Stakeholders have been reacting to the training on digitization of cargo import and export services and business integrity in the Nigerian maritime industry organized recently in Lagos by the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding in Nigeria (CRFFN) for the freight forwarders, shippers and maritime journalists.
The training which was done in collaboration with the Convention on Business Integrity (CBI), Maritime Anti-Corruption Network and the Nigerian Shippers’ Council (NSC) was aimed at exposing the Nigeria freight forwarders and shippers on the need to digitize their business so as to become players in the global shipping business and freight forwarding market.
Speaking on the import of the training, the founder of the National Association of Government Approved Freight Forwarders (NAGAFF), Dr. Boniface Aniebonam appreciated the CRFFN management for coming up with such an eye opening training which according to him was wrong overdue.
He however advised the CRFFN management to target the younger freight forwarders who are of computer age with this kind of training as it would be more beneficial to them than it would be for the older generation of the freight forwarders who may not be in tune with the current realities.
While maintaining that the CRFFN had long derailed from its mandate of professionalizing the freight forwarding industry in Nigeria, he however opined that now is still time to salvage what could be savaged in order to bring the Council back to its original mandate.
He advised that NAGAFF and the Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA) as the two biggest freight forwarding associations should come together to work to promote the CRFFN and help it in realizing its set objectives rather than what obtained currently where each of the associations was working at cross-purposes thereby leaving the Council to further derail.
On his part, the National Secretary, ANLCA, Alhaji Abdullazeez Babatunde Mukaila commended the CRFFN management for the training adding that the training couldn’t have come at a better time than now while urging the Council for more of the training to keep abreast with the developments in the industry nationally and internationally.
He said, “We have CRFFN as a platform, it is ours, whatever will be the politics that is going on, CRFFN came to being to assist the practitioners. I make bold to say that CRFFN has derailed from the most important reason why it was established and that is why CRFFN is having issue with major associations and stakeholders. If CRFFN is ready to go back to the basics, why not, we don’t have any other platform than CRFFN but we need to rise up to why it was established to help maritime training.
Speaking specifically on the lecture by the Convention on Business Integrity, Mukaila said, “We are losing and we are losing big time. I want to assure your network, anything that has to do with unbundling the corrupt tendencies, ANLCA is in for it. Personally, as a practitioner, I am tired of giving anybody bribe, it doesn’t make sense. I want to earn a wage, I want to have a living, a professional fee because it is a professional business and we shouldn’t be seen as somebody aiding and abetting the same corrupt tendencies in the port.
“What I am trying to tell our members present here, it is a new dawn, it is either we agree that we should do things properly or we will be shipped out. So, this is the time for everybody to embrace the code of conduct. If I know what I am doing and I know what NAFDAC is expected to be doing, I have the SOP of NAFDAC, customs; we can jointly, with a robust activity take them to task.”
Also speaking, the Chief Executive Officer of a chandelling and shipping agency, Vow Ventures Limited, Laitan Williams noted that it was a good thing the owners of the business came for the sensitization adding that it would have been the best if the Information Technology savvy young boys and girls in various freight forwarding companies were part of the training.
“The next phase should be for them so that they will be able to complement what this vision is all about because all these people are analogue, three quarter of them are old school but they are not the ones that fill the manifest. When they were young, it was analogue, it was biro and paper but now, it is digital and for us to go to the next level, we need the boys that are doing digitalization in their various offices. That is the way forward”, she submitted.
Lending his voice to the training, a former National President of NAGAFF, Dr. Eugene Nweke who described the training as a welcome development, recalled that the Registrar of CRFFN had said the day’s training was one of the series that would come their way.
He however observed that while giving them these series of trainings, they should go back to the basics.
Nweke pointed out that the time put in for the training was worth it as according to him, the training was an eye opener as according to him, most of them in the hall during the lecture were of the opinion that they were on the verge of being sent out of the business.
“But the things that they need to do like I am trying to advocate, let us go back and understand that we are freight forwarders. We should not just come here to complement what another freight forwarder has implemented over there. We have what it takes to export. Four people have come to meet me from other African countries under this African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement and they are seeking an alliance which is not bad but how many of us have gone outside Nigeria to go and start talking about global trade alliance under the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement?
“It is about training, most of us cannot compete globally. One man business is not the issue, what we are talking about here is one man business”, he said.
On the caliber of the people that attended the training, he said, “These are leaders, CRFFN expects these leaders to go back home, when they get the documents, to now call a larger meeting in their respective organizations and pass the information further to their members. There is no how you will bring about three thousand people together under this Covid-19 era for training. It is not possible but the leaders of the accredited associations and other stakeholders like the journalists should trickle it down. So, what they did is the right thing. But woe betides any association that the leaders did not go back to pass down this information.”
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