Maritime agencies interested more in hiking cost of doing business at ports—Shittu
More maritime stakeholders have continued to kick against the recent imposition of fees by the Nigerian Shippers’ Council (NSC) for port business operators’ registration exercise.
In an interview, the immediate past President, Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA), Prince Olayiwola Shittu, said “It is going to be a burden on Customs brokers. What we are asking Shippers Council to do is to promote ease of doing business but now they are more interested in hiking the cost of doing business”.
“The government is the enabler of corruption in the maritime industry. Maritime industry is a service industry, and that is why they have budgets for the ministry and for the parastatals.
“In a situation where all the parastatals under the ministry are saddled with seeking Internally Generated Revenue (IGR), they will come in one guise or the other, get money out from any registration process because all of them now are more interested in meeting their targets.
“So when you talk about agencies in the maritime industry, there is nothing you do among all the services that you don’t pay for, even Customs brokers pay every year to the Nigerian Port Authority (NPA) for license to operate apart from Customs.
“Now, the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding in Nigeria (CRFFN) is also demanding their own. For every cargo you clear, you must go and pay Quarantine, SON, NAFDAC, and the one you cannot pay officially, you pay by the back yard.
According to him, all these fees create the impression that all the noise on facilitating ease of doing business at ports are mere gimmicks and misleading.
He noted that “I am not surprised if Shippers Council has to do its own IGR but at the end of the day, whether we like it or not, it must add to the cost of doing business. I can understand that they want to sanitise the industry so that somebody who is not licensed should not operate or even come near to the port.
“But what is going to happen to other parastatals that are issuing permit for people to come to the port, how effective would it be? If somebody pays money to be a member of CRFFN, and an identity card was issued to him, he takes it to NPA, and he gets a port pass, so what impact will that have with the Shippers’ Council registration?
He decried the inability of all maritime agencies under the same ministry to come up with a uniform registration process to avoid multiplicity as it appears now.
