Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding in Nigeria (CRFFN) said on Wednesday that the full enforcement of the Practitioners Operation Fee (POF) had started.
The Registrar of the council, Mr Samuel Nwakohu, disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos.
NAN reports that POF is a legal practising fee meant for freight forwarders and customs brokers who need to be professionals in their field.
Under the POF arrangement, a 20ft container attracts a fee of N1,000 while a 40ft container attracts N2,000 before it is cleared from the port.
According to Nwakohu, cargo will not be allowed to leave the port without the freight forwarder presenting a POF receipt.
“Today is full enforcement, we are also monitoring the situation, and we have told terminal operators that no receipt of payment of POF, no exit of cargo from the ports.
“This is a law; it is the requirement of the federal government. It is not just us talking, and so we are urging freight forwarders to remain on the path of the law, instead of violating the law.
“For enforcement, we will not use soldiers or policemen, this thing is technically driven; we have statistics of how many containers come into the country and those that have been cleared.
“At the end of each week, we will do a reconciliation, we will see what we have, the containers that have been cleared, the people that have paid and have not paid, so if anybody compromised, at the end of the day, they will get a letter,” he said.
Nwakohu pointed out that after the soft launch three weeks ago, which had to do with monitoring the platform, the technology had improved from 1.0 portal to 2.0.
He said that during the trial period, they experienced some challenges in logging in due to the method of migration, but the technical team had addressed it.
The registrar said that some freight forwarders used emails that were not directly linked to them, and this posed a threat for registration, as email was important in what the CRFFN was doing.
He said that another challenge they experienced during registration was on password, but a good percentage of this had been rectified for those who had come forward.
“For those who have not come for registration, when they have goods to clear, they will have difficulty and they will be compelled through the system, and whatever challenges they have, they will report and it will be quickly attended to.
“We have also introduced a software, ‘Fresh Desk’ which will enable freight forwarders to make complaints easily and allow us to manage customers very well.
“There are staff trained on this and we have started using it, right now if you call any of the numbers, one person will pick it automatically attend to the caller.
“These are some of the safety mechanisms that we have put in place to make sure that freight forwarders get the best of services available,” he said.
The CRFFN registrar said that so far, associations were communicating with them, saying they had embraced what they were doing in full.
“We all know that in anything at all, there must be pockets of people that are not pleased with you.
“A good example is somebody that called and complained that the CRFFN did not hold a meeting with him on the POF, but was told that a one on one meeting was not possible.
“We have gone through all the zones created by CRFFN, held sensitisation programmes and will continue to hold more because it is not a one-day thing. In the office also, we will gladly give the needed information.