While the founder of NAGAFF, Dr Boniface Aniebonam, believes in the actualisation of 48-hour cargo clearance, the National President of NCMDLCA, Lucky Amiwero, said actualising the target would remain a mirage.
According to Aniebonam, achieving 48-hour cargo clearance in Nigeria is possible if stakeholders begin to respect the rules of engagement.
He said: “It is possible. The problem bedevilling our ports is human element; people are not ready to get themselves engaged in respecting the rules of engagement. This can, however, be narrowed down to corruption.
“Everybody knows that we need to have infrastructure and some other things like that; but the capacity of people to obey the rule of engagement is the issue. For instance, what lead to congestion is the number of cargo that go into the ports; if it outnumbers the ones that go out then it is congestion. Even if you look at the issue of infrastructures, machinery and all of that, if people are not compliant to regulation, nothing will work.”
Aniebonam said government must bear the blame for delayed clearance at the ports due to the inability of its agencies to enforce regulations.
“We can put this blame of inability to clear cargo at the doors of the government because laws are made to be broken and if we don’t enforce our regulations, people will not respect us. So, there is need for us to obey the law and where people fail to obey the law, it should be enforced. Enforcement is about arrest and prosecution and that gives a very clear line,” he stated.
Amiwero, on his part, said achieving 48-hour cargo clearance was a herculean task especially in the face of non-implementation of relevant conventions guiding trade and importation by the Federal Government.