The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Mickey Excellency Nigeria Limited, Otunba Abdulazeez Babatunde Mukaila has called on the Registrar of the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding in Nigeria, CRFFN, Mr. Kingsley Onyekachi Igwe to start talking to freight forwarders urging him not to be too quiet on the job.
Mukaila who made the call in an interview with Primetime Reporters in Lagos recently, stated that three months down the line, the new Registrar should be seen and vocal on the blueprints of his administration as well as his plan on dealing with many challenges facing the freight forwarders.
His words, “We need to hear him, he needs to talk, he should just break the barrier and start talking. He shouldn’t just be comfortable with the coziness of the environment that he finds himself now. He should speak the language of the freight forwarders so that people will know that we have somebody new.
“An average freight forwarder doesn’t know that anything has changed. What they do know is that they still pay their CRFFN fee to carry containers. Nothing has changed. He should be forceful on that, he should create an impact immediately so that people will know that something new has happened to CRFFN.”
Insisting that the CRFFN had lost its mandate before now, Mukaila who is the immediate past Sole Administrator of the Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents, ANLCA, hoped that the new Registrar would learn from the errors of the past and make consultation.
“He shouldn’t say this person is supporting me and that person is not supporting me, he should liberalize his approach, talk to people, seek knowledge, ask questions. I wish him the best of luck and I am sure he’s going to succeed.
“I have talked about the customs being the judge and the jury, I want to see him engage in a lot of interventions in the cargo processes. Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding practice, who goes in and out is key. In the past, everybody is a freight forwarder, all that happened is just pay the money and you are on the register of CRFFN.
“Training and retraining, the world is changing, AI is taking over, ChatGPT, he needs to rise above that level and give us a classical training. He should be ready from whatever the intervention or subventions they have, to train people even if it has to be on train the trainers basis assuming the fund is not enough.
“So, I want him to know that he needs to train freight forwarders. We need to be at par with our contemporaries globally, that should be uppermost in his mind and that is what I would personally want to see”, he said.
Speaking further on training, he advised him to adopt a bottom up approach and make the training accessible for practitioners saying, “The training should be at par with the environment, the terms and conditions of our service requirements. The training should be taken to the people that needed it, you don’t go to Sheraton and tell people to come for training there.
“When you take the training to the people that needed it, the cost would have to come down. Don’t go to the Sheraton Hotel and call people, bring it to the port where people can hop in and hop out and get the knowledge.
“I have told you about how a container demurrage is N68,000 per day and somebody has about six containers and you want to give him training at Ikoyi, of course, he will end up training the MDs. But if you bring it to Apapa, take the training to the freight forwarders, they must create time. If they are three working in the same company, they can choose one of them to go while the other two remain.
“He should take the training to the general floor level of freight forwarders. That is the only way he can make an impact. The former system has not worked. And if it is going to be online, which is the in thing now, he should do it when people are relaxed. Don’t do Zoom meeting around 1 to 2pm when people are busy because it’s not going to work.”
Expressing his joy over the appointment of a freight forwarding practitioner as the Registrar of the Council, he said, “We have demanded this severally at different fora and we actually asked for it. And now that one of us has been given the mandate, I think we should let it be. One of us has been made a Registrar, what I think should happen is that all freight forwarders should gather and say this is one of us. It could be any other person tomorrow.
“The clamour since 2007 has been answered, a freight forwarder is now the Registrar. I think we can improve upon that and now know that a status quo has been laid and definitely, if he steps out, another freight forwarder must come. Gone are the days you bring somebody from nowhere who has never been to the port environment and that has been the practice before now.
“He should not shy away from intervening. We have been saying server is down, customs FOU everywhere. He should be able to meet with the CG and say, look, I am a grassroot, I know what it takes, I did not just emerge from outside. I have been within the port and I am still within the port. He should engage the CG to find a way to facilitate trade more than as it is presently.”
Photo: Otunba Abdulazeez Babatunde Mukaila, Managing Director/CEO, Mickey Excellency Nigeria Limited.
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