Former Director-General of the Nigerian Maritime Administration (NMA), Mr. Patrick Egesi has described the Nigeria Customs Service as militarized, enemy of freight.
Egesi who made this known at a forum in Lagos recently said that the Nigeria Customs Service rather that accelerate trade was laying more emphasis on revenue than trade even as he called on the Service to remove revenue if it tends to obscure trade.
He added that cars were no more coming into the country as a result of high tariff calling on government and its policy makers to do a review of the auto policy and get trade back on the right footing.
He however argued that in order to reposition the service, it should be removed from the Ministry of Finance and placed under the Ministry of Industry, Trade and investment to help facilitate trade and then develop a template for revenue generation.
In his word, “The issue is about freight, it is not about people, it is not about ships. We have a customs that is militarized, a customs that is an enemy of freight; that is what the customs is. A customs should be an accelerator of trade.
“In fact, borrowing from Nweke’s word, it (customs) should be in the Ministry of Trade and Industry to help facilitate trade and then develop those things to help where you want to generate revenue. Where revenue obscures trade, you remove it. You must ask yourself, what does the country want? What is the balance after everything? Cars are no more coming, we should ask ourselves, are we losing or are we gaining? Nobody is doing the balancing. When you do economic balancing, you must do social economic balancing. How many people that could be earning a living that are not earning a living because you raised tariff, you are looking at money.
“And until we realize what we are toying with, not coming here to speak grammar, people should sit down and ask ourselves; what is likely to come from this? You must plan, if you don’t plan well, you lose”.
Meanwhile, all effort made to get the reaction of the Public Relations Officer of the Nigeria Customs Service, Mr. Joseph Attah proved abortive as his cell phone could not be reached as at the time of filing this report.
Send your news, press releases/articles to augustinenwadinamuo@yahoo.com. Also, follow us on Twitter @reportersinfo and on Facebook on facebook.com/primetimereporters or call the editor on 07030661526, 08053908817.
