The Vice President, Association of Nigerian Licensed Custom Agents (ANLCA), Kayode Farinto, has kicked against the concessioning of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS)scanning machines to foreign companies at the ports.
Addressing selected journalists at Apapa yesterday, Farinto said that in the last few years, NCS has been doing 100 per cent manual cargo examination, which takes eagle eyes or third eyes to discover most of the discrepancies and others in the system. He said now that President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the procurement of the scanning machines, some people are lobbying to ensure that foreigers are given the contract to operate the scanning machines.
According to him, Federal Government should look at the issue critically on three grounds, which include security, moralty and economy of the nation. On security, he said it would be too dangerous to leave the manning of Nigeria’s scanning machines in the hands of foreigners.
He added: “I remember some years back when some arms and ammunitions were discovered in Nigeria. It was narrowed down to some hyenas, there were the importers and also there were cleaning agents and that was why it was possible. Now if you allow foreigners to man our machines, the security implcations of it won’t be too good for Nigeria as a country.” He said few years back, some Customs officers were trained in the area of scanning machines, urging Federal Government to allow the Customs personnel handle the issues of operation of the scanning machines because they were the ones trained to read what is called image analysis. He stated that “Customs officers have been trained to man scanning operations to be able to know or discover if there is discrepancy during cargo clearance. We should be patriotic not allow some people that wants to collect percentage from foreigners and now say give it to foreigners. It is not too good.
“However, it can be done in this way, allow Customs officers to operate the scanning machines but when it comes to technical maintenance, that is if we do not have indigenous engineers that can service the machines, you can now bring in experts abroad. But Nigeria has risen to the level where we can produce indigenous engineers that can maintain our scanning machines.”
He therefore, urged the Federal Government not to fall into the hands of those people such as politicians clamouring that the issue of scanning machines should be given to foreigners.