Gilbert Ekwugbe
The Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) have pledge to work together to deepen trade facilitation and drive exports as part of measures to support the federal governments economic diversification effort.
They made the pledge yesterday when the Comptroller General of the NCS, Bashir Adewale Adeniyi led members of his management team to NPA’s headquarters, Lagos.
Doing so, they stated, will improve Nigeria’s export earnings and facilitation of export cargoes onboard ocean going vessels.
Speaking, the Managing Director of NPA, Mohammed Belo-Koko said there is a need to streamline export desks to make facilitation of cargoes onboard vessels seamless.
The NPA boss, however, frowned at situation where Export Processing Terminals (EPTs) report to export desk at the seaports.
“We have raised the issue of export. We have seen a tremendous increase in percentage and quantity of export cargo and we appreciate that but, we still have a little problem because we have an issue of multiple export desks, “he said.
Speaking further, Bello-Koko, urged the Customs CG to include the authority as part of agencies of government that would benefit from the proceeds of auctioning of overtime cargoes at the ports.
According to him, the authority expended huge funds in moving the overtime cargoes from the seaports to the Ikorodu terminal.
“On the issue of overtime cargo, the committee was set up where Nigerian Customs led and an assessment has been done. Everyone has gone round the port and we know the impact of overtime cargo on the activities of terminal operators. It has occupied a lot of economic space and it’s creating difficulty in clearing cargo because there isn’t space. The ports are very small, however, the auction has actually started, the bid has started and the overtime containers have been moved to some locations but in our initial discussions, we have asked that all the money Nigerian Ports Authority spends should also be considered, ” he stated
Responding, the Customs CG, stated that that the visit to NPA was to renew friendship and deepens existing relationship and collaboration.
According to him, the vision of NPA to ensure port efficiency would help the service facilitate trade and regain lost cargoes to neighboring countries’ ports.
“This visit is more of vision alignment because since NPA desires to achieve port efficiency, we believe in Customs that port efficiency would help to facilitate trade and also, NPA through all these programs is trying to promote the competitiveness of our ports this aligns with our vision because Nigerians are diverting their cargoes to neighboring ports and we must do everything to ensure that our ports remain competitive.
“The Nigerian economy is driven by our ports and finally we want to make our ports more efficient because when the ports are more efficient it would translate into better efforts in revenue generation so anything and everything that would help to reduce the time and the costs are what we would be exploring,” he stated.
He continued, “if we go through all of these areas that have been mentioned they all speak to ensuring that we have better ports, more efficient ports, more competitive ports
that speaks to our needs.”
