By Isaac Anumihe
The refusal of National Assembly to pass the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) budget has been blamed for its poor operations in 2017.
The National Public Relations Officer of the service, Deputy Comptroller Joseph Attah, made this disclosure yesterday during the End-of-the-Year Breakfast Meeting with newsmen in Lagos. He, however, noted that the service only enjoyed robust presidential intervention and support from the Federal Government in 2017.
According to him, the non-appropriation of funds by the National Assembly affected the service’s performance in 2017, even though it generated a record N1.3 trillion.
“We believe that what we are celebrating as our achievement of 2017 could have been better if not for paucity of funds. We look forward to improvement in our finances. Also, the service has received some interventions like the issue of patrol vehicles and in few weeks we will have those things delivered as the process has reached advanced stage.
“We have also got the nod to form a presidential taskforce and funds are released in respect to acquire more vehicles, patrol kits for presidential taskforce that will be led by Customs including Civil Defence and National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC).
“So, towards the end of last year, we received robust support from the Federal Government and early this year, those monies manifested to increase logistics and fund to do the job,” he said, assuring that the service will improve on its relationship with the National Assembly in 2018.
“As regards relationship with Senate, we believe it will improve and I believe every new year comes with deliberate wish by everyone to do something better and we hope at the end of the day it will be at the interest of the nation. The National Assembly members are respected representatives of the people and they give us advice on how to get our job done better but we look forward to robust relationship that will translate to better environment to do our job,” he said.
The customs spokesman also revealed that the reinvigorated anti-smuggling operations in 2017 raked in a total of 4,492 assorted seizures with duty paid value of about N12.8billion.