A member of the Governing Council of the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding in Nigeria (CRFFN), Chief Peter Obi has said that the freight forwarding business in Nigeria will soon be for professional only as it will no longer be an all comers’ business.
Obi who disclosed this in an exclusive interview with Primetime Reporters stated that the era where people would retire from the civil service as well as other professions and find their way into the freight forwarding practice without any form of training and registration would soon be a thing of the past.
He added that registration of practitioners as members of the freight forwarding profession would be the first thing that they would have to tackle head on in this present Council adding that very soon, people without port pass would not be able to access the port and for one to get the port pass, he or she must have registered with CRFFN.
In his words,” See, if you want to practice as a freight forwarder, you have to go and register with the CRFFN. It is an ongoing thing, up till tomorrow, we are still registering, it is part of the committees that I told you that we will get. We have registration committee which you know I was the Chairman in the first and second Councils, I registered everybody. So, now that we still have that registration committee, it is in place, so, if you want to be a freight forwarder or you want to clear something or do anything as a freight forwarder, you go and register.
“Just like when you get to common Benin Republic here, you can’t enter their port if you are a foreigner talk more of other places but today, if you come to our ports, you see white man inside the port, doing what?
“So, these are the areas where we will focus attention. If you retire as a LASTMA official, you will join freight forwarding, police officers retired, they are freight forwarders, we will stop it. The freight forwarding will be for professionals, that will be the very first thing we will achieve, let the business be for the professionals and how do we go about it? You don’t allow people who don’t have port pass to access our ports and for you to have port pass, you have to be registered as a freight forwarder. NPA cannot issue you port pass without CRFFN registration. So, when you registered as a freight forwarder, you will be issued with a port pass which will allow you enter the port”.
He further stated that effort was on to create committees with various functions saying that the Council members won’t be doing everything at the same time even as he listed the committees to include; committee on registration, committee on tribunal, committee on enforcement, monitoring among others.
“When they are in place, every committee has its own terms of reference, so we work with fact. Later on, we will now come to the issue of whether POF will come onboard or not”, he said.
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