Comptroller General, Nigeria Customs Service, Bashir Adewale Adeniyi MFR.

The Nigeria Customs Service has said it is leveraging trade platforms offered by the United State Government- backed Africa Growth Opportunity Act AGOA and the recently introduced African Continental Free Trade Area AfCFTA to boost the country’s non-oil exports with a view to further growing her economy.

Speaking in Lagos at the Science of Trade SOT Conference organised by Ascend Studios Foundation in partnership with the US Consulate in Nigeria and other groups, Comptroller General of the service, Bashir Adewale Adeniyi MFR, pledged the commitment of the service to grow Nigeria’s economy through enhanced trade facilitation tools.

Represented by the Customs Area Controller for Apapa Port, Comptroller Babatunde Olomu, fsi, the CG said the NCS is setting the process of perfecting trade procedures within the Customs zone.

The CG said: “The Nigeria Customs Service is collaborating with the Directorate General Taxation and Customs Union DG TAXUD of the European Union for efficient export monitoring and trade facilitation.

“As part of the Customs outreach programme, the service is also working with other agencies of the Nigerian government to maximise the opportunities in trade and reduce the incident of Nigerian goods being returned from countries of destination.

“For traders willing to participate in AGOA, efforts are on for the establishment of a one-stop-shop export seat for export documentation so that it will reduce the time taken for Nigerian exporters to get their goods out of our seaports.

“Programmes such as the Time Release Studies, which we are targeting towards importing of goods and how much time it takes for businessmen to clear their goods in the ports are geared towards enhancing Customs efficiency in Nigeria in line with global best practices.

The exercise is targeted towards having a scientific measure of how long and how much it costs our businessmen to export their products through the NCS control with a view to identifying bureaucratic procedures, or laws that are creating delays so that traders, who comply with trade rules can get their cargoes off the ports, border stations and airports in good time.”

He also listed continuous training and retraining of different cadres of Customs officers, regular interface with various stakeholders and sustained improvement on technological capacity as part of efforts embarked upon since his assumption of office.

Meanwhile Comptroller Olomu ,who participated as a panelist during an interactive session, gave detailed analysis of the trade facilitation benefits in the NCS Act 2023 and the ease of doing business advantages captured in the new Customs law.

The CAC Apapa, while urging participants comprising entrepreneurs, diplomats and other members of the trading community to keep themselves abreast with the provisions of government import and export prohibition lists, said Apapa Port Command is evolving a reliable system to process non- intrusive inspection of cargoes that meets World Customs Organisation WCO and World Trade Organisation WTO standards.