The Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding in Nigeria (CRFFN) on Monday declared the Presidential 100% Compliance Team set up by the National Association of Government Approved Freight Forwarders (NAGAFF) illegal.
This is even as the Council has said that it would write the leadership of the Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA) to suspend the activities of the Anti-Corruption Committee that it launched last week.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with Primetime Reporters at the Council’s headquarters in Lagos, the Registrar and Chief Executive Officer of CRFFN, Barr. Samuel Nwakohu said recalled that when NAGAFF came up with the idea of setting up a compliance team, after a discussion between him and the Chairman of the Governing Council of CRFFN, a letter was sent to NAGAFF to put on hold the activities of the Presidential 100% Compliance Team and was not aware that the directive had been reversed.
According to Nwakohu, “I am aware that NAGAFF came up with an enforcement team some time ago. My Chairman and I sat down and discussed this and eventually, a letter was sent to them to put it on hold.
“We are in the Covid-19 regime, let me say this, I am not aware that ANLCA has an enforcement team that deals with corruption. The same way you read it was the same way I read it. ANLCA is an association, so, if they want to do something without coming to us here, there is little or nothing we can do on that but if they go out without coming to ask us, we can stop them from doing it, yes, we can. As a government agency, we can.
“Yes, CRFFN is charged with the responsibility of enforcement, to make sure that the accredited associations do the right things. Now, I don’t personally believe that in a Covid regime as we are at the moment, lockdown may have eased but we are still in the Covid regime. That is one.
“Two, the ports are grossly congested; I really don’t believe that the best way to carry out any enforcement is to send out physical teams to the ports. There are so many other ways that we can carry out enforcement without further congesting the ports with human beings. Let’s say for ANLCA who say they have a team to fight corruption, how are they going to do it with all those people they are going to send there? I am yet to understand how they intend to do it.
“We will write to them and tell them to stop. Anything to do with the associations is actually the responsibility of the governing council. I will speak with my Chairman and we will write to them asking them to stop. Corruption can be fought in several ways without having so many individuals at the ports. Which area of corruption are they fighting? Is it based on their people who pay duty and they underpay or people who make declaration, who declared things and so on and so forth. We need to know.
“That was why we had all sorts of difficulties in POF enforcement. You saw how we designed it, what stops me from saying that 20 people should go and stay at the gate and make sure that if you don’t show your receipt, you will not pass? That is not my way of enforcement, you can do enforcement through technology and that is what we have been trying to do and I don’t believe that we should send 30 people to go and mount checkpoints and all that and they will all repeat what the Police people who are sent to mount road block do.
“Let me say this, NAGAFF was written a letter by the governing council to put that on hold, I am not aware that that has been lifted. If they are doing it, they are doing it illegally. What are they enforcing? All I can say is that for me, NAGAFF does not have the legal right to do those things.”
He further argued that before one enforces compliance, one must first of all set the rules adding that “there are no rules as far as the Council is concerned to say these rules are not being complied with.”
“So, there is no such rule. So, it means that there is something they are doing the Council will need to investigate. You know we are government agency, we cannot do riot, an association can do riot, they can do demonstration. So, as government agency, we have to understand the demonstration, I take it as a demonstration and then we now know how to approach it.
“Although some people may want us to jump out, we can’t jump because we need to understand what is going on before we can make some interventions because if somebody says he is enforcing compliance, what rules are you complying with? Rule No. 1, what is it? Who is flouting the rule? How do we deal with them? We haven’t seen the rules that they want to enforce against. We may say some other things; some people’s demonstration may want to be a little more ambitious than the others, some may want to dominate the industry and these ambitions are there”, he stated.
Photo: Registrar/CEO of CRFFN, Barr. Samuel Nwakohu.
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