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By Steve Agbota
The Nigeria Customs Service has implored importers, freight forwarders, and licensed Customs agents to fully embrace its One Stop Shop initiative, a critical reform designed to facilitate trade, streamline cargo clearance, and reduce clearance time to a target of 48 hours.
The initiative aims to ease the burdens of importers by reducing the high cost of doing business at the nation’s ports.
Daily Sun learnt that the initiative launched recently by the Comptroller General of Customs, Adewale Adeniyi, is now being piloted at the Apapa Customs command.
The initiative is targeted at reducing clearance time from an average of 21 days to 48-hour target, minimise demurrage cost while enhancing trade facilitation, improve cargo clearance processes by eliminating redundant checks through a single joint examination, and provide an enhanced platform for officers and stakeholders engagement.
Speaking at a sensitisation workshop on the OSS initiative at the Apapa Customs Command in Lagos, Zonal Coordinator, Zone A, Assistant Comptroller-General, Mohammed Babandede, identified the OSS initiative as a smarter, technology-driven approach to cargo clearance that will enhance efficiency, transparency, and inter-agency collaboration.
According to him, the benefits of faster and more efficient trade through the OSS is conditional on full compliance from stakeholders, urging them to declare honestly to ensure the system works seamlessly for all.
“The essence of the sensitisation workshop is to facilitate trade. The CGC decided to roll out this facilitation tool because he is passionate about trade facilitation.
“We want to make our ports competitive for more patronage. So we want the stakeholders to key in by understanding the workability of the one stop shop so that they can facilitate their trade provided they comply with what they declare.”
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He said OSS would eliminate bureaucratic bottlenecks that often delay cargo release, ensuring that every flagged declaration is handled transparently and collaboratively.
He, however, commended the Customs ICT team for their role in developing the platform, describing it as a milestone in the Service’s modernisation drive.
Controller, Apapa Customs Command, Comptroller Emmanuel Oshoba assured the commitment of the Service to ease of doing business and promised to continue to engage stakeholders so that the benefit of the OSS can be realized by all.
Stakeholders present at the event lauded the initiative as a welcome innovation for the trading community but expressed concerns over continuous interceptions of already cleared cargoes outside the port by operatives of the Federal Operations Unit (FOU).
Chairman, National Council of Managing Directors, Apapa Chapter, Abayomi Deluyi said for the system to be effective, interception by FOU outside the port must be addressed.
“We want to minimize intervention in the clearance process and the other agencies are still involved in the clearance process. There is a need to look at these grey areas so that those areas will not be integrated into the new system.
“After you’ve gone through the OSS, the FOU are still on the road and will still flag down your container on the road and ask the same question about value. For this system to work and be effective, all grey areas should be looked into so that we will not repeat the same old process that leads to delay,” he said.
According to the NCS, by consolidating all relevant customs units and processes, the OSS initiative is expected to eliminate duplicated efforts and multiple inspections.
