Nigeria customs service and its wrong headedness

It is no longer news that the Federal Government of Nigeria is in dire financial stress and therefore needs all the revenue it can garner, as is often said jocularly, like yesterday, to prosecute its various mapped out projects. That the government has fallen short of its projected revenues in its yearly budgets is equally no longer trending. No budget in recent memory has been able to record more than 55 percent of projected revenue. A sampler: out of projected revenue of N7.16 trillion in 2018 budget, actual was N3.91 trillion (i.e. 54.61 percent achieved). Though 2019 budget is still running but one does not need to gaze at the crystal ball to predict that the projected deficit of N1.92 trillion is definitely off mark. Indeed, it will be a miracle for the budget to record the same feat as that of 2018, let alone surpassing it, going by performance indicators so far.

To reverse the almost irreversible trend, important organs of government saddled with raising revenues have been assigned targets from time to time. And this is where the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) as a critical agency of the government fits the bill, by manner of speaking.

However, the NCS in pursuit of its job has demonstrated crass disregard for known rules in the statute books. It doesn’t need repeating here the over zealousness with which the NCS usually goes about implementing mere pronouncements from government officials without official gazettes, especially where the pronouncement is in favour of raising import duties/tariffs but soft pedals if a decrease is the case.

If one can call the above over-zealousness within the ambit of the law, one is totally at a loss as to how to describe the recklessness of the NCS in recent times. Recently, the NCS has been in the news for the very wrong reasons. Basically, Customs all over the civilized world are known to operate in the ports (seaports/ airports) to collect the CORRECT import/export duties and on the borders to check smuggling activities. Is this true of Nigeria Customs Service in every material particular?

Has the NCS been collecting all the correct duties at Nigerian ports? How effective has it been in checking smugglings through Nigerian borders. The media has been awash with stories of Nigeria Customs invading hotels and car marts in Gestapo manner in search of exotic cars that import duties were allegedly under paid on them. In one particular case, a hotel in Abuja was so invaded that no person was allowed in or out of the hotel while the invasion lasted. The Management of the hotel, it was reported, was asked to identify the owners of the so-called exotic cars lodging in the hotel. The issue of raiding car marts has since become a daily occurrence!

What is being witnessed currently but no one called the NCS to order then started with Customs men stopping vehicles on the highways and demanding “full customs papers”, irrespective of the year the owner started using the vehicle. Those who were unlucky not to have the ‘full complement’ papers had their vehicles impounded and auctioned off. That off-putting and lawless behaviour is what has today snowballed into the monster that nobody seems ready to tame.

For the avoidance of any doubt, one needs clarification to these seemingly pedestrian but highly profound posers:

Where are the legitimate duty posts of the customs? On the ports, borders or in the hotels, car marts and highways?

Whose duty is it to collect the CORRECT duties for government?

Whose duty is it to ensure that the CORRECT duties are collected? The customs or the importer/exporter?

Whose duty is it to police the borders to ensure that no smuggling activities take place? The customs or the smuggler?

For too long the NCS has failed to carry out some introspection and do the needful. That the matter has reached the stage we are in now speaks volumes of the complicity of both the government and the governed in indulging an organisation that is bereft of how to carry out its basic responsibilities. With all the Gestapo activities of the NCS in recent times, no house cleansing of the NCS has been reported. The so-called exotic cars that were under-dutied, as it were, and linked to some notable car dealers, all came through the known Nigerian ports. Who and who signed off on the customs papers before the cars were driven off? The NCS should stop playing the ostrich and square up to its responsibilities, and by so doing save the nation the unsightly display only fit for an antediluvian one.

An organisation that is always locking the stable door after the proverbial horse has bolted can’t be adjudged a serious one, no matter its pretensions. This cap certainly fits the NCS!