Nigerian Customs:Setting New Agenda?

Getting Imported Goods Into The country through our ports on time has been a major worry for importers for as long as one can remember, no thanks to the bureaucratic bottlenecks put in their path by the various government agencies operating at Nigeria’s ports.

Not a few Nigerians are quick to lay the blame for the delay at the feet of the Nigerian Customs Service even when the facts on ground do not support their position. It’s a mindset problem as most of them would instinctively blame the Customs for any delay in clearance of goods even without seeing or listening to the fact of the matter.

And to arrest the situation, a number of measures have been put in place by successive Comptroller-General of Customs but with limited success. However, the coming on board of Alhaji Abdullahi Dikko Nde, MFR, OFR as the Comptroller-General in August 2009 has changed things for the better for Customs especially in terms of service delivery and public perception.           .

Top of the bill of his re-branding effort for the Service so to speak, is the planned 48-hour clearance of goods at the ports which surely would gladden the hearts of importers.

At an interactive session with Business Editors of the leading Nigerian newspapers sometime in April 2011, the comptroller-general of the customs had amongst other illuminations, revealed that nothing favours the Nigerian economy primarily, and the officers and men of the service especially, more than the possibilities 48 ­hour cargo clearance presents. In the words of Dikko “What a lot of stakeholders on the imports and clearing of cargo in Nigeria do not fully realise is that, it is indeed in the best interest of customs officials for the 48 hours cargo clearance time frame to work.

“We will even be happier if we can do it in 24 hours because it simply means higher remuneration for us. The more cargo we are able to release in 48 hours or even less, the higher our take home is likely to be”.

He is equally breaking new grounds in the area of re-orientation, training and retraining of Customs officers and men towards an improved service delivery.

When the mantle of headship of Nigeria’s second largest revenue earner fell on the seeming fragile shoulders of Alhaji Dikko, not many Nigerians gave him a passing chance at making a success of the challenge he was to take on as the comptroller-general of the Nigerian Customs Service. One year and ten months down the line, Dikko has demonstrated an amazing capability to engineer multi faceted turn – around initiatives that is a sure source of worry and deep seated anxiety and conceit for segment of arm-chair critics who see themselves as the permanent rent seeker of the Nigerian Customs Service.

Not at any other time in the history of customs had there been such level of frenetic activities in the core areas of operation of the service. Presently, no fewer than forty three personnel of the service, saddled primarily with the duty of creating and sustaining a positive and upwardly inclined public perception index for the service are undergoing intensive public relations refresher course in Nigeria. They are going through this exercise for the second time in less than four years!

The CGC had also made it known at various times that today’s customs official can hold his head as quite a lot is expended on trainings and human capacity development. At the last count, no cadre of the service ­clerks/typists through valuation, intelligence, information communication technology, AYSCUDA etc, anti terrorism, international trade facilitation, leadership and management, e.t.c., that has not undergone           specialization courses in the last twenty-two months.

The basis for efficient service delivery is training, provision of conducive work environment and motivation. The customs CGC seemed to have spent useful time prior to his appointment to fashion out a seamless training sequence and module for each area of operation of the customs. One must quickly commend the CGC for his unflinching commitment to the implementation of his six-point agenda for turning the service around. All of these in the face of (sometimes) quite absurd allegations and baseless criticisms.

A solid pointer to the level of commitment of some of the highly motivated operatives the CGC had appointed to man key commands of the service is inherent in the records of these commands. In the months of January to June 2010, the federal operations unit zone ‘A’ Lagos, recorded a total seizure of about one thousand and seventy prohibited items with a total duty paid value of about Nl.l billion. However, with the appointment of Deputy Controller V.D Dimka as head of the command, FOU zone’ A’ has performed even much better. The DC realizing that “to whom much is given, much is expected,” swung into action with a dizzying zeal and singular objective to stamp out smuggling completely. Between December 2010 and Friday June 10th 2011, the command, under his watch made an astounding nine convictions in one thousand six hundred and fifty nine seizures. When computed, the total duty paid value of these seizures stood at about 1.5 billion naira.

If the achievements of            D. Dimka and his men appear breathtaking, the CGC is leaving no stone unturned in providing adequate work environment and tools of work. Towards this end, ten brand new patrol vans have just been added to the fleet to enhance effective policing of the areas of coverage of the zone which span Ogun, Oyo, and Lagos States.

The extensive areas of coverage of officers and men of Zone’ A’ FOU, is reason why it is unfortunate when spurious and quite elementary insinuations are bundled around to create the impression that federal operations unit Zone’ A’ is only at the “ports where they tend to pick up containers already released from the Port” for a federal operations unit whose oversight functions transcends the Nigerian Ports of Apapa and Tincan Island, and whose nominal roll of officers and men are in excess of eight hundred, it is indeed quite misleading to create erroneous notions of over saturation of men of the unit at the ports.

Richard Oteri, another Deputy Comptroller of Customs, is the acting Area Comptroller for Ogun State. He assumed duties around February 2011 at the command. In a space of four months, not only has the revenue profile of Ogun command of the Nigerian Customs Service shot up by over 370% when compared with the same time period in 2010, the enforcement activities as led by this completely well rounded customs man have forced even dare devil die hard smugglers that used to litter that horizon of the Ogun Command to finally realize that it is no longer business as usual.

It was an elated Oteri who excitedly informed close allies recently of the unheard of “over one hundred and fifty vehicle duty certification” issued by his command to operators who voluntarily came forward to declare their vehicles and present the documents of same for duty processing. “Our brothers who clear vehicles here are finally beginning to see the light, imagine that in only one week here, we have issued duty certificates for over a hundred and fifty vehicles”. He said.

At the Tincan Island Customs Command, the out-going customs comptroller, Austen Warikoru had in the last 365 days plus, written his name in gold in the history of the command. From a very turbulent beginning as CAC, Warikoru in the face of harrowing oppositions from operations who would rather “do business as usual” painstakingly identified, and went on to plug nearly every area of revenue leakage in the nations (even west coast’s) second busiest port. This instantly pitched him against “established forces of Tincan”. But undeterred, Warikoru took the revenue profile of Tincan Island from a monthly average of 11 billion Naira, first to 14 billion and ultimately to the present nearly 16 billion monthly.

A cursory perusal of activities across all of the four zones and forty three command structure of the Service presently reflects a quantum leap in service delivery. Alhaji Dikko had made it known to all his men that it is time to “Sit it up and perform or ship out”. As an administrator the CGC is making a very eloquent statement about his mission and vision for the Nigerian Customs Service.

In his words “The whole essence of the massive training programmes and attitudinal re- orientation of the officers and men of the Nigerian custom is to have a world class service, peopled by men of high personal and professional integrity imbued with the core values of best practices. We have set an unusually high moral and professional grounds for ourselves, we have requested for and have been granted a wide latitude by the federal government, I intend to deliver with a view to justifying the confidence reposed in our capabilities by the president, Commander-In-Chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces”. Happy days are indeed here at last.

Yomi Olomofe wrote from Lagos.

Yomi Olamofe