu maintained that it was the licensed customs agents who were the declarants through a company licensed by customs for the purposes of customs declaration. “They are the only ones capable at a particular point in time to drop the money to the shipping company, terminal etc”, he said.
Recall that only last Friday, after hearing from the CRFFN Registrar during their National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting at their National Secretariat in Lagos, ANLCA announced its acceptance and support for the POF collection as proposed by CRFFN, even as it promised to withdraw all their pending cases in court against CRFFN and others thereby giving the hope that better days lie ahead for the council.
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