The Vice President of the Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA), Dr. Kayode Farinto has blame the failure of the Ease of Doing Business policy of the federal government in the Nigerian maritime industry on battle to safeguard territories by the heads of government agencies in the sector.
Farinto who made this known in an interview with Primetime Reporters in Lagos recently also blame the development on human factor and sentiments which had not allow the policy to be properly implemented.
He recalled that shortly after the introduction of the Ease of Doing Business policy by the federal government, some stakeholders including himself as a representative of ANLCA were selected by the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) to draw a roadmap for the implementation of the policy which according to him took them one week to achieve but regretted that sentiments, human factors and territorialism by the various departmental heads had not allowed the roadmap to see the light of the day because of the activities of agencies like the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), the Nigeria Police Force among others.
According to him,” Why did I mention customs? In our recommendations, we gave three categories on how these things can work namely; short term measure, medium term measures and long term measures. Most of these measures, the customs did not allow them to implement it, like why do we have officers at the gate, they have actually hammered on the fact that they have discovered guns, they have discovered ammunitions which killed this initiative.
“The person that would have driven this ease of doing business is the Managing Director of the NPA and she has not been given the political will to sanction any erring department and this is why we don’t have ease of doing business at the port. On a more serious note, the ease of doing business is actually working in the aviation sector but because of, like I said, territorialism from the various departmental heads in the maritime sector, it cannot work and we need to call stakeholders’ meeting.
“Government must be decisive, give more power to NPA to sanction any head of government department that fails to implement his own part of the ease of doing business because we are losing cargoes on daily basis”.
Farinto who is also the Managing Director of Wealthy Honey Investment Limited disclosed that investigations revealed that the President of Benin Republic who he said was a businessman took delivery of three vessels fully loaded with foreign parboiled rice in the country last month saying that those rice so discharged would eventually end up in the Nigerian markets through the unapproved routes as federal government had banned importation of rice through the land borders.
” So, these and many more are the reasons we need to sit down and see how to implement the ease of doing business. All the officers that are in front of the gate, we have Strike Force in Lagos, we have Strike Force in Owerri, why don’t we move them to the unapproved routes and see how we can protect our economy.
On the ban of rice importation through the land borders, he said,” We told them ab initio that they don’t need to ban importation of rice through the land borders, what they needed to do is to provide an enabling environment for our local producers because even the locally produced ones are more expensive than the imported ones and Nigerians will want the cheapest but what Nigerian government ought to do is to empower the local producers, give them incentives and see how they can match up with imported rice.
“What is it that they are doing in Thailand that we cannot do? Make machineries and equipment zero duty, encourage the Millers to bring them in. Why do we have the Bank of Industry? Can’t they be given money? But they know what to do and they are not doing it and nobody will tell me that they don’t know at the Presidency that smuggling of rice is going on in Nigeria because from our investigations few years ago when Obasanjo was still the President, we were told that somebody in the Presidency will actually have a cut of whatever is smuggled into the country”.
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