TINUBU MUST MODERNISE CUSTOMS

At the heart of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s vision to overhaul the nation’s economy is the need to spare the nation of bogus foreign loans that have consistently held it down.

Thankfully, the President just wriggled out of judicial landmines set to invalidate his mandate won at   the February presidential polls.  While he might still have the Supreme Court to contend with, the president must begin to grapple with the economic hardship facing Nigerians, especially after the fuel subsidy removal.

Pressures keep mounting on President Tinubu to open the borders for food and basic items to flood the country as a short cut to mitigating the rising costs of living. Even at that, no responsible leader would bow to this with numbers of porous borders and vulnerable customs’ operations.

As such, efforts must first be focused on firming up those loose ends enabled by archaic and cumbersome operations in the Nigeria Customs Service. Interestingly, former President Muhammadu Buhari had commenced a process to digitize the management and operations of the Customs as a crucial income-generating agency via the e-Customs Project.

The project was originally concessioned to Bionica Technologies (WA) Limited and Huawei Consortium as a Public- Private Partnership initiative by the Federal Executive Council on September 2, 2022, following an anticipatory approval by Buhari a year earlier.

Although this project is now entangled in legal tussle that suggests intentional sabotage for personal gains. President Tinubu, while looking inwards to generate revenue to run his administration, must swiftly revisit the e-Customs Project in the economic and security interests of the nation.

Funding the Renewed Hope agenda of the president must find a voice in the resuscitation of the project to protect the genuine promoters of this project and reverse the impunity of the Buhari administration.

Remi Adebayo, Ibadan