Business
Customs Mulls 24-Hr Cargo Clearance At Lekki Seaport
The Zone ‘A’ Coordinator
of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), Assistant Comptroller-General Eporwei Edike, has said that cargoes should be leaving Lekki deep seaport under 24 hours.
Edike stated this during an inspection tour of the Lagos Free Zone housing the sea port project and the Lekki Free Trade Zone on Wednesday.
The Customs boss said that his visit to the zones had to do with seeking avenues of increasing customs revenue at the free zones.
Edike said that the service wanted to know how investors in the zones processed Customs duties.
He said that the service would prepare its officers ready to meet the challenges that would come with the Lekki deep seaport.
The Customs boss said that the service would also be ready to train its officers and provide the necessary equipment and Information Communication Technology (ICT)
He also said that a lot of Customs investments like high profile scanners to scan about 1,000 containers daily would be put in place.
Edike said, “ Once containers arrive, they are pre-scanned, the images are captured and immediately the cargoes would be processed and released.’’
The Customs boss said that only containers that have queries would be referred for physical examination to disallow harmful imports.
“With that, we should not be spending so many hours on container examination.
“We expect containers to be cleared here within few hours so that when the port comes on stream, we (Customs) will already fit in,’’ The Tide source quotes Edike as saying.
According to him, this is for us a revenue issue and I am here to see whether there is an assistance Customs can give, if the operators have challenges.
He said that the service would not want any loopholes that could create room for revenue leakages.
Edike, however, said that there must be a Customs Processing Centre (CPC) at the Lagos Free Zone to capture the consignments before they are released as well as a Customs Enforcement station.
He also suggested that there should be dedicated points for exports and also spaces for examining goods in the zone so that some people would not play smart.
Edike said that the service must approve the free zone plan, adding that there should be no gap to encourage revenue leakages.
“We want to encourage water-tight revenue collection,’’ he said.
The Director of Finance, Lagos free Zone, Mr Kundan Sainani, said that the Lekki deep seaport is a Private Public Partnership (PPP) arrangement, which involved the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and the Lagos State Government.
Sainani said that the issue of the CPC had been on the companies table based on availability of bandwidth, connectivity and further discussion with the Customs service, without delay.
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