MAG protests collection of practitioners operating fee

A pressure group within the maritime sector, Maritime Advocacy Group (MAG) has protested against the collection of the Practitioners Operating Fee (POF) that took off on March 1, 2021 at the Tin Can Island Container Terminal (TICT).

Speaking at the protest ground at the TICT administrative office at Point Road Apapa, the founder and convener of MAG, Igwe Dino Kingsley said: “We all know the state of the country right now, the difficult business environment, people are suffering, the government has been taxing us on several fronts.

“We battle with multiple alerts on our transactions from the different units of Customs and the shipping companies have not been fair to us as we pay different kinds of fees including demurrage on cargoes and same goes for the terminal operators.”

He lamented that all of a sudden, the Council for the Registration of Freight Forwarding in Nigeria (CRFFN) is now imposing another bill on freight forwarding practitioners to be pay, a fee, which they call Practitioners Operating Fee (POF).

“Come on man, most members pay their registration fee at the beginning of the year and now you want us to pay per job at hand. You want every practitioners to pay the sum of two thousand naira as a POF, what is the reason for that, who is the money going to, who will manage the money and what is its purpose?

Where is the legislation for that? We do not know the CRFFN as a government revenue generating agency, they are supposed to be our regulators caring for our own interests. We have never seen them intervene when freight forwarders are being maltreated by either the shipping companies, terminal operators or Customs, but they seat in the comfort of their offices to now impose this illegal fee on us to pay to enrich one or two of the board members, we say no to that,” he queried.

He said there was no meeting or any form of agreement where it was generally accepted that the fee should be collected, adding that what practitioners only saw on the notice board at the TICT on February 28, 2021 was that starting from March 1, the collection of POF was going to be implemented.