Customs boss, Buhari differ on dry port-bound cargoes

By Muyiwa Lucas

Comptroller-General of Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), Col. Hameed Ali (retd.), has ordered officials of the service to examine containers and other cargoes heading to inland container ports across the country.

This is said to be against international trade rules and President Muhammadu Buhari’s directive that the NCS and all other agencies in the trade chain should not introduce trade restrictions and bottlenecks that would hinder the patronage of the dry ports by shippers.

President Buhari gave the directive at the inauguration of the Kaduna Inland Container Terminal.

But Ali, The Nation gathered, has instructed the NCS in Apapa Port, Tin Can Island Port, PTML, Ikorodu Port, Murtala Mohammed Airport, Ikeja and the Federal Operation Unit Zone A, to hold, open or unseal and examine all containers and other cargoes destined to inland dry ports in Kaduna and Kano.

The inland dry ports are ports of origin and destination, meaning that goods are exported and received at the dry ports.

Inland ports are established to ease trade and to decongest the seaports while ensuring that a country’s ease of doing business is improved.

But Ali said it had come to his “knowledge that the current procedure of non-examination of foreign cargoes destined for Inland container terminals (Kaduna and Kano) have been largely influenced by illegal activities”.

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To curb the alleged illegality, the Customs boss ordered that “all importation be unsealed, opened, examined to ascertain the content before exiting the mother port”.

This is said to be against the President’s directive.

President Buhari had said: “It remains for Customs and ports officials to make these facilities work and not to frustrate business, commercial and industrial enterprises with unnecessary bureaucracy and inflicting on them delays and hardships, thereby defeating the object of the whole exercise as has happened in the past. Make these facilities work this time.

“As ports of origin for exports and ports of destination for imports, the inland dry ports will accelerate the implementation of our economic diversification policy.

“The concept of inland dry port has gained widespread importance with the changes in international transportation as a result of the container revolution and the introduction of door-to-door delivery of cargo.

“It provides importers and exporters located within the nation’s hinterland, especially industrial and commercial outfits, access to shipping and port services without necessarily visiting the seaports.

“It also enables them to process clearance of their import cargo and take delivery of their raw materials and machinery close to their places of business.”

The President also said the dry ports would provide exporters the much-needed facilities to process, package, consolidate and forward their exports to their customers all over the world without having to physically be at the seaports.

According to him, this replicates the port economy in the various centres where the dry ports are located inland thereby generating employment and contributing to the ease of doing business.