The National President of the Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA), Prince Olayiwola Shittu has said that people paying money and getting their way into the ports is the easiest way to overturn the executive orders issued recently by the Acting President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo.
Shittu disclosed this while reacting to a notice issued recently by the leadership of the National Association of Government Approved Freight Forwarders (NAGAFF) to its members urging them to register and pay the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding (CRFFN) stipulated fees to enable them get port pass from the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) so as ti carry out their businesses at the ports.
He pointed out that CRFFN was only interested in registering ad collecting money from people, giving them certificates and Identity Cards without taking a step further to find out what they would be doing at the ports.
According to him,” Somebody approaches you, you are the issuing authority but you are not doing due diligence to find out what the person is going there to do. If he says he wants to be a customs agents, it’s okay, you will ask him if he had gone to the customs. Then if he needs to register with the CRFFN first, you open the book and enter your registration as pending, when you succeed in getting customs license, we will now give you your final certificate so that you know whatever is taking you to the ports is because you are a customs agents.
“But when somebody tells you, I want to go and learn the work, I am an apprentice just because we want number, that is the problem we have in the port.
“The CRFFN has failed to do its job, its duty is to categorize membership into specialized fields. The attempt that was made where we had seven was even unhealthy, you don’t need more than three, the customs agents, the freight forwarders and the other ancillary services if any. CRFFN. staff are calling themselves a category for working in a regulatory agency”.
The ANLCA boss who recalled that the CRFFN Act specified the payment of annual practicing fee, then the Governing Council brought out some payments to be made by every practitioner and now the CRFFN had been included in the nation’s budget however argued that since government fund regulatory agencies, it should also fund the CRFFN and not be asking freight forwarders to to pay all those monies that they were meant to pay.
“Yes! We can only pay one token, membership fee. By the way, what do you pay membership fee for? It is compulsory you must subscribe, that is what the Act says, you don’t need to loose subscription, annual certification, just one fee, we pay it and that is the end. For customs agents, you pay it per company because it is the company that is licensed. For individuals who might find their way into the ports, you put them under freight forwarding and those two categories suffice.
” But you want to hide and register too many associations under the same category because it is either you are a licensed customs agent or a non licensed customs agent. Assuming that is what it is, all these other associations, where do they fall? They fall into these two categories, so why don’t we have two categories? That was why you saw the NAGAFF-ANLCA Initiative wants to do, a test run, to point a finger to let CRFFN see what could be done to this proliferation. When you have only two, the two of them can always come together, everybody knows his limitation and then they profer advice”, he said.
Shittu who is also the Managing Director of Skelas Group observed that CRFFN having taken government’s money was now gearing up to collect the Practitioners’ Operating Fee (POF) on an entity that every Jo it does every day it collects money wondering if the council is now a revenue generating agency.
He went ahead to say that those were the distortions that ANLCA had been crying out about for so long but nobody was looking in that direction.
“So, it is the regulatory agency that could have sanitize that is the one that is creating problems”, he concluded.
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