– Some senior custom officers working at the country’s ports have revealed that despite leadership change, Nigerian Customs remains riddled with corruption, inefficiency
– The customs officers affirmed that customs operations at the country’s ports remain riddled with corruption and inefficiency due to broken and non-existing equipment
Some senior custom officers working at the country’s ports have said that far from the Comptroller-General of the Nigerian Customs Service, NCS, Hameed Ali ‘s chest-thumping appraisal of the agency he heads, the rot in the customs had worsened or at best remained same since the retired army colonel was appointed by President Muhammadu Buhari.
Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Customs Service, Hameed Ali speaking at the interception of the Pump-action rifles
Premium Times reports that on Monday January 30, Ali, said that officers of the agency on “information patrol” intercepted 661 Pump Action handguns concealed inside a 40 foot container.
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Reading from a prepared speech, Mr Ali described the seizure as “the new normal” and a pointer to the determination of the customs to enforce all laws involved in the importation of goods.
However, senior customs officers affirmed that customs operations at the country’s ports remain riddled with corruption and inefficiency due to broken and non-existing equipment such as scanners required for examination of imported goods, officers deployed to man these equipment now waste away in redundancy.
One of the officers said: “Though Mr. Ali claimed that the team that apprehended the container conveying the handguns was tipped off, our sources said his claim couldn’t be further from the truth.
“The container was specifically targeted by Lagos Roving, as the team which intercepted the container is nicknamed, because the importers of the arms got greedy and avoided paying a mandatory bribe to the team that would have ensured that vehicle conveying them would not be stopped for checks on the road.
“Many containers with arms have left the port,” one the sources claimed.
“The name of the team is Lagos Roving, which is under Federal Operations Unit Zone A Ikeja. What the team does is, you as an agent you come and tell them that a container is leaving the port and for every 40 foot container you will pay N50,000, for 20 foot containers will pay N30,000.
“The container was caught because of greed. The agent tried to bypass them by not paying, thinking they will not stop him on the way. If he had paid nobody would have stopped him. Just imagine how many containers would have gone through because the agents paid,” he said.
But the spokesperson of the NCS, Joseph Attah insisted that the container was intercepted following “credible intelligence” from the customs intelligence network at the port.
“We have customs intelligence operatives in the port. We have informants around monitoring what is happening and once they suspect anything that could be wrong, they will give information to such a team to intercept that particular container,” Mr. Attah told PREMIUM TIMES in a telephone interview.
“They went there on information patrol. Anything you said about bribe or no bribe, what I can repeat here is that they got intelligence that uncustomed goods were in this container, they went to that place and they intercepted the container.
“Talking about bribe, these officers could have accepted bribe and let the container go, but they refused to compromise. They insisted that the right thing should be done and that is why the nation is celebrating today.”
The entire process of clearing of the containers conveying the arms was enmeshed in fraud, one of our sources claimed.
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He claimed that the documents used in clearing the container from the Lagos port was not genuine.
“The documents the importers tendered to the Lagos Roving team when the vehicle conveying the container was accosted were old documents used for the clearing of a similar consignment last year,” the source said.
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