Follow Us on Google
The Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC) has disclosed plans to issue body cameras to truckers and freight forwarders operating along the Apapa and Tin Can Island corridors as part of efforts to gather the evidence needed to prosecute officials operating unauthorised checkpoints, the council’s Director-General, Zahrah Audu, said on Tuesday.
Speaking at the State House Meet the Press briefing organised by the Presidential Media Team, Audu said repeated enforcement operations in January, March and July failed to result in arrests because officers were rarely caught “red-handed”. That, she said, has made prosecution difficult.
“In addition to that, as we speak now, we have a stakeholder engagement with, which is for sensitisation of the truckers, because the truckers and the freight forwarders are the main people who are at the bane of the problem, who suffer from these issues from customs,” Audu said. “We are, in addition to that even giving them as one of the interventions that we are doing, body cams. We want evidence.”
Audu said PEBEC has already installed clear signage at every legal checkpoint along the corridors. Each sign includes a QR code linking to the ReportGov escalation portal, enabling motorists to report abuses immediately. She added that once video footage or other evidence is obtained, the council will work with the Office of the Attorney-General to prosecute offenders “to the full extent of the law”.
“We didn’t catch them red-handed, rent-seeking. They are officials of whichever agency they represent, and nobody had outrightly told them that they cannot set up here,” she said. “Now that we have clearly marked out the legal checkpoints and put in place ample information, if they engage with truckers or freight forwarders and there is any kind of extortion or rent-seeking, they know where to escalate.”
Other measures highlighted by Audu include a unified access-pass system being developed by the Nigerian Ports Authority to block unauthorised pedestrian entry—a vulnerability she said has allowed extortion networks to flourish—and efforts to reduce cargo dwell time at the ports.
Other News
“Their average cargo dwell time was about 21 days, making us extremely uncompetitive,” Audu said, noting a government target to reduce the average to seven days, set by the Ports and Customs Efficiency Committee chaired by Vice-President Kashim Shettima in April 2025. “As a resolution from the committee, we were tasked to bring it down to seven days. It is a work in progress.”
PEBEC’s interventions to achieve that target include coordinated joint inspections at berth, a shift from physical inspections to scanner-based checks, and expanded use of the National Single Window to streamline documentation across agencies.
Audu also listed recent reforms, including the Nigerian Regulatory Impact Analysis Framework, launched in January 2025 to enforce evidence-based policymaking, and the relaunched ReportGov platform, introduced in June 2025, which links businesses directly with 69 business-facing agencies and commits them to a 72-hour response time.
She said a second nationwide tour to activate state Ease of Doing Business Councils across 35 states has just ended, with the aim of connecting states to a $750 million World Bank facility.
Despite the progress, Audu conceded that PEBEC still under-serves the informal sector and announced “Enable Her”, a forthcoming programme to cluster informal businesses for formalisation, reliable power access and equipment support.
