…Seeks amendment of CRFFN Act
The National Association of Government Approved Freight Forwarders (NAGAFF) has blamed the problem bedeviling the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding in Nigeria (CRFFN) on government intervention.
This was made known by the National President of NAGAFF, Dr. Eugene Nweke while playing host to the National Executives of the Nigerian Institute of Freight Forwarding and Customs Brokers (NIFFCB) who paid him a courtesy visit at the NAGAFF National Secretariat in Lagos recently.
Nweke disclosed that it was the urgent need for the Freight Forwarders to regulate the profession themselves that necessitated the initiation of a bill to that effect to the National Assembly but regretted that the government at the end of the day took over the regulation all over to itself.
He observed that that decision by the government to regulate the profession instead of the Freight Forwarders themselves had since left the council in the state of coma thereby leaving it financially insolvent.
According to him,” we have also found out in NAGAFF that essentially, why CRFFN is not really up is because there was a diversionary approach as to who wanted to regulate the Freight Forwarding as a profession”.
“We wanted to regulate the Freight Forwarding as a profession hence we initiated a bill but when the bill went through the National Assembly, the government chose to regulate us and now aligning us or keeping us under the Transport Ministry”.
“Therefore, whatever thing we have done so far, it depends on whether government like what we are doing or not and that is what has been holding CRFFN to ransome because if it is we that want to regulate our profession, we can sit down and decide how to get money and fund ourselves and we do it”.
“Today, so much money has been collected by the CRFFN and it becomes their internally generated revenue which they cannot touch because they are dependent on the government allocation. That is a very big problem”.
The NAGAFF boss however said that as a result of this and other lapses noticed in the Act establishing the Council, NAGAFF and other well meaning Freight Forwarding associations had stressed the need for the amendment of the Act establishing the Council in order to correct the anomalies so far noticed.
He further argued that there was no reason for which the Council should be supervised by the Federal Ministry of Transport adding that the midwife stage was over and done with.
“So, that Act must go back to the National Assembly and the institute must support us because we are talking about professionalism”.
“We are going to regulate ourselves so that it is not when the government says it has no money, CRFFN will remain docile as many years as the government decides it remain docile. No, that patronage does not represent professionalism rather it is retrogressive”, Nweke stated.
